Having said that I think there’s something to be said for atheists who adopt more philosophically Greek ideas of God. Say pantheism. What I think many, if not most, atheists are opposed to isn’t the idea of the absolute or some ultimate origin. Rather it is to the idea of a personal interventionist God. So the line between deist and atheist is a blurry one.

One example that springs to mind is J. Michael Straczynski, the guy behind Babylon 5. He’s rather sympathetic towards religion, actually, but he claims to be an atheist. However, his personal writings and internet postings show that the belief system he gave to the Minbari in Babylon 5 is quite close to his own. He’s merely replaced “God” with “the universe” and thus claims to be an atheist because his god goes by a different name.

Arthur C. Clarke also springs to mind, though he jokingly referred to himself as a “lapsed atheist.”

Of course that’s not what the above study was really getting at. Just that people tend to believe many things uncritically. We might point to many religious beliefs as uncritical but people who don’t hold beliefs we’d characterize as stereotypically religious seem to do the same thing. The critical stance is, I believe, a fairly unnatural one.