Atheism is a religion too, right?

I created this blog because I wanted to add my voice to a choire I am fond of. It sings songs like "Enough With This Exaggerated Politeness Towards Religious Beliefs", a funky groove I find, and "Believe What You Will, Just Don't Force It Upon Me Or Defenseless Children", among other tunes.

Like a lot of people still do, I used to describe myself as an agnostic. This seemed to me a perfectly appropriate description, in fact the one that most faithfully (pun intended) captured my position. One cannot prove the non-existence of god - my thinking on these matters was not sophisticated enough to make that "the existence of a god" - and I guess I thought the word atheist implied the assertion that there is no god.

My view on this has changed quite a bit. One thing is that the word itself, a-theist, follows the same pattern as words such as asexual ("without sex", for example asexual reproduction), or amoral.

But what really convinced me was the tooth fairy. Did I ever describe myself as agnostic about that? No, and not did anyone else. And yet I had no more reason to be any more confident about this than the god thing. I ought to be agnostic.

The same of course applies to the innumerable things you or someone else can imagine but not disprove. We could run around saying we're agnostic about them, but in practice we'd all be non-believing tooth-fairy atheists all along...