Someone more knowledgeable about JW is free to correct me here, but as far as I know, they believe that only a certain number of people will be truly “saved” and admitted to heaven after Armageddon. All other JW believers will live in some kind of paradise on earth. This definitely deviates from the standard central Christian doctrine that anyone who accepts Christ as their savior is saved and will be admitted to heaven, so I can see how some Christian denominations would not consider them to be Christian.

Many, many churches, Protestant, Orthodox, and other denominations, affirm the Nicene Creed.

cath·o·lic
   /ˈkæθəlɪk, ˈkæθlɪk/ Show Spelled[kath-uh-lik, kath-lik] Show IPA
–adjective
1.
broad or wide-ranging in tastes, interests, or the like; having sympathies with all; broad-minded; liberal.
2.
universal in extent; involving all; of interest to all.
3.
pertaining to the whole Christian body or church.

I have no horse in the “my church is more Christiany than thine” race. I’m atheist.

ok sooo….
“We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church”
only catholics then??

On the question if atheism is another religion, it’s not atheism itself, but the particular ideology that the atheist holds that is another religion, e.g. liberalism.

What social functions does *any* religion have?

Religions establish a few fundamental tenets for a group: a) what reality is and is not, b) what is right and wrong c) rules/laws based on values, to guide social relations/behavior d) it defines what is important and what is not, including selecting which people (issues/views) will be heard and which will be ignored.

Notice that liberalism does all of the above. It has its definition of what reality is (i.e., “social construction of reality”), it stipulates what is right and wrong (the morality of liberalism), and it defines its rules/laws to guide/control social relations and behaviors.

Perhaps the very different characteristic of current liberalism is that most liberals hate to see it as a “religion” even though it is very much a religion from a sociological and anthropological perspective.

As noted by other commenters, atheists can be extremely fanatical about their particular ideology, as well as overall stupid and ignorant. The fact that they do not believe in a deity is no guarantee that they won’t fall into a myriad of other destructive and ignorant systems of values and behaviors.

In this respect, Americans love to delude themselves in believing they have separated their government from religion, when, in reality, what they have done is to separate the state from the management of organized religious institutions. It is impossible to construct a state separate from an ideology (whether it involves believing in a deity or not) and the US is not exception.

My sense was that she became a JW partly because they made “house calls”–and offered clear explanations for her depression (it’s logical in a fallen world that you’d feel depressed) and a clear structure of faith and discipline that somehow worked for her.

I don’t think all Jehovah’s Witnesses are in my sister’s situation, by any means–clearly most of them are not. But they were eager to continually reach out to her when she was in a place and a frame of mind where many individuals and organizations could not or would not reach out in the first place, and especially then continue to reach out to her even when she woud reject them at times. (Her social worker would continue to come but often my sister would not let her in; she trusted the Witnesses.) And they offered a great deal of support to someone who really needed a lot of support.

So, in addition to all of the other explanations offered above, I also suspect that some part of the reason for the higher rates of poverty amongst JWs is also their continual outreach to people in poverty.