And I disagree. : /

As I explained in the previous post, atheists lack belief in gods. Gnosticism and agnosticism refer to knowledge, not belief. Theism and atheism deal with belief. It is simply incorrect to call oneself agnostic in reference to one's beliefs. While there are some atheists who assert, for a fact, gods don't exist, they are the exception, not the rule. The majority of atheists LACK belief in gods, but don't claim that gods can't exist. IOW, there are a handful of gnostic atheists, but the majority are agnostic atheists, which is what I am. Therefore, when talking about atheism it is important to talk about what the most common member believes (or doesn't, in this case).

Gnostic Theist = has knowledge of gods, has belief in gods
Agnostic Theist = lacks knowledge of gods, has belief in gods
Gnostic Atheist = has knowledge of gods, lacks belief in gods
Agnostic Atheist = lacks knowledge of gods, lacks belief in gods

The vast majority of people are the bolded, either gnostic theists or agnostic atheists. However, this is why I oppose the use of gnosticism and agnosticism in these debates as they only serve to muddy the waters. The most important thing is what people believe (theism/atheism), not how they view their knowledge of the issue (gnosticism/agnosticism). This also avoids the extra fine tuning of agnosticism, such as is one saying they lack personal knowledge of gods, or that gods are unknowable? smh

The reason you (and many xians) think atheism is silly is because you misunderstand it. Atheists do NOT assert that gods don't exist, nor do they think this on blind faith. Atheists LACK BELIEF in gods, which comes from the prefix "a-" meaning lacking or without. A-theists lack theism, the belief in gods.

As for personal labels, I am: agnostic atheist, anti-religious, anti-theist, anti-xian.

So you view the believing in leprechauns with no evidence to be superior to the rejection of them with no evidence? I'd view them both as equally unsupported instead of patting the believers on the back as if that was commendable of them. What exactly do they do that you approve of that they're doing, or is it that you just dislike atheists more for lack of imagination/gambling on various mythos?

It is not a strawman argument as your point was structural - on a logical level, you found ridiculous the fact to believe in the non existence of something ("negative belief"). I want to point out that non-existences aren't that special. That you, yourself, believe in the nonexistence of a lot of things (pink unicorns, etc). And that absolutely no science would have been established (with no technological results) without the exclusion of the impossible which is implicit in many positive works (you exclude that newton's apple will fall upwards, etc). Science establishes limits to the possible, and these limits are instrumental to technology. I am sure you can find a huge lot of exemples of perfectly justified beliefs-that-no-no. Or even knowledge-that-no-no.

You can always narrow it down to something you don't believe in. Drop the somewhere. You don't believe in earthly pink unicorn ninjas with propeller hats. Especially the ones who live in your room, and are so good at hiding when you turn around. Deep down, you believe they don't exist.

Another type of exemple is directly self-contradictory elements, such as "spherical cubes". Or pink unicorn ninjas with propeller hats directly in front of you. Your beliefs aren't made of positive elements only, they are made of whole systems, whole landscapes, with their absences and their empty spaces and mutual exclusions. Plus, I suspect that many positive things can be rephrased as negative, and reciprocally.

There were philosophers who deduced logically necessary attributes of God longer before modern science, so I encourage you to read Aristotle or Aquinas. An excellent beginnings guide is Aquinas by Edward Feser.

http://www.amazon.com/Aquinas-Beginners-Guide-Edward-Feser/dp/1851686908 The term can be translated in His likeness, so what we're trying to figure our is in which ways God made us to be like Him. The Bible describes God as spirit, so it would be hard to look like this. However, throughout the Bible God wants us to be in a certain relationship with Him, so it would make sense that God would give us attributes that would allow for that, such as a intellect, or making us moral agents. The Bible says that God is eternal, so I think the verse saying that a day is like a thousand years is simply expressing the timelessness of God rather than Giving precise measurements about how He relates to time. It's not that God gave us superiority bodies to animals, but that God gave us dominion over the, which includes responsibility to them. Our intellect and morality set us apart from animals and allow us to have a relationship with God. If we were given dominion by God, then it's not really arrogance, and the point of the passage was not to foster arrogance, so to keep harping on that is really to miss what is being said. (www.dictionary.com)
be·lief [bih-leef]
noun
1. something believed; an opinion or conviction: a belief that the earth is flat.
2. confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof: a statement unworthy of belief.
3. confidence; faith; trust: a child's belief in his parents.

The common theme I see here is having confidence, conviction, or trust that something is true, which I don't think that comes from just merely wishing it to be true. Rather, it is evidence that gives us confidence that something is true, and the stronger the evidence, the greater the confidence we can have.

Hitler said some very anti-Christians things, so it's clear that he wasn't a Christian, but he did believe in some sort of god, so he wasn't an atheists. He also said some negative things against the occult, so it not likely that he was a pagan either. He was a cultist in Positive Christianity that disagreed with Christianity on some major points. They dumped the entire Old Testament and anything in the New Testament that was deemed too Jewish. They dejudaized Jesus and they were more interested in right action than right doctrine. They said it was important to be good to humanity, but then said that Jews didn't qualify as part of humanity.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/grok558/2013/11/23/deeper-waters--hitlers-christianity A theist is someone who claims that god or gods exist while an atheist claims that god or gods do not exist. An agnostics is someone who doesn't know whether god or gods exist. God is good, He loves me and made me for a purpose, I love God, and it is good to express my love for God in obedience to His commands. (www.dictionary.com)
ev·i·dence [ev-i-duhns]
noun
1. that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof.
2. something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign: His flushed look was visible evidence of his fever.

According to #2, evidence is an indication that something is is true. When you consider evidence to be strong enough to justify your belief, then it is grounds for belief and it is proved to you.

proof [proof]
noun
1. evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true, or to produce belief in its truth.
2. anything serving as such evidence: What proof do you have?

Again, this aligns with how I've been using it.

If your parents or friends tell you something and you accept it, then they indicated to you that it was true. If you tell someone else and they accept it, then you indicated to them that it was true. Evidence does not have to be strong evidence to qualify as evidence. He said, "I don't need to give it too much though, there's no proof in a religion. So there's no reason to believe it." That is essentially the same as saying that those views don't have anything behind them at all.

Christianity was originally viewed as a sect of Judaism, and Christians today have essentially been grafted in to a Jewish religion. No, of course not, but Christians claim to follow the same God that Jews do. Note sure what you're getting at here. Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are cults and I do not think they have more in common with Christianiy than Messianics have with Judaism. Messianic have the proper understanding Judaism, while those Jews who rejected their savior have missed the boat.

God is a dick. I mean seriously. He is purported to be omniscient and omnipotent, but he spends a considerable amount of time causing bad things to happen to people. He then demands that everybody worship him and nobody else. Worse, he gets credit for saving people, even when it's clear that it wasn't God, it was a medical doctor armed with science that God didn't bother to give us.

I'm not sure why the presumption should be that God is good when the evidence is equally strong that, if any Gods exist, they're just as likely to be complete assholes as actual benevolent entities.

Now we are no longer talking about an omnipotent and omnipresent deity, if you impose such limitations. That is where my strawman accusations came from before. However, I'll give it a go.

Well, I have a pretty good knowledge of my immediate surroundings. That is certainly a plus. Thus, I can reason inductively, given past experience, that there is very strong evidence that that sort of creature does not exist. I cannot prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, however.

I suppose it depends on how Euclidean your geometry is at any give time? :P

Such positive statements must be, by implication, exclusionary in some respect (else the reciprocal negative statement could never be formed). Thus, the same rules of doubt must be applied to the positive exclusion. If you can think of an exemption to this, please state it (I am genuinely curious).

And this is why I encourage you to study, so you can learn why these are misconceptions that Christians have. You probably think Judaism is more difficult and rigorous than Christianity too and that Christianity frees you from all of that (a very popular misconception). :)

Not to mention setting humans up to sin, then blaming it for him, when he's all powerful, all knowing, knowing the future yet still put the tree there and punished the humans when they ate from it.

You forgot to label rocks and trees as atheists because they lack a belief too. Rather, theists make a claim and the "a-" means atheists make the counter claim. The "a-" is the negation of theism, so it is impossible for them both to be true at the same time. However, if atheism is simply the lack of belief in god or gods and if God exists, then theism is true in that God exists and atheism is true at the same time in that they lack a belief that He does. Theism makes no sense apart from the claim that God exists and neither does atheism make sense apart from the claim that God does not exist.

No, if a god exists it's possible that it's not the same god of any holy book, which would make deism true, not theism.

1) "disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods."
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/american_english/atheism

2) The link you gave to MW has definition 2a as stating "disbelief". Compare that with 2b. If you interpret disbelief as active non-belief, then aren't the two the same? Disbelief here is clearly used to mean passive non-belief, as opposed to active non-belief, which would be 2b. This view is explained more here: http://atheism.about.com/od/definitionofatheism/a/dict_online.htm

You can also read About's definition of atheism here: http://atheism.about.com/od/Atheist-Dictionary/g/Definition-Atheism.htm

3) Wikipedia says:

"Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.[1][2] In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.[3][4][5] Most inclusively, atheism is the absence of belief that any deities exist.[4][5][6][7] Atheism is contrasted with theism,[8][9] which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.[9][10]"

I agree with footnote 4 from there, which says:

"Harvey, Van A. "Agnosticism and Atheism", in Flynn 2007, p. 35: "The terms ATHEISM and AGNOSTICISM lend themselves to two different definitions. The first takes the privative a both before the Greek theos (divinity) and gnosis (to know) to mean that atheism is simply the absence of belief in the gods and agnosticism is simply lack of knowledge of some specified subject matter. The second definition takes atheism to mean the explicit denial of the existence of gods and agnosticism as the position of someone who, because the existence of gods is unknowable, suspends judgment regarding them ... The first is the more inclusive and recognizes only two alternatives: Either one believes in the gods or one does not. Consequently, there is no third alternative, as those who call themselves agnostics sometimes claim. Insofar as they lack belief, they are really atheists. Moreover, since absence of belief is the cognitive position in which everyone is born, the burden of proof falls on those who advocate religious belief. The proponents of the second definition, by contrast, regard the first definition as too broad because it includes uninformed children along with aggressive and explicit atheists. Consequently, it is unlikely that the public will adopt it." "

4) Lastly, this non-dictionary link (a-dictionary?) shares my views, with the benefit of a little graph as well:

http://clearbluereason.org/649/what-is-an-atheist/

New Testament is pathetic. Seriously, God is this horrible badass throughout the Old Testament, messing with people basically because he can and he's a dick. All of a sudden, he has a kid walking the Earth and he's all peace and love and shit throughout the New Testament. Terrible! :)