Nihilists Have More Fun

Some would say that, when I realized I could no longer believe in God, I lost my faith. I even used this phrasing to explain my changed views to others once or twice, but something about it never struck me quite right, and after thinking it over a bit, I realized why these words had seemed ill-fitted to the situation. It was because all my life I had heard the word "faith" used in two different ways without realizing it, and while I had given up on something that is called faith in certain circumstances, I hadn't stopped exercising the thing that is more broadly referred to as faith at all. You see, I had gone a very long time without realizing that people were calling two different, and in fact contradictory, concepts by the same name. Now, I don't want to give the impression here that it's somehow wrong, bad, or incorrect for a word to have contradictory usages. The meanings of words tend to shift over time—that's simply how language works—and sometimes pe...