Something to think about the next time you want to call an atheist "militant".

[saras]

21. Nope. Belief is a mental activity, not an abstract binary opposition.

Disbelief and absence of belief are two different places on an abstract continuum - absence of belief is the simple refusal to DO belief as an action. Disbelief is USUALLY belief in the opposite of a hypothesis. It can be knowledge (i.e. the accumulated weight of opinion that is well-tested from many perspectives, especially rationalist ones) about the opposite of a hypothesis, but of course knowledge is gradually obtained, and is also not a binary yes/no phenomenon.

A simple test of an opinion versus a belief: what evidence would it require for you to change your mind, and what straightforward experiment could produce this evidence? If there isn't any evidence that would change your mind, you are believing in something. If you can't frame the evidence and experiment in terms agreeable to the person you're discussing it with, then you need to back up until you DO agree and start over, even if that means defining the word "be".

If you think that by "believe six impossible things before breakfast" that I mean "THINK six impossible things before breakfast" then you're missing the point entirely. It would be MUCH better to have this discussion while lying side-by-side in interactive MRI machines where we could see the nature of different states as we enter them.

"Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true." - Wikipedia
There's nothing about the definition that requires you stay in the same state for a long period of time. There are reasons that most people do that, but they aren't utterly compelling, and in fact I'm suggesting that in modern society keeping them fixed may be bad for you.

If you believe in a deity about six times an hour, on the average, for less than three seconds each time (but with a really wide standard deviation, especially during sex), and they are contradictory deities with conflicting universes, and most of the time between you drift between being an experientialist and a materialist except that about every two minutes, usually for only a few seconds unless you are with someone else, you are a savage mocker, sometimes of your own religions but mostly of others, and the deity you spend the most time with (aside from sex) is a psychedelic joke in the first place, and you are a practicing member of a few different joke religions - are you a theist or atheist? Yes or no?

I think your first mistaken assumption is that everyone else's mind works just like yours but has different and usually inferior contents. Don't fret - most people make this assumption, and almost all media reinforce it as a message. Corporations desperately want it to be true. But it's not true.