When and where did atheism first start ?

[Angrboda]

Dumb question ... probably just semantics.
Can one be an atheist without understanding the "theist" portion?

Are we all a-jgkrtgkje45o6tu954 -ists?

That’s the question, though, isn’t it?
It seems like in order to be an atheist there has to first exist a theist.
But going by definitions alone atheism doesn’t really have anything to do with theism. Looking at the word you would expect the definition to be “A person who is not a theist”, but that’s not it at all. In that case everyone who didn’t prescribe to a specific religion would be an atheist, but actually some people are deists. The only actual qualification for being an atheist is not having a belief in god. I feel like it’s possible to not believe in a god even if no one else has ever believed in a god.

I think there's a legitimate gray area involving the difference between not believing and disbelieving that is largely a product of the different ways we think about what belief and such behaviors is. Such things aren't a science, and most such notions are based upon "folk psychology" which is nothing more than a common, uneducated intuitive attempt to give a mechanistic account of how thoughts arise and interact with things like desires and fears. It's little more than an evolved just-so story. We don't have any real notion of what belief literally is as a fact of the complex physical system we call the brain, or how it works, so that gray area exists largely because of the inconsistencies between various accounts of the nature of belief and mental causation, all or most of which is underwritten by accounts of "the physics of thought" that are largely derived ex culo.

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I don't think Belaquaa has well identified the underlying argument behind his complaint. He seems to be suggesting that a normative judgement about belief is unwarranted solely on the fact that it is something learned just as other learned things do not receive similar treatment. There is a tendency to be fooled into thinking that because something is in some sense natural that it is therefore good, right, or appropriate and that further justification of making it a norm is unnecessary. I'm too lazy to go back and read what he was responding to, so off the top of my head, I don't recollect how that would fit into the previous discussion. Failing an obvious connection, which I may simply be missing, this seems something of a red herring as I'm not sure the point the original author he was replying to was arguing that a normative judgement about belief should be made simply because it was learned. If not, well then Bel may have a valid point.