It's entirely fair to define which god-concepts you're rejecting on your own terms. I'd be aware that pretty much anything and everything you can name is considered a deity by some theological position. It's why I feel it is very important to be specific about which understanding of god(s) one is taking issue with. IMHO, a better way of framing what you believe here would be that you reject any and all supernatural agency. Or, even better, to frame yourself in terms of what you believe rather than what you do not; define yourself in the positive rather than in the negative.
I think this might be a consequene of using dialectics. It is simulateously a rejection of theism by stating that it is an illusion (rather than simply false) in comparision with a more limited definition of consciousness as originating from the brain and therefore matter. It contains both positive and negative elements.
And yes, i think it would be fair to say I reject all supernatural agency, rather someone as specific as theism.
I'm a little confused. Weren't we talking about theisms, not religions?
If you aim to reject all theisms, that... well... it gets tricky. Doing this necessitates framing theisms by your understanding of it and ignoring or rejecting how other people understand it. As I said, there is nothing in this world or the otherworlds that someone doesn't consider worthy of worship, or a god. You'll have to ignore that, or you get really strange things going on like denying the existence of someone's genetic ancestors, denying the existence of the sun, or even denying the existence of the entire universe.
This kind of goes back to the thing I said earlier about how it is better to define yourself in the positive.
This is again to do with the illusionary nature of religion; just because someone worships the sun and I say that the sun is not god or does not have supernatural properties does not mean the sun does not exist;The sun itself objectively exist, rather it is that its status as divinity is an illusion. I'm not specifically saying the belief in god is not derived from an objective source, merely that the property of consciosness as the cause of pheneomena is being attribute to it is false or illusionary.
The issue with 'god' specifically, is that in a materialist view (the positive) it is a false agency (the negative). God is a product of the process of abstraction in seeking to attribute cause to consciousness rather than matter.
I'm having to weigh up two dimensions to this. The first is obviously the insistence that Atheism is a scientific fact and therefore objectively true. I'm wondering how far a scientific atheism is compatable with a pragmatic one.It is certianly true to say that no healthy appreciation of science can come without accepting uncertainty, so on this sense I think I'm in agreement with you.Fair enough... as long as you prepare yourself to deal with the fact that deities can be and will be defined in ways that are neither troubling for an atheist nor truly possible to disprove in a meaningful way. Instead, it is necessary to just (legitimaly) decree that you don't care for using them.
The second issue is that as a Marxist I'm obliged to think in terms of social consciouness rather than individual consciousness. This may or may not lead to an 'ethical' obligation in which in order to advance socialism as an socio-economic system I am obliged to assert [this specific form of] athiesm as something that everyone should believe in. However, this is counter-acted by the fact Marxism is deterministic, so that means the transmission of the idea of atheism itself is limited. So in practice, yes I would agree with the latter statement also as in a deterministic sense, it is impossible to force someone to believe something which is contary to their interests.