The label "atheist"

I wrote a similarly-titled post on here about six years ago contemplating whether I could still call myself a Christian. I suppose now is a reasonable time for a follow-up. Although this time around, I think I'm perhaps less uncertain about a different label for me now than I was about the label "Christian" for me then.

It certainly wouldn't feel like a lie if the label "atheist" were applied to me. I don't live my life or make any decisions with regard for the existence of a divine being. God, Jesus, and spirituality are simply irrelevant in my life; I arrived at the point where it doesn't matter whether God exists or not.

However, I think my current hangup is the connotation that the label "atheist" has associated with it. To me, "atheist" suggests a degree of certainty and possibly even closed-mindedness--God does not exist, and that's that. But I think my migration from Christianity to atheism-adjacent or wherever I am now has made it clear to me that you can't go through life closed-mindedly. You need to be open to change if experience and evidence (or lack of evidence) compel you to revise your worldview. I suppose in that sense, applying any label to me could pose a similar challenge.

Perhaps my view of atheism as a closed-minded worldview is due to how atheism was characterized while growing up Christian. Atheists, I was told, assume the premise that atheism is true and make all experiences or evidence conform to that worldview. Atheism was described as requiring as much faith as Christianity to support its worldview. Perhaps to a degree, the latter statement that is true. It cannot be proven that God does not exist, so jumping from, "I have no evidence for God's existence," to, "God does not exist," is indeed a leap of faith.

I've thought before about adopting the label, "agnostic". However, my problem with that label is that it captures an exceedingly broad range of the do-you-believe-in-God spectrum. I think adopting that label would put me under the same umbrella as people who still believe in God but harbor some doubts. I'm far beyond that point in terms of my lack of belief in God.

The image below shows Richard Dawkins' "Spectrum of Theistic Probability" from The God Delusion on top, and how I think about the labels on the bottom. I'm somewhere around "De facto atheist" on top, but I'm not sure where I fall on the bottom (atheist vs. agnostic) since it's kind of at a boundary area.

All that being said, I do find myself in a bit of a similar situation as when I wrote my previous post about the label "Christian". I don't really care, I'm overall happy in life, and identifying a marginally more precise label isn't going to change that. I can definitively say, however, that I am far happier now than I ever was when I was a Christian.