Keven Dillon provides us with a good example of this attitude:
Seeing as we have seemed to designate the American Heritage Dictionary as the official semantics referee, I found my definitions for the two words there. Atheism is defined as "Disbelief or denial in the existence of God or gods; the doctrine that there is no God or gods." The belief in the nonexistence of something is still an active belief, as much so as the belief in something.
Both make claims about how reality functions; the onus of proof lies on both parties to prove their respective cases. It is this doctrine of the nonexistence of God that unifies atheists, a doctrine that I think is a bit too big to fit in the category of "just about nothing." ...Acknowledging that it is impossible to know either way, agnosticism abstains from taking a stance on the spirituality argument, something altogether different from atheism's assertion of the nonexistence of God
Source: The Tufts Daily
Notice how Kevin Dillon makes an effort to quote a dictionary and then promptly ignores it? This gives the impression that he's trying to be fair but allows him to dispense with anything remotely approaching reasonableness and fairness in the pursuit of his faith. The first word in the definition of atheism is disbelief, but you won't find it in Dillon's analysis; instead, he replaces it with "belief."
Had he done his readers the service of defining disbelief as well, he'd have informed them that disbelief has a purely passive sense, which is simply not believing something, and an active sense, which is to refuse to believe something. Both fall quite short of denying a claim and neither the passive nor the active senses of disbelief do what Keven Dillon says atheism does: make "claims about how reality functions." If that were admitted, though, Dillon would no longer be able to pretend that his predetermined conclusion has validity.
And what is his predetermined conclusion? It might be an effort to prop up agnosticism as if it were a third and "more reasonable" way between atheism and theism. I have nothing against agnosticism, being agnostic myself, but I do strongly dislike how smug, self-righteous agnostics go to great lengths to misrepresent agnosticism, atheism, theism, and even religion in order to make themselves out to be the most superior group of the lot. Even worse are religious theists who do much the same in order to denigrate atheism while pretending that their own theism is somehow immune from the invalid arguments they are making.
To undertake such a thorough analysis of thought would bring you to the conclusion that at a fundamental level, reasoning dissolves and one must accept faith before going forward. ...It is by this same token of faith that I have fostered my belief in God. If one wishes to stay strictly "rational," only accepting what can be proven under our mode of logic and not using faith in the least, then reasoning will quickly come crashing down, as it is in part based on the fundamental assumption that human reasoning is sound, an assumption that cannot be proven.
It's popular among religious theists to pretend that everything is based on "faith" because they think that helps them excuse their own faith from any sort of rational critique. A major error they make is in treating many different senses of "faith" as if they were the same — a logical fallacy known as equivocation, but it's not clear that such theists have enough respect for logic to care about fallacies.
Another error made in such arguments is the fact that the premise that some ideas are accepted axiomatically does not entail the conclusion that we therefore cannot subject them to critical, rational scrutiny. Resolving disagreement over basic, axiomatic principles may be difficult, but that's no basis for thinking that all are equal — equally good, equally bad, or equally acceptable. The reliability of human reason can certainly be subjected to test and scrutiny, as can the reliability of religious faith and belief in god. Guess which will come out on top?
>If one wishes to stay strictly “rational,” only accepting what can be proven under our mode of logic and not using faith in the least, then reasoning will quickly come crashing down, as it is in part based on the fundamental assumption that human reasoning is sound, an assumption that cannot be proven.
Proving something is logically possible is not hard. But what is logically possible has no impact on what actually exists. It’s logically possible for aliens to live in other parts of the universe. Does this offer any evidence or “proof” at all that they actually do? No.
Santa is logically possible. Since he can do magic, any issues with his seeming nonexistence or the nonexistence of his workshop at the North Pole, might be simply his use of magic to trick us. Does Santa exist? I hope nobody at this forum would reply “yes” in terms of material reality.
So, the question is not whether or not a thing is logically possible or can be logically proven. It’s whether or not it’s actually likely to be real or true.
And without using reason, I’m curious how any person comes to a conclusion about anything. How did they get there? Even incorrect conclusions are generally the result of some sort of (generally bad) reasoning. Some are the result of very good reasoning, but bad or incomplete “facts” or information.
But if we actually care whether or not what we believe is likely to be true, we have to examine our beliefs in a skeptical mode. If we don’t–then what we’re actually saying is that we don’t think that beliefs which are likely to be true are any more valued than beliefs which are not likely to be true.
And while a person can hold to this opinion, I certainly don’t respect such an opinion. And that probably doesn’t matter to the person who doesn’t care about the validity of their own views. But so be it. I still don’t respect it.
Unless there is evidence, there is no reason to believe any claim, including the claim of “God.” This is the foundation of atheism: not a belief in non-existence. As an atheist, I do have problems with people who declare that there is no God, because it is a positive claim, thereby requiring evidence. This is, in a way, a kind of hijacking of atheism. A_theism is to be without belief because there is no evidence in support of the claims of theism. To believe in no God, in my opinion, is another category altogether, and only complicates the notions of atheism.
We must remain open to all ideas, but belief in anything requires some sort of objective reinforcement. Anyone who argues against this is dogmatic, and ignorant of their own ignorance.