Those are all unnecessary platonic ideas. The word "atheism" is incoherent. I agree with Frank on this point, "People who claim the word 'atheism' morph its meaning depending on the circumstance." Atheism is the denial of the deity claim and we're all born "atheists" and then when it's shown that babies don't deny deity claims the claimed adherent then claims, "I'm not making claims, it's a proven scientific fact that babies lack belief of gods." What the hell happened to the part about denying deity claims? — Daniel Cox
Your own definition of atheism is still in line with what I described. The concept of a God or Gods does not exist for a baby, but is learned. If the baby had the tools of critical thinking and not just accepting the ideas put forth by parents and the environment around them, they would question the validity of the claims they learn. This means that pure logical and rational reasoning, which babies lack, is a standard ideal within atheism. Compare that to agnosticism which accept the belief that a God or Gods might exist, only that we don't know. Atheism does not even accept the belief in the first place, it's a tabula rasa of concepts about existence, it focuses on what
is, not what
might be or what is
believed.
The core of what I'm saying is that if you are to define atheism you need to specifically draw the line between the different fields; theism, agnosticism, and atheism. If theism is belief without actual proof and agnosticism is a belief that you cannot know either (which accepts a belief in each direction), then atheism cannot be about a belief in anything, it is the lack of belief altogether. That would essentially boil down to atheism relying on what
is, not what is believed, i.e the definition I previously gave.
The thing I can see is that the concept and methodology of thinking without belief is so alien to theists and agnostics that it's hard to actually explain this kind of perspective. Essentially, it seems that to be able to truly explain atheism, you need to be an atheist. Hopefully, I'm wrong about that, but I find it common that atheism is a hard perspective for many to grasp. It's like the difference between asking someone to imagine something specific and to ask someone to imagine nothing. To imagine
something is easy, to imagine
nothing is a concept hard even through philosophy. To grasp theism is easier than to grasp the absence of belief in god and the ascent of god.
So how do I view things as an atheist? I reject belief of any kind that doesn't have support. Belief in my eyes is only valid as a hypothesis, which means it has rational support as educated guesses. If I believe something, I do it because of having some data in support of it. If I encounter something in which I don't know anything, I cannot have a belief in anything about it, since any unsupported belief becomes a concept of fantasy for me. I know where the line is between fantasy and conviction. This means that if we look at Russel's teapot, I cannot accept the concept of a teapot in space to be anything other than a fantasy. I don't even believe there to be
no teapot in space, because a belief of non-existence is a belief accepting the possibility of the opposite. There is no belief, i.e there is nothing before data of a possibility of it being there. If someone recorded a blurry image of something resembling a teapot in space and interpretations of historical data suggest that it might be a teapot because we have records of historical events that might show a teapot have been ejected into space at some point in history. No one can know for certain, but the hypothesis is sound. In that case, the hypothesis about a teapot in space can exist as a concept for an atheist but never accepted as truth before proven beyond doubt. This is why I used a form of extension of Russel's teapot for this reasoning in order to exemplify the difference between the three positions. This is why I can't define atheism within
any concept o belief. Belief is non-existent in any form within atheism.