Delicate Offers a Truce

[pocaracas]

Very well... Mind giving me a link to that place?
I'm on my phone and searching with little more than your username is a pain.

See my above response. Hope it helps.

Indeed it helps, thank you.

It seems you are operating under the impression that atheism is the position or claim that gods do not exist.
However, the more general case of atheism is the not acceptance of the claim that any particular god exists... especially, applied to all gods ever claimed to exist by any man.
In simpler terms, atheism is "not believing in the existence of gods", as opposed to your definition of "believing in the non-existence of gods". The difference can be subtle, but it paves the road for what comes next.

You are sincerely wrong then, and I would like a reference to your explanation so I can correct you.

I don't feel like hunting for the links either, so I'll just lay the most salient considerations out here based on how you've laid your position out.

1. I don't believe atheism is the default position, while theism needs to be proved because I take atheism and theism to be epistemically on par. One makes a claim, another makes a contradicting claim. If one doesn't make either claim (that God exists, or that God doesn't exist) they can rightly be thought of as agnostic. This triad is a perfectly adequate, well-established, and widely-accepted survey of the various positions and I haven't seen enough reason to change it.

Atheism as the claim that gods do not exist is indeed not the default position.
But atheism as the non-claim of existence of any god would be an adequate default position.

(A)gnosticism is applied as a concept of knowledge over the particular subject of the divine. A sort of measure of how sure people are about the existence or non-existence of gods. It complements the (a)theist view as this one relates to belief. People will often bring forth a 2D chart to illustrate this, but, essentially, you can have 4 quadrants: atheist agnostic, atheist gnostic, theist gnostic and theist agnostic.
The most common are "atheist agnostic" and "theist gnostic". The theist gnostic who thinks that the atheist is also gnostic will tend to, like yourself, think that agnostic is an independent category... alas, humans are not that easy to catalog.... on both these axis (knowledge vs belief) there is a continuum of positions.

Like I said, the norm among atheists is the "agnostic atheist", which possibly coincides with what you describe as simply "agnostic". No claim of knowledge is made concerning the actual non-existence of any god (for it is the intellectually honest position), but, for all intents and purposes, life is carried out as if no god exists (for there is no hint that any god has any influence over life - or anything).

2. Like I pointed out in (1), I think atheism makes a claim because atheism and theism are on par with each other epistemically. The only way you could say atheism makes no claims is if atheism were in fact a default position. 

But why think so? In fact, if not believing in x is a default position, then isn't "not believing that atheism is the default position" itself a default position? I think more work needs to be done here to explain why you believe in this kind of default position and why it's needed. 

There's more to say on this, of course, but I want to keep the post concise and focused.

Allow me to unravel that "not believing that atheism is the default position" to "not believing that 'not believing in the existence of gods' is the default position".
Now that's it's properly explicit, using the correct definition of atheism, perhaps you can agree this sentence makes no sense?

The default position is that which makes no claims, except those that are borne of immediate experience... like gravity - things fall.
Hence, the lack of claim for any god would be the default position. Such lack can be defined as atheism, but, under a hypothetical society that has never known of such a claim, the concept of atheism would be as foreign as the concept of "afaerism" or "aunicornism" are to us.