I don't regard atheism as a statement of faith, as someone called it earlier in this thread; I regard atheism as a statement of reason.

That bothered me as well when I first read the thread, but I refrained from getting my philosphical soapbox on. "Atheism", literally, means "no belief in God or gods", and that's the way I construct it when I use it to describe myself. I don't possess a conviction based on subjective spiritual experience or emotion that a deity does not exist, I just fail to find evidence in the world around me (based on my criteria) that a deity does exist, and in the absence of such evidence, do not believe in any such being. It's not an impulse or a choice not to believe, it's just the absence of belief. Sad that the word is necessarily defined negatively, but there you have it. Thiesm is the cultural "default state" in our corner of the Western World.

As an aside, I'm not hostile toward any theistic belief just because it's an expression of faith; I just have no such faith or impulse toward it myself.

</nerd>