Is atheism a belief?

[The Grand Nudger]

Atheism = without belief in god

Asexuality = without sexual attraction to others

Amorality = without morality

What's the issue? There is no issue. The disingenuous attempt to push atheism as "a belief" is simply a sad attempt by theists to paint atheism as requiring just as much faith as theism.

A + theism = without theism. Without a belief in a god or gods. It's truly simple.

I cannot force myself to believe in god as I cannot force myself to believe that 2 + 2 = 5. You can scream and shout that I have a "belief" that 2 + 2 = 4, but unfortunately for you your efforts would be in vain. I don't "believe" that 2 + 2 = 4, I simply accept it as the fact of what my senses and logic are telling me.

The semantics are a little off, there, as only one of those is an -ism.

There are two ways of deriving atheism:
1)  atheos (no god) + ism (a belief) = A position that there is no god.
2)  a (not) + theism (belief that god exists)  = A lack of a position that there is a god.

The former is sometimes called hard atheism, and the latter soft atheism.  The other words don't really break down as ambiguously as that, precisely because they are not -isms.

It's clear that hard atheism represents a belief.  But what about soft atheism?  If you are just saying, "Hey, dude, I don't subscribe to theistic thought," then is this a lack of belief?

It seems to me that normally, an "-ism" suffix is generally applied last.  For example, "polytheism" isn't a collection of theistic traditions (poly + theism).  It's an ism formed on the idea of multiple gods, (polytheos + ism).  "Pantheism" isn't saying that theistic traditions are everywhere (pan + theism); it's a formation of an everywhere-god (pantheos) with the systematizing noun former, "-ism" added to it.  Linguistically, then, I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect that someone who declares as atheist holds to the position that God does not exist-- and, in fact, I'm pretty sure that this is how the term was originally intended.

Add to this my former complaint, that one normally doesn't look for things one lacks a belief in to identify with (I'm an a-unicornist, a-spaghetti-monsterist, a-magic-space-monkey-ist, and a million other not isms), then I think the expectation that there's some kind of belief, either explicit or implicit, in this particular -ism is a fair one.

I suspect that modern atheists like the ones in these forums often use the term to mean "not a theist," without much consideration for the actual God idea at all.  But in that case, rather than identifying as atheists, I think it would be clearer if they identified as non-theists.

non theists -are- atheists, lol. "non" is the modern english prefix analog for "a" ;

non-Dictionary result for non-
/nän/Submit
prefix
1.
expressing negation or absence.
"nonaggression"
2.
(added to adverbs) not in the way described.

Would you feel better if I said that you, like many other agnostic non-theists, find reason to clarify for others that you're not expressing a positive belief?