When I married Jason, the Rabbi who married U.S. said that Jason's atheism was stronger than my Judaism. One time he asked him, "Tell me about the God you don't believe in." Jason had a very clear picture in his mind of that nonexistent God.

I do not find existential comfort in systems that rely on faith rather than evidence. However, I do think there is self-comfort to be found in the performance of kindness to other beings. Further, faith-based systems that emphasise and encourage the practice of that sort of kindness seem to be very useful templates for behaviour patterns, if not internal mental states.

So, even if I don't subscribe to a literal interpretation of the writings of and about Gautama Buddha, I still don't mind calling myself a Buddhist, as it gives others an easy shorthand understanding of my behaviour patterns and my regard for other beings.

A long time ago I described myself as militantly agnostic: "I don't know if there's a God, and you don't either."

I took this stance partly in response to people who thought atheism was "wimpy," but mainly because I was drawing a distinction between a view held on the basis of the available evidence (which, to my mind, was essentially nil either way) and a view held because you'd like things to be that way ("I don't like the idea of God, or the people who believe in God"). The former can pretend to being objective, the latter is on no firmer ground than fundamentalism.

Later I read some of Stephen Hawking's pop-science stuff and decided that the evidence suggested an omnipotent creator is unnecessary to get us to where we are; the weak anthropic principle, and the possibility of many universes, are sufficient explanation. So I became an atheist, but not an especially vehement one, because it's tricky to rule out the possibility that something chose the initial conditions. Occam's Razor isn't an iron-clad guarantee.

One more thought that helped me put my views in perspective: I realized that the fear of damnation wasn't much of a motivation for me. That is, even if pascal's wager wasn't fundamentally flawed to begin with (*), it is cowardly not to live in accordance with your own ethical beliefs. I didn't want to obey some of the more reprehensible bits of Leviticus or punish others who did not do so, even if it meant I'd be in trouble down the road. And a God who wouldn't expect me to was at least as likely to exist anyway.

That is still essentially where I sit. I agree it's a very different animal from the viewpoint of an atheist who speaks of nothing but how Catholic he isn't.

But can we draw any useful conclusions from this about the average atheist? I don't know; has anyone surveyed self-identified atheists to find out if their viewpoint is more like mine, or more like that of Shelle's ex?

(*) Because a God who demands the opposite of all the rules you've been following "just in case" is equally probable.

what's the term for someone who simply has no interest in questions of god, gods, his/her/their existence, and his/her/their role in human life?

I neither believe nor disbelieve nor consider it an open question. I'm not interested enough in the problem to want to bother.