[baconner]

My experience is most atheists are a lot more educated about the wide variety of religious beliefs than the religious who tend to just stick with whatever their parents believe. That's anecdotal but I think it's natural to go find out about other faiths as part of the process of questioning the faith of your parents or society.

There may be 4.6+ billion variants of the idea, but I rejected the root idea, magic.

[erikpukinskis]

You can shift the focus from the word "god" to the word "magic" but you are still rejecting a heterogenous mix of ideas of which you've only been exposed to a tiny fraction.

You have supreme belief that your compression of these ideas into the concept "magic" was lossless compression with respect to accurately conserving 6 billion people's core beliefs...

That seems honesty crazy to me. And it resembles an article of faith on your part.

[baconner]

You're putting a lot of beliefs and faith in my mouth there. I don't have supreme belief in anything. I just think it's extremely unlikely that any faith founded on magic is true and some kind of magic is a common thread in religion. I think it's unlikely true to the point that it's not worth my time except as an interesting cultural phenomenon. There's nothing crazy about that.

Faith and belief are not the same thing.

[maxerickson]

I'm an atheist in a theological sense.

Philosophically I'm agnostic.

You are making the same leap about atheists that you say atheists make about deities.