A common misconception about atheism.

If I had to name one of the most common misconceptions about atheism, then the belief that atheism is a religion is the first thing that comes to mind.

First, let's establish what does religion mean. (Taken from Wikipedia)

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature.

And now, atheism.

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist.

So, in essence, atheism is the lack of belief in deities and all religious scriptures are viewed as mythology by someone who is an atheist. Atheism, however, does not have any scriptures that instruct people on morality, ethics, laws or preferred lifestyle, in fact, people are left to find those things by themselves. Atheism also has no solid culture and the only common thing among atheists is usually the rejection of religion and lack of belief in deities.

If that isn't convincing to you, let's consider an analogy here.

An orange is a fruit. An oak is not an orange, however, it is also not a fruit. Seems pretty easy to derive that, however, if we replace orange with christianity, fruit with religion, oak with atheism, it seems that a lot of people would have a problem coming to the same conclusion.