I see faith and religion confused a lot. I’m pretty anti-religious, but I find myself fairly spiritual. There exist known, and knowable, things such as the number of cards and their values in a standard deck. We can know there is no fifth ace in the deck, and so we can know you will never pull a fifth ace.

Unknowables, however, also exist. I already listed the example of the specifics of what goes on in another person’s head, which - fair, you can make inferences and guesses, but we’re still not able to know for certain what someone else is thinking. A more esoteric example for anther things in this category would be something like how a 4th spatial dimension would look. We, with our current biology, can’t actually KNOW this. We can approximate it, and even develop an intuition, but we’re simply not equipped with hardware to allow us to interpret that information. Or, that the sun will rise tomorrow. It’s always happened so far, but I have nothing guaranteeing that it will happen. In fact, we know as a point of certainty that it will, one day, not rise. We have pinned down a timeframe we think this death will occur in, but we can’t KNOW.

We still engage with each day as if the sun WILL come up. And there may be overwhelming evidence that it will, but it may not. Similarly, the old thought experiment of us being in a simulation. Practically, we can’t really know whether or not that’s the case, but all but the most adamant about simulation theory are going to act as if it’s not.

To wrap it all back around, about militant atheism and the like - my view is that we all act on some degree of faith, and some people really glom onto a worldview that helps to explain our origins and meanings of our lives. And there’s _nothing wrong with that. The issues only start to arise when one person or groups faith starts to impress itself upon others. I don’t care, in the slightest, what someone believes, it’s only when they start asserting that their faith is fact, and when they start using said faith to justify mistreating anyone else.

Edit: to address the thing about bigotry, I really don’t think having some notion of Faith has much to do at all with one being a bigot. Bigotry tends to come from exclusion, because of fear and not understanding. This is why I have a problem with most RELIGIONS. Religions take your faith (i really like the term spirituality more here), something I think should be inherently personal, and dogmatize it, use it to form an in group and an out group, and use it as justification for the subjugation of the out group. Nothing to do with the faith/spirituality of the individual, a LOT to do with the biases of whatever leadership your in group has.