On the contrary, Christians just believe everyone trusts many things and thinks many things are true. It's not a question of "whether" you trust and think things, it's a question of "what" you trust and think.

You trust medications from doctors, for example. That's believing medicine will work and that's having faith in a doctor.

When a Christian talks about "faith" or "belief", they're mostly saying they think Christian theology is true and trust it to some degree. Thinking it's false and trusting other things (saving for retirement, the golden rule, "not thinking about it too much is best") is no less of a belief system.

So we can come up with other words for things, I guess, but all this is fundamentally a conversation about what words mean. I think religious people know what atheists mean when they say they have no faith. I don't think it's true that atheists necessarily understand what a theist means by "everyone has a religion".

And secularism does not mean what a lot of religious persons think it does, as, with respect, your reply demonstrates. It's not anticlericalism or anti-theism. If it was, the vanguard of secularism would not have been composed of ardent Protestants.

What did I demonstrate? It seems clear from the conversation (and, indeed, in plenty of other cases) that there are people who take exception when someone says "everyone has a religion" or "everyone has faith".

Secularism is another one of those tricky words with multiple meanings. I'm both for and against it depending on which one someone means. I'm for first amendment protections for people of all dispositions. I'm against people (again, of all dispositions) feeling like they have to closet themselves in an ever-growing set of contexts.

I hope everyone else feels the same way, but apparently not since things seem to be regressing as time goes on.

I had plenty of discussions on this topic and explored this statement in depth. "Everyone has a religion" is good predictor of inability to see difference between beliefs backed by the best available methodology of constructing and falsifying beliefs and beliefs which are religious beliefs.

If we try to see what is the core of rationality belief, we find there few philosophical principlec like Occam razor. And even that principles are subject of doubt and refinement. Rationality has no beliefs which are not justifyed by practice.

But theists (or some of them) reject difference between justified belief and unjustified one, it allows them to say "every belief is a religious one".

I even can demonstrate it with your words:

> You trust medications from doctors, for example. That's believing medicine will work and that's having faith in a doctor.

No, it is not a faith in doctor. It is faith in medicine, which is complex system which is doing research, gathering data, training specialists, inventing pills and so on. I know that it is just system, that system can make mistakes, that system really make mistakes. I even know weaknessess of that system and know which kinds of mistakes are more probable and which kinds are unlikely. I prefer doctors over praying because research shows, that doctors are more effective than praying.

So I have faith not in doctors, but in rationality as system allowing me to make decisions. But even rationality itself is not unjustified belief for me: show me other way that better than rationality, and I'll stop using rationality.

You can spent millenia trying to show to theist that it is nessesary to differentiate between religious belief and justified belief, but he feels that if he accepts argument, than he ought to reject ideas "everyone has a religion" and "religious belief is no worse than justified one". Feeling this he just fails to hear argument. So, my understanding of "everyone has a religion" can be reworded as "la-la-la-la, what you say?, la-la-la-la, I can hear nothing".

But it's far more convincing when faith and belief are considered in more non-rational human emotional terms. Having faith in a god is closer to appreciating a beautiful painting, feeling excited when you're about to go an adventure, feeling sad when a family member dies. Those feelings can't be explained through logic, you just feel them. This is nothing like having "faith" in a doctor or medicine. Further, while scientists may explain why humans evolved to have a particular feeling, they do not explain the feeling itself.

True, faith can be beaten back with logic and reason, much like a person can be convinced that a piece of music is bad. But the underlying emotion is integral to most people. Telling them to not believe is like telling them not to laugh.