[Serious] Atheist Dogma

[Belacqua]

You are saying that something needs to have a thorough grasp of the god concept before it can weigh it up and either reject or accept it.

No, I have never said that, and do not think it.

Very few people have a "thorough grasp" of the subject. Yet most people have formed an opinion about it anyway.

if they haven't heard the concept they don't believe by default so atheist. 

That's right. Babies, people raised by wolves who have never had contact with human civilization, etc., are trivially atheist.

Of course there are some of us who have been exposed to the concept and reject it.  find it childish myself. 

That's an example of what I've been talking about. Except I don't think "some of us" is really the best way to say it. Every human raised in civilization who is capable of conceptual thought has heard about some religious concept or other. 

The fact that you have judged it to be "childish" indicates that you have applied standards of judgment and made a judgment. "Childish" is a specific adjective describing your impression and judgment. 

So if you take atheism as the default then anything that doesn't have a positive belief is atheist.

But I don't take atheism as the default. Not for thinking humans raised in a civilization. For them, some religion-like beliefs have been the most common position. Trivial atheism is the default for babies, but not for adults who have given any thought to how the world works.

Nor is it meaningful to say that atheism is the default for bicycles, lizards, and the vast empty light years of space, for reasons I wrote above. 

In thinking adults, atheism is the mental state of declining to affirm the religious claims that one has heard. Since nearly every human in recorded history has been raised in a civilization with some religious beliefs, having heard them and formed some opinion about them is the default.