what is atheism

[Brian37]

A few years ago I came to the conclusion I was an atheist, but was recently convinced I was actually agnostic.

My question for everyone is: what is atheism? Atheism is by definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is simply the disbelief in the existence of deity(s), or, the doctrine that there is no deity.

By this second definition, it states that atheists know there is no higher power. However, no one can actually ever know if there is or isn't. Since no one can ever know if there is or isn't a higher power, wouldn't it be more appropriate to say one is agnostic?

On that note, I would like to launch into a much deeper issue of morality which I have come to face. First of all, I'd like to clarify that without religion, people can make moral choices. With this in mind, I’d like to launch into the idea of logic. Whether you are atheist or religious, you are presented with two basic options: God exists, or God does not exist.
Now in order to have a proper base for a logical argument, assumptions must be made. For the first case, our initial assumption is that God exists. With this assumption, the benefits of doing so would be any of the world’s religions; where with proper understanding can generally benefit the individual by creating in infrastructure for future decision making. With the second assumption, we find ourselves in the lap of atheism or agnosticism. At this point, we find…nothing. Atheism and agnosticism offer no help in proper decision making in the future. This leaves it to the individual to be able to discern right from wrong, good from bad, and what to do and what not to. Why even believe disbelieve in God when the benefits of believing in him seem to outweigh the benefits of disbelieving in him, given that either case is equally probable?

Actually there is no such thing as an "agnostic", that word can only qualify the on or off position, it is not a position itself.

You can lean to a god existing but not know=agnostic theist
Or you can not have any belief in any god, but not know=agnostic atheist

I myself am an outright atheist about past and current claims. I am only semantically speaking an "agnostic atheist" regarding the future because none of us know the future(but still highly unlikely and currently I do not hold a belief in any god)

[Whateverist]

Now, probabilities...
Some people have managed to account for all the gods that humanity has followed. They came up with something like 2800 different gods. You can add to these any gods you may come up with, but you'll know there's no believers for those, so just forget about it
How do you know which of those 2800 is the real one? if any!
What are the odds that a given deity you end up following, turns out to be false, man-made, imagined...? 1/2800.
What are the odds that the absence of gods ends up being real?... 1/2?
Equally probable?

Alternatively, if you truly believe that the probability of any god's existence is 50%, then there are probably 1400 known gods that exist. I always want to ask a pure agnostic whether any god I deliberately make up in my imagination would receive the same probability analysis as the traditional ones. And then what is the possibility that there are gods who have not bothered to enlist human followers? Or what about the super heroes of comic books? At some point the idea that everything whose existence is uncertain has a 50/50 chance of being real begins to appear absurd. Agnosticism does not require assigning a 50% likelihood to everything unknown.

For things lacking any physical evidence such as gods, which are often described as other worldly or ineffable, it is impossible to assign any measure of certainty one way or the other. There is simply no basis to do so. As genkaus already said, where no evidence is available, beliefs abound but can never be what we would describe as knowledge.

Of course no religious person comes to belief in their god through a fair analysis of the relative likelihood of all the known variants. They each come to understand themselves and the world around them as revolving around the deity known to their community. Any theist who wishes to redeem their reason, should concede that their faith is not based on reason. It is instead a belief regarding what cannot be proven which they accept uncritically and embrace gladly since they like their life better that way. Then they may take their place beside other right thinking human beings with their heads held high. They are no more absurd for holding their defacto belief that their god cares about them than I am for believing godlessness is the way of the world. So long as we can each agree on what there is good reason to acknowledge as being known, true, valid and well supported, we are both rational.