Responding to @Cyran and expanding on my own post:
What I would say is that (from my POV) explains the distinction between irreligion and religion. And, I personally don’t conflate irreligion vs religion with atheism vs theism. This is something I touch on in my last post, using the academic vs vocational study → to many, school is school, and it has a the same outcome; but, there are fundamental differences between the foundation of academic studies and vocational studies, and (to others) this is of extreme importance and relevance. I consider myself an irreligious agnostic. So, functionally, not too different from an atheist from people who don’t care about the philosophical foundations; but, entirely different structures with a distinction of foundational importance for those of us who do.
So, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your position, just that I think our priorities are very different on this subject, so we approach it differently.
And (back and adding to my Hitchens example - which I want to add to) it’s highly unlikely TH Huxley was compromising either, that’s a straw-man by Hitchens → don’t get me wrong, I agree with a large amount of the work of Hitchens (mostly political), but this is one area where I don’t find his views compelling. If Huxley was compromising, the man (Huxley) who they call “Darwin’s bulldog” certainly had an interesting way of showing it with his anti-religious sentiments. Huxley often went further than the atheists on the anti-religiosity: were it a few centuries earlier, he’d be first to be burned by the inquisition. Huxley was a skeptic, not a compromiser.
I’d be interested in your background in terms of religion exposure. To give my own background: I was barely exposed to religion until my late teens - my parents are both atheists, my grandparents and great grandparents were all atheists and/or irreligious. And, before I became wiser to reality, assumed that religion (as it existed) was the vestiges of archaic culture… kind of like old poems, songs, or stories.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
