Is atheism a belief?

[The Grand Nudger]

I could go a step further saying, is there really any other type of belief?

How is belief in something proven? Doesn't the mouth speak what the heart is full of?

Good point!

People here may want to separate belief and knowledge. Normally what they mean by this is that knowledge is something I hold to be true based on reasons I think are good ones, and belief is something someone else holds to be true based on reasons I think are bad ones. 

But I think you're closer to the real situation. Very few things are proven, what we hold to be true is based on any number of assumptions, prejudices, desires, and habits, and in the end the heart is boss. Even if our belief seems like assent to us, it's likely to be commitment.

I think Hume said something along these lines. The reason is servant of the passions, and that's how it should be. Or maybe just how it must be.

The things that people know and the things that people believe are likely..at least by them, both thought to be held for good reason.  It's not really unique to people here to separate belief and knowledge, that's been an active topic for about as long as human beings have been writing about the subject.   The jtb description of knowledge adds true precisely because a belief can be justified without being true, which is why people have proposed additional qualifiers.  Some of those qualifiers attempt to explain how it is that something can be said to be proven...whether it's through methodological construction, reliability, both, additional criteria, or other un-described criteria.  

I believe that I'm going to meet my goals, I know my name.  

There's something to be said for knowledge as a conceit, something we have, for this or that reason™, undue confidence in (because we want it to be true, for example) but if that's a uniform rule when it comes to knowledge and applies to all knowledge then it also applies to the knowledge of our own names.  I don't actually know my name, I only believe that it's my name because I really really really want it to be my name, for example.  Maybe that's true..but, on the face of it, it seems as though it's profoundly off-base and I still can't help but separate the two items. A deepity.

For you, catharsis, atheism is simple. It's a term that describes any person who doesn't believe in gods, for any reason, or no reason at all. It's a single line item, a comment on a persons status of belief in gods, not the reasons for them or any certification that there is one. As interesting as a discussion between belief and knowledge may be, it's irrelevant to the term and in this thread that discussion has only been initiated in order to posture over novel positions and use of the term. A person who contends to know that there are no gods..by default, doesn't believe in gods and is an atheist.... just as a person who doesn't contend to know and doesn't believe is - no matter what difference there may be between the two, if there is a difference. If we want to contnd that everything is a belief, then..fine..still, some beliefs are different than others, and a gnostic and an agnostic still don't believe the same things. The difference between those two has nothing to do with gods, it's a difference in what people believe about their own knowledge. Between the two, only the gnostic is directly commenting on the existence of gods as they see it. Agnostics are only telling you about themselves.

Either they know what they do and don't believe, or they don't..they are aware of what they do and don't know, or they aren't...we can either take them at their word in those assessments or not...but let's be clear, here, about exactly what it is we're doing, lol.