As I said somewhere before in this thread, anthropologists typically accept the earliest form of religious belief to be animism. That is, the belief that everything has an "animus", a spirit beyond its physical form. I think there's a pretty clear association between animism and symbolism - religious belief is founded when a symbolic association is divorced from the physical thing it was associated with.
But animism is not theism per se, the earliest form of what we recognize as theism are in the form of "human gods". You see later forms of this with Gilgamesh or the Hellenistic pantheon. The gods aren't transcendent beings, they act and mostly look like immensely powerful immortal humans. Zeus is a horndog. Poseidon fucks up people who disrespect him. Aphrodite puts Playboy models to shame. All very human impulses and desires.
And, for the record, this starts to turn into the transcendent kind of god when these polytheistic deities are all gradually subsumed: first in henotheism as one god takes precedence above the rest, and then eventually in monotheism as one god absorbs the qualities of all the rest. But at that point all of your "human but more" attributes get subsumed into a single idea and it isn't long before that gets smoothed out by the idea of omnipotence and omniscience.
As for the other thing, no, you don't need faith to be an atheist. The definition of faith should not be "accepting your own beliefs" because that's completely non-determinate. Everybody accepts their own beliefs about everything. It's a useless word at that point, much along the lines of people who say shit like "I think everything is God" (pantheists exempted). Faith, in the way it is typically used by anybody outside of trying to win an argument, and by both theists and non-theists, is "belief in something without or in spite of evidence". Faith should also not be conflated with trust, because an idea of trust is based upon the past experience or character of what/who is being trusted.
It is clear that atheists don't have to do this. Pretty much everybody reasonable agrees there's no scientific evidence of the supernatural, even if they think there is a supernatural. "Thou shall not put thy god to the test" and such. This is, in fairness, not to say that someone cannot believe atheism is true on a faith-basis, they just don't have to. An ardent member of the Communist Party of China might have faith that the official doctrines of atheism espoused by the party must be true. However, for atheism as it is generally discussed in English, we're virtually always taking about western skeptics or people who accept similar ideas. Skepticism is the polar opposite of faith, a conscious withholding of belief until sufficient evidence is provided, and so in general it is correct to say that atheists don't have faith.
Poll
71 (27.7%)
Author
Topic: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion (Read 687021 times)