I called a friend who is a believer...

[robvalue]

Old baby: I agree, telling someone they are "not really an atheist" is about the most dishonest, ignorant and pointless thing to say.

[Below is just my personal assessment. I don't mean to imply that living in fantasy is necessarily a choice, often it's the direct result of indoctrination. I see such people as victims.]

I consider scepticism to be about living in reality, accepting it on its on terms. It just so happens that scepticism, when properly applied, generally leads to atheism. I see deism as dipping one of your fingers in fantasy just to get a little magical sensation, while remaining rooted in reality.

However, once you start assigning very specific attributes to "God" and claiming you have some way of knowing these, you have one foot firmly in fantasy. You may still mainly be living in reality, but you have gone a bit off the rails.

Once you reach the point of devout religion and actually thinking you can communicate with this God in some real sense, you're beginning to straddle the divide. You're living maybe 30%-50% in fantasy.

Some people take it all the way, announce themselves firm gnostics and that there is no chance they have made a mistake, even ignoring all the countless other religions all making the same claim. They then can't even conceive of someone not seeing things how they do, and the way they describe reality bears little resemblance to what I experience every day. At this point they are probably living 90% in fantasy, and may never have the chance to come back unless they have a massive moment of clarity somehow.

Is there a "God"? I don't know. I generally don't even know what people are talking about, and I suspect neither do they, since they can't define it on request using anything other than world salad nonsense. If there is one, I say we can know nothing about it at the moment, and until we can, it's irrelevant.