so if there was a question which football team do you support? There couldn't be a "don't follow football" box?

I think it's telling really this article, it shows just how deluded some religious can be. The religious have daddy issues and believe everybody else has. Well the fact is many of us don't need a sugar daddy in the sky that's going to make it all better.

And to top it all off you quote mine Richard D.

Richard calls himself an agnostic because it is the only sane position to have. In science it is impossible to "prove" something doesn't exist. So while Richard is in all intents and purposes an Atheist he understand the former position.

A poor argument poorly made, well worthy of a PHD in religious studies.

This article addresses at leat four topics, somehow interrelated but clearly distinct:

1. What is the meaning of “no religion” in the Census forms.
2. What is to be understood by the terms religion and worldview.
3. What does separation of state and religion in Australia mean.
4. What are/should be the consequences of (non-Aboriginal) Australia’s Christian roots.

The answer to 1. is that “no religion” is apparently supposed to mean “none of the above/below”, (including religions the respondent might think belong to the “Other”).

As for 2. I think the problem is much more complicated than could fit into a short article: For instance, my understanding of worldview is as the equivalent of Weltanschauung, one of the most basic terms in any continental philosophy. There are e.g. Christian worldviews, atheist worldviews etc. Besides, there are a legion of isms in addition to secularism, rationalism and atheism, compatible or not with a religion in the traditional meaning of the word, most of them usually representing an extremist adherence to a single idea. So I thin it is more standard to call the worldview of a person with no religious affiliation/preference 'secular humanism', 'secularism' being its extremist (fundamentalist) version, although this is obviously not what Justice Kirby had in mind.

3. and 4. deal with legal questions and interpretations of history respectively, where I am not much at home but I feel they also would need a more balanced approach lest they sound as merely an apology for a Christian point of view, as is testified to by reactions which are actually apologies in the opposite direction.

The author's essay is fatally flawed - rather obviously - by an attempt to define religion in such broad and vague terms that it encapsulates virtually everything. This won't satisfy the religious or the non-religious, so the whole thing quickly degenerates into a pointless exercise in rhetoric. Sad.

Environmentalism and the Loony Green Left are the new religion. It's all based on beliefs and they use the same pejorative language as religious zealots.

the something from nothing brigade are certainly the most irrational believers we have today. And to think many of them are university trained. No wonder they are able to call evil good and good evil even though they claim not to believe in absolutes.

@Peter Lang, worshiping nature was the first religion Peter.

@Runner I believe in absolute zero.