Yazata,
In the academic philosophy of religion, 'atheist' has historically meant one who believes that 'God exists' is F. (That's how I learned it in my university philosophy of religion classes.)
Historically, the academic philosophy of religion has been written largely by theists, not atheists. If theists get to write the dictionaries, should we be surprised if they define "atheism" to suit themselves?
In fact many theists would also accept that it's possible that their religious faith is wrong.
The devil is in the detail. While there may be "many", in terms of raw numbers, I'm not sure sure there'd be "many" in terms of overall proportion of theists.
In my experience, if you ask your average theist (whatever that is) how confident he or she is that his/her god is real, most of them initially report "100%".
That's one of several reasons why I think that we should interpret 'faith' as commitment.
I don't like the word "faith", for reasons I have previously explained. The word tends to get used in two very different ways. One way of having "faith" is to have confidence based on past experience of reliability. The other way is to pretend to know stuff you don't actually know. It's very useful in discussions like this one for theists to try to blur the boundaries between those two meanings, and using the same word for both things is such a convenient way to do that.
Even though the atheist and the theist might agree in not being 100% certain whether or not God exists, they commit to different alternatives. The atheist behaves and believes as if God doesn't exist, while the theist behaves and believes as if God does.
Yes. The difference is that it is rational to act as if God doesn't exist, until there is some good evidence that He/She/It does exist. The alternative is to have the second kind of "faith" that I mentioned above.
The first place that I encountered the idea that 'atheist' means one who lacks belief in God (whatever 'belief in God' means) was in the 1990's on the old usenet board alt.atheism. Though more recently, I've discovered that the idea originated with Anthony Flew, a well known and highly respected philosopher and controversialist.
On alt.atheism the motivation for arguing this way was largely to argue that atheists have no burden of proof. They were essentially claiming a 'get-out-of-thinking-free' card merely because they were atheists.
My own view is that anyone who hope to convince somebody else of something always has the burden of being persuasive. That applies to atheists as much as to theists.
Rather than trying to lump all atheists into a single basket (because we're a diverse lot), I will speak for myself. I have never set out to persuade anybody that (their) god doesn't exist. I have often set out to prompt them to question whether the reasons they believe their god exists are sufficient to justify that belief. Again, speaking only from my own experience, a lot of theists typically don't spend a lot of time - or any time - wondering if their god is real. In most cases, they believe in the god(s) their parents believed in - the god(s) they were taught about as children. They assume that since people they trusted said it was real, it must be real. Some theists also add personal feelings into the mix. They feel in their guts that their god(s) is/are real - possibly misattributing certain experiences to the god(s) - and that helps to bolster their belief.
I found the idea that atheism is merely lack of belief disingenuous, particularly given that they were ready to ridicule and insult religion and religious people at a drop of a hat. So atheism in their minds was obviously a lot broader than merely lacking belief. There was the idea that religious belief lacks satisfactory justification, along with the idea that religious belief was bad somehow and should ideally be eliminated from human life. (One could perhaps define 'atheist' that way, as one who believes that religion is bad in some moral sense. There's almost always a negative value judgment.)
Again, speaking only for myself, I think that the "badness" of religion depends on many factors. Some religions are worse than others, in promoting immoral behaviours in their followers, for instance. But even for a single religion, the "badness" can vary among individual believers. Individuals tend to vary widely in how seriously they take their religions. Some are fundamentalists who try to take all the teachings of the religion (or the words of the holy book(s)) literally; others cherry pick and let their own morality guide them (which can also be good or bad, depending on the individual).
In judging "badness", I tend to focus on harm caused as a result of actual behaviours related to the beliefs.
One could imagine a hypothetical religion that promotes some deity who is only interested in peace and harmony, meditation and kindness towards all living creatures. One could similarly imagine a hypothetical religion that actively promotes the murder of all "infidels" (those who don't believe in or follow the religion), the subjugation of women, the persecution of homosexuals, etc. I'd say it would be fair to say that the second religion was "worse" than the first, in that it would, in all likelihood, cause more harm and suffering than the former. It could well be that the second religion should be "eliminated from human life", if for no other reason than to protect the victims of its devout followers.
It led to their claim that atheism is the default condition of humanity since babies are presumably born without religious ideas.
I'm fairly sure it is a fact that babies don't believe in god(s) until after they are taught about them. If you prefer to define atheism and theism as beliefs held consciously, though, I don't have a big problem with that.
And that in turn led to the idea that religious ideas are some kind of mental contagion that should be eliminated from intellectual life in the name of mental hygiene. (I think that Dawkins has argued like that with his "memes".)
One can certainly ask the question as to whether the world might be a better (safer, happier?) place without religion.
Dawkins' invention of the idea of a meme made no value judgments. The original idea was that a meme is a kind of replicator - an idea that propagates from mind to mind, with some idea of "survival of the fittest", analogous to biological natural selection. Dawkins suggested a successful meme might be something like a catchy tune, or a good joke. He also suggested that religions might be memes. He certainly did not, at that time, advocate for the "elimination" of any memes - religions included.
My objection (one of them) is that this definition would make rocks atheists as well, since rocks seemingly lack belief in anything.
As I said, I'm very happy to accept that atheism and theism are beliefs held by minds. Since rocks don't have minds, I accept that they don't have believes either, so theistic rocks and atheistic rocks don't exist.
In order to be a theist or an atheist one would seem to me to have to be a suitable cognitive agent and to have adopted some kind of position (however uncertain and faith-based it might be).
We're in agreement, then.
An importantly in my own case, I didn't like the way that defining 'atheist' as one who lacks belief in the existence of God threatened to collapse the distinction between atheist and agnostic, a distinction that I (an agnostic) thought important to maintain.
I've already commented on that. For me, it doesn't collapse the distinction at all.
