Posted on Huffingtonpost. com today:

Not believing in a religion is not a belief.

Everyone is an atheist, by the definition given. Do you believe in Krishna? No? You're an atheist. Thor? Atheist. Ishtar? Souless you are.

The implication here is that God exists, and to not believe is in itself an act of faith, therefore a religion itself.

This shouldn't even be a debate. Atheism is a term loaded with assumptions. The problem is sematic -- most problems with humans are semantic in origin.

Faith is the belief in something without proof. I'll give you that I have faith in the rights of man as stated by Jefferson. I know there is no rational basis for it. But it is a faith necessitated by a need for humane structure for society, not a need to believe that a superhuman told me to believe so.

Faith is not the same as religion. Religion is a belief in beings that by definition are always outside the sphere of reason and evidence. Being or beings. Agents, projections of the id onto the universe. And it always seems to boil down to holy writ and forced impression on children to carry the line forward.