(April 14, 2011 at 12:24 am)bliss Wrote: I may be the one who believes in God, but I am not the only one who believes. All people believe. Making inferences about reality is a necessary part of survival for humans. Atheism is just a general term for belief systems not based upon God.
In the strictest sense atheism is simply the lack of belief in a god. Theism is a belief system whereas atheism is a lack of that belief system. It's similar to describing a "dark" room, the word "dark" is a word we've invented to describe the lack of light.
You can infer nothing more about atheists other than their lack of belief in god, the definition simply does not cover anything else.
From my own personal experience people who push the issue that atheism is a belief system are theists with an agenda of trying to convince people that atheism is a strong position, one that needs justification for holding, which it's not. The reason this is done in my opinion is because many theists simply cannot justify their position to rational thinkers so they need to attack the opposite position saying it requires just as much faith, which is of course nonsense, nor does this type of argument sway rational/sceptical thinkers, we tend to believe X based on he merit of X and not the relative merit of alternatives Y, often leading to us believe niether X nor Y until there is more reason to do so.
Rejection of X does not imply belief of Y in this case, it's perfectly reasonable to reject both X and Y until there is sufficient reason to justify belief.
