I am privileged and honoured to have a friend and colleague contribute the inaugural post in this series. Greg Laden writes for The X Blog on FTB. He submits this:
I “believe” in everything tangible and natural rather than stuff that is made up, and as a minor side effect of that there are probably things that are made up that I enjoy a bit more than I otherwise might (that stuff called “fiction” and “entertainment”). I’m also an anthropologist (the good kind, don’t worry) so the word “belief” means something to me quite different than for other atheists and skeptics. I “believe in” belief in the sense that it is a human process of inference and knowledge tracking. Rational, Boolean, deductive, whathaveyouistic thinking is far more ex post than most people “believe” it is, which is not a bad thing. We use rational thinking to verify or reject what we are thinking. Belief is a creative process that is inherently unrelated to religion and distinct from faith. While faith comes in handy in certain video games involving Indiana Jones (it’s a strategy for crossing abysses on foot) it is what I reject most completely…
… because I am an atheist.
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I like the distinction between belief and faith. Well said.
Because I am an atheist…
…I felt really let down by Battlestar Galactica’s final half-dozen or so episodes.
Honestly, I can’t really think of many things that are because I’m an atheist other than feeling (varying degrees of) embarassment and discomfort at others’ sense of faith.