Enzo wrote:Atheists proclaim THERE IS NO GOD. They proselytize their non-belief.
That is a misconception.
The terms atheist and agnostic are answers to different
questions.
Atheist means "without god", i.e. a person who would answer the question "Do you
believe in any gods?" with "No."
Agnostic means "without knowledge", i.e. person who won't answer the question "Do you believe it is possible to
know if any gods exist?" with "Yes."
Seems you're an agnostic atheist, just like me.
Most atheists are, and they usually don't make a fuss about it. (At least in countries that are actually secular.)
Hard atheism, or gnostic atheism ("There are no gods!"), makes only sense in regard to
specific proposed gods, a god with well defined attributes.
Frex the attribute of omnipotence, which leads to paradox ("Can god create a stone to heavy for her to lift?"), and can be dismissed as logically impossible.
When someone says "I don't believe in God." they usually mean the proposed god that is dominant in their culture. The one they might actually have put some thought into. In the West that would be a Triple-O god, omnipotent, omniscient,
and omnibenevolent all at the same time.
The question "Do you believe in the Mighty Thor, God of Thunder" simply never came up.
Since there are an infinite number of imaginable and unimaginable god proposals, and most of them are to ill-defined to even reason about ("God is love!", what does that even mean?), trying to dismiss all of them is a hopeless exercise.
Which is of course
why the burden of prove, as always, lies with the claimant.
Not believing in wild claims for which there isn't any evidence worth mentioning is the only rational position.
Luckily there are religious people rational and honest enough to admit that their believe is not rational, they'd be agnostic theists, they believe something they are well aware they can't prove.
Anyhoo, most people who aren't Hindu disbelieve in
almost every god ever imagined. For some reason they can't take that final logical step and apply the same reasoning they used to dismiss all those gods to the last one left.