I think Sam Harris explained the issue with the word "atheism" best - we don't for example, have a word that says "NOT a believer in Zeus", or "NOT a worshipper of Horus and the pantheon of ancient Egypt"... these things, generally, are just assumed to be the default, and we can imagine a more enlightened future for humanity where we don't need words like atheism., or at least, the word has a lot less weight than it has today.
All that said, I think it probably is a belief, I had to just double-check the definition of belief because this made me think but essentially anything that we think about reality can be considered to be a belief.
I believe that Santa and the Tooth Fairy probably do not exist. I am an asantaist, and an atoothfairyist.
On that note, I would say that gods in the generally accepted definition are far removed enough from everyday reality that saying one categorically does not believe they exist - or rather,
believes they do not exist - is equivalent to saying one does not believe in parallel universes or other dimensions, none of us really know but we would be able to go to the North pole or set up hidden cameras or something to verify the existence of those other 2 likely fictional characters.
Maybe atheism still makes sense to say as a refutation of the more rigidly defined anthropomorphic deities of organised religion which are basically analogous to Zeus and the other deities of ancient paganism, as opposed to a more holistic, or just more vague definition... maybe I'm getting bogged down in semantics.
Thinking about it I guess that "
not believing something exists" is not entirely equivalent to "
believing something does not exist", which presumably is the distinction you're getting at,
@mal3volent.
