Overview of Atheism
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is the absence of belief in any Gods.
Atheists are people who do not believe in God or other spiritual beings.
Some atheists go further and deny that God, or other spiritual beings, exist.
Agnostics
Agnostics, in the popular sense, are people who have doubts about the existence of God. They don’t believe that God exists, but they don’t believe that God doesn’t exist, either.
There are probably over a billion people who don’t believe in God, but don’t go as far saying that they are certain that God doesn’t exist.
The strict meaning of Agnostic is not the same as this popular meaning.
An agnostic in the original sense of the word is a person who thinks that we can’t ever know about anything other than the material world, and therefore that the question as to whether God exists or not is one that can never be answered.
Reasons for Non-Belief
People are non-believers for many reasons, among them:
Atheism is their chosen philosophy.
They find insufficient evidence to support any religion.
They think that religion is nonsensical.
They once had a religion and have lost faith in it.
They live in a non-religious culture.
Religion doesn’t interest them.
Religion doesn’t seem relevant to their lives.
Religions seem to have done a lot of harm in the world.
The world is such a bad place that there can’t be a God.
Atheism as Opposition to Religion
It’s perfectly possible to be both religious and an atheist. Virtually all Buddhists manage it, as do many members of other faiths.
But many atheists are also secularists, and are hostile to any special treatment given to organised religion.
Terminology
Atheists are people who don’t believe that God or supernatural beings exist.
Atheists don’t use God to explain the existence of the universe
Atheists say that human beings can devise suitable moral codes to live by without the aid of Gods or scriptures
Atheism is not a religion, nor a specific philosophical system. However, some religions are substantially atheist in nature. Atheist philosophical systems are at least as intellectually adequate as religious belief systems. There are many atheist philosophical systems, but the only thing they have in common is non-belief in God(s).
Weak atheists do not believe that God exists. They support their views by stating that:
there is no evidence for the existence of any god or gods
or
the evidence is not good enough
Strong atheists go further. They believe that God does not exist. They either argue that
There are good arguments that prove that there is no God (or gods)
or
The whole topic is meaningless
The word Atheism comes from a, meaning without, and theism meaning belief in god or gods.
Atheists and Morality
Atheists are as moral (or immoral) as religious people.
In practical terms atheists often follow the same moral code as religious people, but they arrive at the decision of what is good or bad without any help from the idea of God.