That's an odd question to ask, I agree. Give me a moment to explain myself before you answer.

The term is an odd one, you must admit, in that it describes the absence of something. There aren't many words that work in reverse like that.

Which makes it uniquely vulnerable to being abused. One particular abuse of the word allows folks to think of "atheists" as a homogenous group like the word "Christians" does, as if atheists were an organized, dogmatically driven group-thinking lot. This can get awfully silly, like the charge leveled at atheists lately from several ostensibly independent sources: That evolution by natural selection, and specifically Darwin's "Origin of Species", is to atheists as the "New Testament" is to Christians.

Which leads me to ask that odd question. What I mean is: Is there any single one of us that really labels ourselves as an atheist first, before any other facet of ourselves? Personally I consider my atheism to be a subset of my skepticism, which in turn is a subset of my lust for knowledge.

I get the feeling that everyone's atheism is going to be removed from his or her sense of who they are by that kind of distance. On this board alone we're a diverse lot, and there is a very great deal of disagreement on a great number of subjects (surprisingly good natured disagreement, really. Y'all should be proud of that.).

So, how about it? Anyone here really "an atheist"?