Fenster writes:

There’s been an open moderated thread running at Andrew Sullivan’s blog on various approaches to atheism and their overall relation to belief.  It was kicked off via a link to an article by Thomas Wells on why he is not an atheist.  Wells is not a believer but he doesn’t want to call himself an atheist because he sees no reason to define himself in opposition to something he finds non-relevant to his life.

There are many supernatural things that some people believe in that I don’t, including Santa Claus, UFOs, crop circles, witches, ghosts, homeopathy, gods, fairies, and astrology. I see no particular reason to select out my non-belief in gods from that list of non-beliefs for special attention and justification. I see no no more reason to describe myself as an atheist, than as an afairieist, ahomeopathist, etc. To put it another way, my non-belief is apathetic: the nonexistence of God/Gods is a matter of great insignificance to me. And isn’t that how it should be?

That stance got a lot of pushback, including from more aggressive atheists who argue for more pro-active Dawkins-style assertiveness.  In the pushback to the pushback, these folks got termed “dickhead atheists”–people who have nothing better to do than rain on the parade of believers when they ought not to care.

I agree raining on parades is dickhead behavior.  I have too much respect for most believers–and too little fuel for any fire on my own account–for anything more than a general policy of live and let live.

I will note, though, that most of those folks arguing for greater voice did not argue for dickhead disruption just to make believers’ lives miserable, or to convert them to non-belief.  Rather, most arguing for assertiveness based their arguments on politics–i.e., atheists ought to be willing to stand up and be counted, lest the assumption that we are all similarly religious produce outcomes, both cultural and in terms of public policy, that are not to our liking.

I suspect these points of view can be reconciled.  As I see it Wells is making somewhat more of an aesthetic or psychological argument.  He is indifferent, and thinks those making too much of a stink reveal themselves as caring too much about something they profess not to care about.  But one can have the generally indifferent attitude Wells advocates to belief per se yet still be mindful of the tension between belief and non-belief in the public square, and to take action, including using one’s voice, in that square as needed.