Posted: Jan 06, 2011 8:39 am
Just to clear this up, it's because "atheist" isn't just a word with an i and an e in it. It's because it's a suffix (-ist) attached to a word "the" from "theos" meaning "god". With "a-" being the prefix meaning a negative. So it's: a (no) the (god) ist (person). "Person who does not believe in gods." Or something like that. ;P
Anyway, I was thought to be dyslexic when I was younger, although I was never tested. Mainly because I was forever getting "d" and "b" messed up. The only time I have a hard time reading now is when I'm really tired.
However, I seem to have a lot of the problems with numbers that I hear dyslexics have with written words, so I can sympathize a bit. Like you said with the not-reading-names thing, I almost never read numbers when written in text unless it's a small number, like 4 or 20. Anything more than two digits and have to slow my reading down tremendously to actually "read" it, and the more digits the worse it gets. If it's a really big number, I'll just skip it entirely and be like "really big number of blah blah blah" and keep reading.