Eyebrows at the ready:
Lots of interesting stuff raised here since I last logged on, but I have to be brief just now as there is off-line stuff to deal with.
@EnolaGaia Thanks for coming back on that question of language. Can I ask where you're based? Are you US? My experience here (UK) is slightly different. In England particularly (I'm now based in Scotland, which is slightly different), I don't think the term 'atheist' is necessarily pejorative. If you'll forgive the phrase, it is often treated as a 'holier than thou' self-descriptor: the atheist feels themselves to be more rational, more logical, more modern, and more clearsighted than the believer (who is typified as being credulous, archaic, irrational. and even dangerous). This is, clearly, a massive generalisation, which I introduce solely to suggest a slight difference in cultural positioning.
I am as uncomfortable with this atheist-as-superior as I am with the atheist-as-inferior that you describe. Partly my reaction is a gut discomfort with such value-based generalisations. And partly it is because I don't think that the one fact (faithlessness - I use it advisedly, for all it's drawbacks) necessarily connotes the other qualities of rationality, logic, modernity etc.
As we've seen, atheism is such a wide field (a 'broad church' we might say, ha ha) that I really don't feel that individual atheists experiences or outlooks necessarily have much in common with each other. I have a deep respect for
@INT21's articulation of his perspective. But - even though we are both atheists - our positions seem quite different. He dies not speak for me when he uses the pronoun 'we'. My own atheism does not come from rational speculation, and I am not a particularly logical or clearsighted person. I share
@blessmycottonsocks' rail against "mere flesh and blood automata". I am definitely no scientist!
I understand the world through poetry, and the marvel of living; through all the plurality of art and thought and laughter and awe. I am not a humanist, because the secret languages of tree sap and rock strata may have equal and glittering potentiality. I will never know, and that is glorious. We live, and we love, and we die, and at the centre of all my experience of the world is a calm and quiet place at the heart of me that says
there is only this. And which smiles, because
this is infinitely wonderful. That is my atheism. It is an entirely positive experience.