[Skybird]

There are people who do not know whether or not gods exist - but they simply refuse to care for the question. they are not interested. Most oftehn this is what is meant with "atheism".

Then there are people who do not only refuse to believe in gods, no matter whether they exist or not, but who are sure they do not exist indeed. This is "anti-theism".

Both atheism and anti-theism usually do not get properly separated in language use, resulting in confusion and misunderstandings quite often.

Some people say that the truth of religious or areligious claims cannot be known for sure. they make a strict distinction between belief and knoweldge. Usually this is referred to as agnosticism. But as far as this leads these people to not care for these questions alltogether, they belong to the first group of Atheists.

And some people simply have not formed an opinion. This also sometimes is called agnosticism, but that simply is misleading. In the meaning of that they do not care enough to form an opinion, they are desinterested, and by that qualify for the description of atheists.

these are the major categories to which the terms atheist, anti-theist and agnostic refer, but sometimes the borderline especially between atheism and anti-theism is blurred, or terms get reversed. For example often the term atheism is used in the meaning of "being sure that no gods exist".

However. Saying that atheism is a belief is like saying that a statement like "There are no pink elephants on the backside of Neptune is a belief, too. What we know is that there is not the smallest reason whatever to assume that there are pink elephants on the dark side of Neptune. To claim this scepticism already is a belief, would give the term "belief" such an inflationary diversity of possible contexts and meanings, that the term by that is rendered meaningless, since it could mean all and everything, then.

Atheism/Anti-theism is no belief, like science is no belief either. The demand that the non-existence of God must be proven in order to falsify the claim of atheism being a belief, is a reversing of the burden of evidence.

It is theist believers claiming that there are things and beings existing whom nobody ever has seen, ever has checked, ever has gained the smallest real evidence for, so since it is believers adding something unproven and unseen to life and all the world beyond man'S mind never has heared of and never has cared for, the burden of evidence is with them - they must prove that their claim of gods existing is correct, not us sceptics must prove that their claim is wrong. And that scepticism is no attitude of "belief" of ours. Nevertheless claiming that it is, just tries to raise the reputation of theism by minimising the reputation of atheism - by lowering it to religious standards. you can see the same mechanism at work in the climate debate, when GW sceptics try to shake scientific results by labelling the science behind them a "belief" only.

When you claim there are invisible green dragons flying around us all the time, and I deny that, then this denial of mine is no belief. Only your claim of green dragons flying around invisibly - only that is the belief.