Is atheism a belief?

[Belacqua]

The things that people know and the things that people believe are likely..at least by them, both thought to be held for good reason.  It's not really unique to people here to separate belief and knowledge, that's been an active topic for about as long as human beings have been writing about the subject.   The jtb description of knowledge adds true precisely because a belief can be justified without being true, which is why people have proposed additional qualifiers.  Some of those qualifiers attempt to explain how it is that something can be said to be proven...whether it's through methodological construction, reliability, both, additional criteria, or other un-described criteria.  

I believe that I'm going to meet my goals, I know my name.  

There's something to be said for knowledge as a conceit, something we have, for this or that reason™, undue confidence in (because we want it to be true, for example) but if that's a uniform rule when it comes to knowledge and applies to all knowledge then it also applies to the knowledge of our own names.  I don't actually know my name, I only believe that it's my name because I really really really want it to be my name, for example.  Maybe that's true..but, on the face of it, it seems as though it's profoundly off-base and I still can't help but separate the two items.  

This is quite a good summary. You might consider holding on to this and re-posting it when those intemperate and emotional anti-theists make claims about belief that aren't so careful.
I try to explain all this to them, but they are more likely to listen to you.