Atheism as Part of a Social Construct

An excerpt from a comment (4) I made elsewhere.  From the Ashes of Faith asks: ". . . can you believe in a higher power and not a god? Does that still make you an atheist?

Me:

Are not all such questions burdened by the inherent difficulty of defining a word in terms of a negative? Presumably, a “strict materialist” would be describable with satisfactory accuracy (leaving aside for the moment the question of a person being total or consistent in outlook.) A “theist” would be describable to a similar degree—or at least to the uncontested satisfaction of his or her definition. But “atheist”? Is not a self-identification as “atheist” contingent upon the prevailing concept of “god” (or at least that which prevails in the milieu in which a person says, “atheist”?)

I believe in God. I believe that entails a continual duty to challenge every human understanding of God. I see no functional difference between that outlook and one that conceptualizes the divine as a more and more stringently refined notion of a “higher power”. I see no functional difference between those two outlooks and a strict materialist determination to pursue selfless virtue as a default implication of the connectedness of sentient beings. All of the above approaches are provisional and faltering in practice—but that doesn’t stop us from deciding communally to argue about worldviews as if they could ever be pristine or held continually.

The religion-versus-atheism controversy is a social construct—nothing more.