Are you an agnostic, an atheist or just apatheistic?

I just read an interesting short essay about "apatheism" in Atlantic Monthly. In searching for a link to this essay, I came across this blog about it.

Don't care much about your religion and care even less about the religions of others? Then you're an "apatheist," according to The Atlantic Monthly's Jonathan Rauch. Most agnostics are apatheists, but most apatheists are not agnostics--because a believer can still be an apatheist. It's what makes it possible for Rauch to have "Christian friends who organize their lives around an intense and personal relationship with God, but who betray no sign of caring that [Rauch is] an unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual." The piece isn't online, but Rauch claims that apatheism is rising, and that it's a very good thing:

"...the rise in apatheism is to be celebrated as nothing less than a major civilizational advance. Religion, as the events of September 11 and after have so brutally underscored, remains the most divisive and volatile of social issues. To be in the grip of religious zeal is the natural state of human beings, or at least of a great many human beings; that is how much of the species seems to be wired. Apatheism, therefore, should not be assumed to represent a lazy recumbancy, like my collapse into a soft chair after a long day. Just the opposite: it is the product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset, and often of an equally determined personal effort to master the spiritual passions. It is not a lapse. It is an achievement."

In search for more, I went into Websters Online, but apatheistic wasn't listed. However, The American Dialect Society (whatever that is) published their words of the year and making an appearance in the creative catagory was apatheist, someone believing that God or gods exist but are not of any use.

Interesting, I think, to say the least, yet not surprising. I see alot of apathy these days in many areas...does not surprise me it's flowed over to theism.