[jammies]

Atheism is not based on faith. To assert that a god or gods exist is not a conclusion but a premise; accepting that premise does require faith but this does not mean that dismissing this premise is also an act of faith, as the onus of proof is on the person asserting a premise, not the ones rejecting it.

The idea that atheism is a faith is entirely due to the inability of the religious to step into a frame where belief is completely discounted as a tool with which to understand the world; to them it is much like someone claiming they don't see any shades of blue, and thus is impossible to credit because they can clearly see there is blue everywhere. Therefore the tendency is to try to fit atheism as a different kind of faith to make it comprehensible, but it is NOT. It is a denial of faith, and labeling a denial the same thing as what is denied is not logic, it is a deliberate twisting of semantics.

Atheism is fundamentally incomprehensible to the faithful because it views the world from entirely outside the frame of belief - for a religious person to understand atheism, he/she has to become an atheist. It is also very difficult for an atheist to understand the faithful, even for those who have lost their faith: you can no more truly remember what it is like to believe than you can remember what it is like to be a child; everything is seen thru the lens of Now.

This is why it is so frustrating for an atheist to argue matters of religion with the faithful; there is no shared vocabulary which can overcome the differences in world-view between the two camps: each finds the other obtuse and irrational. It is why discussions like this are of little benefit between the ostensible opponents involved - what people are really fighting for is the minds of the undecided.