Taken from an e-mail I wrote earlier this month:
I have faith in no deity nor any other form of divine structure. Rather, I have faith in mundaneity, in the accidental, and in hope as a source of comfort (though not necessarily as something with actual effect, other than personal comfort). I also have faith in that karma does not exist; I believe that there is no universal balance structure of good v. bad.
I do not necessarily see theistic faith as a "daddy in the sky" phenomenon. I suspect that it comes from the social construction where we receive external input on the existence of the divine and learn how to look for evidence of the divine. This construction, beyond setting a foundation for our interpretation of the world (and establishing our sense of faith), establishes a dependency on there being something divine; without that divinity, our foundation for meaning crumbles.
For my part, it took many steps to eventually reconstruct my faith from theist to atheist. Because I have actual faith in atheism (including going through the difficulty of realizing that I will not see my adored dead in some afterlife) rather than mere profession to it, I consider myself a true atheist; I differentiate between myself and those "atheists" who are actually temporary agnostics going through some crisis-of-faith period. I have also learned to supplicate myself to hope rather than divinity in times of personal crisis.
