There’s an ongoing discussion on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish about the nature of religious discourse, and the role an “atheist” plays in this discussion.

I do not reflect upon religion, or deities, on a daily basis. And I do not harbor any resentment toward those who do – that is their own choice – and I try, or at least have tried as I get older and less foolish, to be more understanding when believers bring their religion into conversation. I think their mythology is very curious, a fascinating artifact of human evolution, full of beautiful art and music, telling histories, and compelling moral fables. I see great acts by wonderful people, performed in the name of and stirred on by their love for their religion.

But I am truly tired of people using the term, atheist, to describe people who don’t believe in God, gods, the flying spaghetti monster, et al. I grew up in a family built on several generations of people who did not attend church and had no spiritual interest in religion. Academic, yes, but spiritual, certainly not. In our family’s affairs, any and all religions were comparable to Tolkien and CS Lewis: dramatic stories, imagined and written by man, no more.

The term atheist is particularly offensive because it implies I deny something’s existence, that I don’t believe in something. No, far from it, I believe in so many things. Air, trees, flowers, earth, space, gravity, physics – and my apologies for being glib here. God and Jesus and Allah were simply never on the table to believe in, like unicorns and elves. They were mythology, like Athena and Zeus, Apollo and Aphrodite.

But for so long, anyone who chose not to believe in one mythology or another was labeled – for convenience’s sake – a heretic, a non-believer, and now, an atheist. It’s a term applied to these people, not chosen, even though in these modern times many atheists (Harris, Dawkins) have taken the word and attempted to empower themselves by owning it. But I do not care for their venomous clique either, hell-bent on destroying the stories of others.

No, I say. I am no atheist. I am no secular humanist. I reject these terms. As far as I’m concerned, this is the same as referring to me as a fictionalist – that I read and digest works of fiction – or more accurately, that I don’t. Please refer to me as a human being, an intellectual buffoon, a progressive Independent, anything but atheist. That’s history’s word, not mine. I do not need a label for an argument in which I have no stake. In terms the young may understand, when asked what team – Team Edward or Team Jacob – I’m rooting for when the movie, Twilight, came out, I simply say, neither.