I constantly find myself in disagreements with atheists of a western background who don't understand that the concept of "belief vs non-belief" is indeed a western obsession.

In Chinese culture is is not Kwang Ti is "real" or believed in, nor is it a question in Hinduism whether the god Shiva is real, Shiva lives on a mountain somewhere outside place and time, and the many inconsistencies in the Hindu stories do not deter or bother most followers. It is not uncommon for impossible situations, such as God A killing God B before God A's son is born, and then have another story where the son of God A is interacting with God B.

I often laugh that if we did things like the ancients did then western society would mandate people worship a 3 headed god with the head of a rabi, a priest and an imam.

Back to the topic at hand, the "Crux of Belief" is the only way I can describe this barrier which paralyses so many atheists from understanding so much of spirituality, symbolism and culture.

As I see it, this is a problem borne of the ultimate proposition forced onto largely Judeo-Christian societies, "Do you believe in Jesus?" and it is a frame of mind that often fails to leave the even those atheists whom never believed in God. Buddhists do not generally get hung up on the question of whether or not the Shakyamuni Buddha ever existed or not, and the Bodhisatvas of far-eastern Mahayana Buddhism never had physical forms in this world, a stark contrast to Jesus whom Christians allege to be a genuine historical figure.

So let's address the rhetorical question that is likely to be the first argument against this post "But why do people need to believe in such things?" or "Don't people already believe in enough silly things that cause harm!?". The people who state this question do so from a perception rooted in the "crux of belief" that is the be-all and end-all of Christianity. Looking at places in the East, there is not the same confrontation between religion and science in India because Brahman created the world with his breath-sound, nor is there a serious problem studying evolution in Japan because Japanese people are descended from a Shinto sea-goddess.

The concept of believing or not-believing is something of an incredible importance in the Atheist vs (typically) Christian debate, and often when I encounter atheists in this train of thought I think of them in somewhat derogatory terms as being "Christian - Atheists", I do not just dislike the idiocy that is the pseudo-history and aversion to science of the Christian world, I despise the Christian culture entirely. I don't want to believe or not-believe in God, I want the Christian concept of God to depart from my mind, and I am most commonly forced to revisit it in the context of "Christian Atheists" which constitutes the larger part of the pop-atheist community.

I think the term "belief" has no place alongside the disciplines of history or science, it is a (largely) Christian nuisance, stuck on the minds of people culturally fixated into the double-bind of being asked to believe in Jesus. It is a corruption of the concept of believing.

It would be more accurate to say that I expect or accept gravity as opposed to believing. To say, I believe in the theory of relativity,
is a kind of redundant statement, as the word theory already implies the way in which it (the theory of relativity) is understood.

If I tell a person I believe in them, it is not there physical existence which I am concerning myself with, it is a notion of trust and expectation. It is the Christianity that has corrupted the act of believing by compelling people to "believe" in the physical, historical and miraculous account of Jesus Christ. Imagine somebody saying "I believe in the theory of Jesus Christ".

To me the idea of acting in full belief with a salutation to Lord Shiva, summoning the Elder Gods of the Lovecraftian mythos, reading the Buddhist scriptures, become a Jedi or reading some Klingon codex of wisdom is not silly, undertaking these activities with full belief is the only way to do them.

If you genuinely want to be an actual atheists, not some Christian with a hole in their mind burnt out from where everybody else accepts Jesus Christ, then I think it is important to understand the various ways in which "belief" can exist, even in the case of belief being a tool of the mind. If you fail to understand this then as far as I see it, you may have escaped the religion of Christianity but you have failed to escape it's cultural presumptions.

Even though the token realization that "God doesn't exist" is a turning point for most people, it is not the end of the journey, I have spent a long time here attempting the describe the way Christianity has twisted peoples minds, but it has also had a great influence in the way our society operates, for example courtrooms have pews, and are arranged just like a Church, however today all I want to do is to get people to imagine what it would mean to "believe" something had they never encountered Christianity.