Hyper-Militant Atheism or Pro-religion: a false dichotomy

[Meikaii]

Today I reviewed an issue regarding the state religion. The background for it was noting that despite the state (non)religion as atheism, some of the populace were still religious and what should be done about this. It provided three options, one that sanctioned religion, one that put all of the religious in death camps and a third, less extreme, option that was to educate children on the facts of life. I chose the third option as I feel death camps are wrong and I am fully anti-religion. However, this third option for education resulted in a boost to spirituality and the revocation of my atheism policy. As a result, there was only one option that did not result in loss of atheism and that was killing off all of the religious in death camps.

Now, I have to consider killing off all the religious in my nation, not because I want to, but because Nationstates seems to support the idea that hyper-militant atheism is the correct way to go about eliminating religion rather than having intelligent discourse. I feel as though that issue needs a serious reworking to prevent an extreme like that from being the only tenable atheist position.

[Trotterdam]

You are talking about #1014. Please specify the issue number when you're complaining about something, it makes everybody's job a lot easier. Also, this belongs in Got Issues? rather than Technical, probably in the megathread. (EDIT: Turns out somebody else already reported it in the megathread, so take a look at the response there.)

The problem here is that, despite some issues being written to give the impression that it might be, "atheism" is not properly tracked as a flag. The game tracks a sliding scale of pro-religious/anti-religious sentiment by your government, and gives you the atheism policy if you're low enough on this scale. Therefore, slightly relaxing your anti-religious policy by technically not punishing people for not being atheists and merely heavily pushing them in that direction will sometimes cause you to lose the "Atheism" policy, if your religious freedom was close to the threshold before. In some nations, it won't be enough and they'll retain the policy.

And, for what it's worth, in real life, education does not actually seem to be working particularly well in eradicating religion. Many people aren't smart enough to understand science even if you try to explain it to them, and pushing it on them can just build resentment of "intellectuals".