This is a decent example in terms of militant atheists, but I was going for the even less extreme case where even a casual atheist operates tacitly on faith in many facets of life.
Now who's flinging words around carelessly? What does a militant atheist do, exactly. When a "casual atheist" operates, what is s/he operating on?
Do my terms sound strange to you? I would have assumed most readers would find them clear enough. A militant atheist would obviously be someone who is to an extent dogmatic about this position; either by attacking religion or else by proselytizing atheism or anti-theism. Instead of it merely being a personal belief it becomes a kind of cause, if you will. As for 'casual atheist' maybe this one is a bit less clear but basically I mean someone who would check of "atheist" if they had to fill a questionnaire but to whom it isn't a central part of their intellectual life. Maybe it could also mean someone who just hasn't taken the time to give it almost any thought even though they believe in theory that it should be important.
The words faith and belief are hopelessly overloaded with both theistic and pragmatic meanings. I generally use the word "faith" to imply trust, except when tying it to a clearly religious subject, as I did above. In that case I am implying that it refers to a deity. I am faithful to certain causes, but not to the object of any religious faith.
I understand in context that by "faith" you might have specifically meant "faith in God", but I guess I had to jump on a blanket open-ended claim that atheists are bereft of any kind of 'faith', which sounded to me like a back-door claim that atheists as a whole are somehow beyond that silly 'faith' stuff. You may not have meant this, but without further specification it sounded like a bit of a high-horse statement regarding a lack of faith being a good thing.
Recall that your initial statement was that while an atheist can be as crappy as anyone else this crappiness cannot be written off as being a result of their 'faith or religious beliefs.' Just to show you that I'm not being a semantic pr**k I would say that many atheists do, in fact, embrace parts of their worldview entirely on faith and as a result of what Bacon called the idols of the marketplace. Whether these idols come from religion or some other exchanged beliefs seems to me not really relevant, and in fact the only difference in the context you meant it (with faith implying faith in God) is that some faiths are of supernatural phenomena while others are not.
