Letters to the Editor
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Oy, Anonymous!
This is a pointless semantic game. We can debate whether a belief that something is not true is really a belief, but I wonder what the purpose is.
I think you're falling into the trap of thinking that just because someone is an atheist, they object to the very existence of religions or religious people. I honestly don't care what private beliefs you ascribe to. I really don't care if you believe you're Napoleon unless you raise an army and try to conquer Europe.
Of course you can't prove definitively that there's no god. But you have to live according to some set of beliefs. If you believe in any of the plethora of gods that are offered by mankind, you are going to live your life a certain way; if you don't believe in god, that is also going to affect how you live your life.
If I'm going to live my life as if god doesn't exist, then to me it's a matter of profound indifference whether you call me an atheist or agnostic or whatever. If there weren't any people who believed in god, there wouldn't even be a word to describe those who don't believe. They would just be called "people."
It's a bit annoying that some people seem to caricature atheists as either 19th century positivists or as merely inverted religious believers. In my experience, atheists don't even think of themselves as atheists most of the time, because they've got better things to think about.