Just about everybody believes in lots of things (and just how boring do you have to get to get by in life without believing in anything?) so the fast answer is, atheists believe in things too.
I’m writing this a few weeks after the original discussion of the question took place. I'm also writing this soon after the death of Pete Seeger, who was an atheist the last time I heard him talk live, about 25 years ago.
For some years the International Humanist and Ethical Union has compiled an annual Freedom of Thought Report, and their 2013 edition surveyed 194 countries, ranking them by how tolerant they are of nonbelievers.
(RNS) “I am certainly not predicting that every atheist is the result of one hypothesis, much less mine,” said Catholic psychologist Paul C. Vitz. “I am just saying there is a tendency for more things to go together than you’d expect normally.”
As "absolutism" is not an entity, I have no "personal relationship" to it at all, just as I can have no "personal relationship" with the mathematical absolute that one plus one equals two and not 64
I had the pleasure of attending the John Crossan talk at Gonzaga University last week, which I learned about first from one of my young atheist friends at the Eastern Washington University Atheists (who drew on the SpokaneFAVS announcement for information on it, by the way).
An online conference on atheism, the Free Thought Blogs' Atheism with a Conscience (FtBCon), will be held this weekend starting tonight. All events are free and open to the public.
More than 30 sessions are scheduled, addressing such topics as "Sex and Skepticism,"