Is atheism a belief?

[bennyboy]

Regardless of how many definitions you throw out or how you try to argue the semantics, atheism = an absence of a belief in deities. That definition stands. Where any individual atheist chooses to go from there is up to them, but atheism is an absence of belief. If someone chooses to identify as as a gnostic atheist, that's up to them. If they choose to identify as a gnostic theist, that's also up to them.

That's kind of like saying "A dog is a brown mammal with four legs that says arf arf." Yes, some dogs are brown. But the overall definition of dogs is greater than that-- and, in fact, some do not meet that definition.

Then you are either an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist.

Nope. Neither of those terms describes me, as I do not default to an atheist position, and I'm not espousing a view on the existence of God. I default to a position of not knowing, and I would never apply an "-ism" to myself that doesn't represent a systematic belief. You don't declare as an a-unicornist, do you? I'd hope that you'd wait until someone describes a belief in unicorns, and then say: "No. . . I don't believe such a thing exists."