Why don't some people understand lack of belief?

[KevinM1]

 
Are you really attempting to dumb down and trivialize these distinctions?  Who cares?  Well everyone seems to care on this forum and the distinctions are used to give a more granular understanding of our position.

Yes, because those imaginary distinctions make atheism a trivial position. Nobody cares if you're 20% or 80% certain that no God exists. The issue isn't certainty. It's whether or not you are willing to commit to a stance despite the various uncertainties and vicissitudes of human existence.

If I tell my friend that I'll meet him for lunch. I just say whether or not I'll show or if I need to check my calendar.I don't say, well, I'm an agnostic scheduler so I assume I'll be there unless my car unexpectedly breaks down. Nor do I insist that I'm a gnostic scheduler because there is no circumstance under which I would miss lunch.

First, you are again dismissing these distinctions out of hand without justification.

Second, the distinctions, outside of gnostic/agnostic, aren't about certainty, but rather descriptors about atheism.  Ignostic: the question of god is meaningless because there's no cogent definition of a god.  Apatheist: the existence or non-existence of a god is ultimately irrelevant.  There are, of course, other descriptors.

Third, gnosticism/agnosticism has always been a descriptor of certainty.  It's literally "I know/I don't know."  And while that certainty doesn't necessarily have a 1:1 ratio with belief (there are agnostic theists, too... people who don't know if a god actually exists, but still believe for other reasons (personal comfort, fear of the unknown after death, cultural inertia, etc.)), it does tend to inform it.  There is a meaningful distinction between "I know there's no god" and "I don't know if a god exists."  And, to demand one's answer on the god question without at least considering that part of it is, yes, idiotic.  Especially when there's more than the Abrahamic god to consider.

So, when I say "I consider all earth religions utter BS, but am open to the possibility of something existing that might fulfill the definition of 'god' in a satisfactory manner," my sliding scale of agnosticism isn't trivial or meaningless.  Rather, it's a way to answer the god question as clearly as I can.  Because 'god' is a variable in this question, and not all values for 'god' provide the same answer (nor should they, IMO).