Is atheism a belief?

[bennyboy]

The problem with these ideas is that they are plausible enough philosophically, but there's really no way to gain the knowledge required to sensibly form an actual belief around them.  One might believe on a hunch, but there's nothing more to go on.

Right, I'm of the opinion that if we don't know, we should just say we don't know.

With this, I agree.  And that is precisely why I declare as agnostic, and do not choose to identify by the term "agnostic atheist."

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I agree with what you're saying, but that some gods are more unlikely than others doesn't mean the possibly more likely ones get any sort of pass. Like you said, I still put the probability of most of the gods at zero or at very close to zero. There's simply NO reason to think that such a thing exist.

I can think of at least one reason to to think a non-religious God might exist, though it is logical in nature, and not much provable by material evidence.

I'd say, for example, that like begets like. Material processes, it seems to me, are like to beget material processes only. Since there is mind now, it is possible or likely that there has always been mind as part of the material system we call the Universe, though maybe not that we'd recognize as such. A universe which is completely devoid of mind, and then some organic molecules evolve on a tiny blue planet and poof! there's sentience-- this universe seems very strange and unlikely to me. In fact, the idea is so hopelessly anthropocentric that it seems to me it must be rooted in religious dogma.

If, right from the start, whatever allowed for the existence of material systems which were sentient, already included sentience, then I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to call the genitive philosophical property or entity "God." Maybe we shouldn't call it that-- since we wouldn't want a material panpsychism to serve as a point of reference for religious fucktards-- but it certainly seems like a reasonable possibility philosophically to me that at the Big Bang, there was the seed for both material and mind (or, if you prefer, the property of material which we call "mind").