Is atheism a belief?

[Angrboda]

If a statement begins with "I don't believe..." then I doubt it could be called a belief system.

But it has evolved into a major belief system.  As a whole, it's not just one thing, but rather many things.  Churches, hymns, offerings, books, T-shirts, church offerings, religious protections, etc...  If something is just an idea, it doesn't need all those things to stay afloat.  If I say I don't believe in elves, that's all I would need to say.  I wouldn't need to make a church for it to try and offer a counter belief.  No need for anti-elf hymns and bake sales.  If you don't believe in something, just don't believe.  I don't believe in Bigfoot, but not chasing Bigfoot enthusiast around telling them they're wrong.  That's one of the things I don't quite get about modern atheism.  They say they don't believe in any God or gods, but they go out of their way to practice the same way that theists do.  Sure, they still don't believe in any god, but they incorporate the things that are associated with theism into their collective.

Some atheist and humanists have found that religion employs certain tools and methods that are good and beneficial and would like to find a way to add those things to their lives without taking on the religious baggage that comes with them. It's kind of a form of syncretism, and is a synthesis of ideas that attempt to separate the human from the religious, and use the good bits of that. But adapting things that are simply human isn't adopting religion, just as if I like to burn incense because I like the smell and find it soothing doesn't mean that my doing so is religious. You're both attempting to claim certain behaviors as necessarily religious, even when engaged in for non-religious reasons, when convenient, yet simultaneously trying to distance yourself from them by claiming that religion is NOT necessarily these behaviors, such as Huggy's dance step around the dictionary in trying to equate praise, worship, and celebration, so as to include non-religious behaviors in his definition of religion, for reasons that are transparently obvious. In short, theists are talking out of both sides of their mouth in making this argument, and once that aspect is clarified, the argument collapses. You have to go one of two ways. Either identifying everything that religious humans do as part of their being religious, and therefore anybody else who is also human and engages in those behaviors is religious, which is a form of equivocation, and so fails, or, you restrict the identity to behaviors identified through paradigm cases such as Ninian Smart has done through his seven dimensions of religion, and then the argument fails because atheists and atheism aren't particularly religious on such measures. Both ways lead to failure of the overall argument.