Just because one is an atheist does not necessarily mean that you don't have a faith in something. I am a firm believer that religion and spirituality are not necessarily one and the same.

I am not at all religious, but in many ways I would call myself quite a spiritual person. Even belief in the existence of something as simple as luck is a faith of sorts.

It's hard to live without faith, which I sometimes define as the most rudimentary trust that the universe is not entirely malevolent and that things will hang together in a relatively coherent way.

Complete lack of faith means waking up in the morning in a state of total skepticism about whether the floor will be solid when you put your feet on it. After all, the floor is mostly made up of very small molecules and empty space, right? But why bother standing up, if you don't have some confidence that there's a meaningful difference between staying in bed and standing up?

Some of us hold our faith at such a deep and tacit level that we don't even recognize it as such or know its basic tenets.

I don't know, Midas. I don't see how everyone needs faith in either a higher power or total randomness. I don't have either.

I happened to be a Buddhist, and as such am completely unconcerned about those things. They are irrelevant to my life. I am neither a theist (I don't believe there is God), nor an atheist (I don't believe there is not a God), nor an agnostic (I don't believe that I don't know). I am a nontheist (it makes no difference whether there is or is not a God, nor whether I can find out).

I am here and I am now. That's the only reality. What was in the past does not exist, it is not real, so it is irrelevant to me. What will happen in the future, has not happened yet, it does not exist, it is not real, so it is irrelevant to me. When it does happen, it will exist, it will be real, it will be relevant, but it will also be the here and now then. I'll "worry" about it when it happens.

Do I have faith? Not in the sense of believing in something. I do have faith in the sense of trust. I often have faith that someone will do what he promised to do, because he has proven himself trustworthy. But if he does not, he will not, I will not be distraught. Panta rhei.

To begin with, it's important to note the difference in meaning between faith and belief. When I wake up in the morning, I believe that the floor will be solid under my feet, but I have no faith that it will be. It just possibly might not be.

Also, it is important to avoid an equivocation fallacy here. Faith that the bus will arrive because it is on a schedule and has consistently arrived in the past is not the same thing as faith in a supernatural force. The former is basically just a synonym for belief; the latter is something else entirely. There are individuals without faith in either, I believe, but it is important to be clear which definition is being suggested as a universal human behavior. Often the suggestion that one has the former type of 'faith', simple belief or conviction in recurring phenomena, is used to imply that one has faith of the latter type, which is where the equivocation fallacy comes in. Belief in demonstratable occurrences and belief in realms of existence beyond the natural are, clearly, very different things.

As a naturalist and something of a nihilist, I find it amusing when others suggest that I must have faith in something. I have belief in many things, but never to the point of surety--I don't even, really, have faith that the bus will arrive, just a conviction that it is very likely to do so. And I have no belief in anything at all which could be considered supernatural. And no, I similarly do not have faith in the nonexistence of the supernatural or the existence of a naturalist universe. Just belief.

The postulation that one cannot possibly exist without faith seems merely an act of projection: because one cannot comprehend existing without faith, one assumes others cannot exist without it either. Most such acts are rather obvious (if I were to project my disbelief in god onto society and assume that nobody can really believe in such a thing, that would be patently ridiculous), but when the vast majority of human society is a certain way, it's all too easy to assume the entirety of human society is that way, and those who claim otherwise are merely deluding themselves in some fashion.

We're not. I have no faith in anything at all. At least, as far as I can tell. Of course, I wouldn't say I have faith in this, my lack of faith.