Most mail software doesn't try to be something better than Outlook, it just tries to be compatable on a different platform or with less cost.
But that, in itself *is* something better. If a software package makes it so that I can run an OS I can be productive with, instead of having to run Windows to talk to the rest of the company, then that's a benefit.
THe more likely explanation is that they aren't using a well-defined term. If they meant a server in the technical sense, then they can't let people run with IRC and instant messaging turned on and ready to recieve. And that's something they clearly want to let people do, so they aren't using the actual technical definition of a server. That of course immediately raises the question of what the hell DO they mean - and the answer is "Whatever they retroactively feel like saying is a service".
It's the same standard stuff - ban everything by default, then selectively enforce it.
- There are a multitude of documented cases of swimmers dying because they got too much dihydrogen monoxide in their lungs.
- It is the primary component of acid rain.
- Factories spew it out into the environment, in both vaporous and liquid form, with wild abandon, and it's not even regulated.
- Dihydrogen monoxide contributes to the erosion of topsoil from our nation's precious farmland.
- It has been found contaminating nearly every riverbed and lake basin in the Continental United States.
- In cold weather, it drasticly reduces the effectiveness of a vehicle's brakes, and has thus been a contributing factor in thousands of traffic accidents.
- When dihydrogen monoxide sticks to structural surfaces, it often repeatedly crystalizes and decrystalizes, a process that degrades the strength of the structure, sometimes so dangerously that the structure, such as a bridge, completely collapses.
Come, join with me now and ban this terrible deadly chemical.
Fine, then charge by default until such a time as it is discovered to be your own company's fault. As soon as that's discovered, the charge for the call should be waived. To do otherwise is to create an economy of making more money the more bugs your product has.
That makes zero sense. What the heck do you mean by the phrase "seeing the creation from the earth", at a time when there isn't an earth there yet? A person viewing from the earth would see neither the sun nor the earth form first - they'd both already be there at the start before he starts observing.
You seem to be trying to weasel out of something by claiming a definitive source is invalid.
The part immediately following the bit you quoted proves that I'm not. I stated that even if the dictionary is correct it still doesn't support the narrow definition you used. I don't tolerate people who lie about what I said.
Your point is predicated upon the assumption that existing plants will be phased out if no new ones are made. They won't. If you choice is between decomissioning an old plant and replacing it with a new one, versus continuing to use the old one beyond it's safe lifetime, then a ban one making new ones is a bad idea because it forces people into using the old ones instead of decomissioning them. The world in which people just stop using the power and therefore you can close down the plants without replacing them is an imaginary fairy-tale world.
In a lot of cases, though, the change in meaning of a word happens becasue of ignorance - like the change in the meaning of "hacker" - the people who changed the meaning didn't *realize* they were changing the meaning. They thought they were accurately describing something using the original meaning. I do have a problem with that sort of thing, and that's why I don't like the term "organic food". It's just like ignoramouses who claim that something has "no chemicals" in it.
Apparently you think people who care about honesty are "utter boobs".
Oddly, very loosely-associative schizophrenics seem to be able to tickle themselves. This indicates some loss of the idea of "self," since the premise of tickling is that it has to surprise you.
False. I am extremely ticklish and I can be tickled even when I am fully aware ahead of time exactly when and where the tickle will occur (i.e. I'm watching the tickler's fingers). But even so I *still* cannot tickle myself. So it's not a matter of surprise that prevents you from being able to tickle yourself.
Literal, concrete interpretations of speech/writing (typically detected using a proverb test in which the patient is asked to explain a proverb or phrase like "loose lips sink ships")
Careful, this is just as much a test of cultural exposure as it is of mental health. "Loose lips sink ships" is a world war 2 reference that some people might not have much exposure to. Any turn of phrase like that which you care to use is going to have the same sort of problem.
Besides, I despise turns of phrase that are in the exact opposite direction of their literal interpretation, and so I don't use them in their figurative way. An example of this is "Aren't you going to the store?" Logically, an answer of "yes" should mean "I am not going to the store", but the figurative meaning is exactly the inverse of this. This doesn't make me schitzophrenic. It just means I disagree with the way a particular part of the langauge has evolved, and think that it is unnecessarily confusing, and so I've taken a decision not to persoanlly be part of the problem, by choosing not to propigate that usage myself.)
The difference is that the mechanic that's charging you to look at your car isn't the company that made your car. I see a large difference in ethics between these two practices:
1- Charge someone money to diagnose what is faulty with someone ELSE's product.
2- Charge someone money to diagnose what it faulty with your OWN product.
The solution to the oil shortage won't be to keep using oil but use it more conservatively (i.e. stop driving SUVs). The solution will be to use something else entirely instead of oil. This is the direction research should be going in, and FAST. Being a luddite is almost never the right solution to an environmental problem.
It is still stupid to be pro-environment while simultaneously anti-new-refineries. If you can't build a new refinery from scratch, then you can't ever make a refinery that pollutes less. You guarantee that the old technology keeps being used.
(It's kind of like the ban on new nuclear power plants. The older a nuclear plant gets, the more dangerous it becomes. If you won't let people build new ones, NOT EVEN FOR THE PURPOSE OF REPLACING existing ones, then you make the danger WORSE, not better.)
You mistranslated the opinion as written. You've already been shown that even using the dictionary definition, which is predjudiced because it's written by people who are not themselves atheists, even THEN it still doesn't render a definition as narrow as the one you're using.
And it shouldn't be all that threatening to an atheist. It only proves design, not the existence of the Judeo-Christian God.
It's encouraging that you realize that proving a creator exists does not prove Christianity correct (a LOT of people I argue with don't understand that). And yes, such a creator could exist. But there is a wide gulf of difference between "could" and "must". There is room for a creator, but the evidence does not make it a necessity. And the problem is that the moment you pick something specific without really having any evidence to back it up, your chance of being correct becomes infinitessimally close to zero.
And, I do not see evidence that the world must be designed just because it has some order to it. As you say, there are different levels of order. It is not unusual to find rare bits of seeming order in a random string of things. It's only unusual when EVERYTHING is ordered, and that's not the way the universe seems to me. The brain - fairly orderly. The Sun - not the slightest bit orderly.
(And if this is a deliberate design, then God is very, very sloppy since he wasted all that space in the universe just to get us way out here on the fringe to get the right conditions for life. The massive size of the universe destroys the notion of a god that cares about us specially, as far as I'm concerned. If there is a creator, then we're a side effect of whatever it was trying to do, not the main goal. (Either that or the hypothetical creator wasn't as powerful as people make it out to be, and this massive brute-force method was the only way to hope to get the right conditions for life to pop up somewhere - make billions of trials and eventually one of them will work out somewhere.)
You made the assertion that an omnibenevelent/omnipotent God is logically contradictory with the existence of natural evil. My reply was designed to refute that assertion. I'll assume we've laid that point to rest.
No. We haven't, because your reply undercut one of your own premises - the premise that god is omnibenevolent. To defend against my argument that omnibenevolence is incompatable with events in the world, you proposed that such a judgement call about the goodness of events by us mere mortals is impossible. Okay, fair enough, but then you fail to realize that this premise makes it impossible for YOU to call god omnibenevolent in the first place. At best you've just argued that the morality of god is unknowable to us, and thus you should remove "omnibenevolent" from the list of known properties of your god.
The reason a machine looks odd and we imagine it must have a creator is that it is not similar to the other things we see in the natural world. But if you talk of a creator OF the entire universe, there is no external thing to compare against to see if the world we live in has more order than one that was not directed would. The machine looks designed because it's different from natural things. But there isn't anything else to compare the universe itself to to make this same judgement about it. (It's ironic that you claim the natural world is designed when it's the difference between that natural world and designed things that makes us conclude THEY are designed.)
Anyway... it is in this manner that the existence of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God is not contradictory with natural evil. We could only make the claim of contradiction if we had full understanding, which we do not
Congrats - you've just made it impossible to claim anything is good either, since that would require the same level of full understanding. So I assume you'll stop claiming god is good now?
Presumably your answer to that would be "no", so then I'd ask - why is it that you feel qualified to judge something as good, but not judge something as evil - seems like a double-standard to me.
Disbelief is defined as "Refusal or reluctance to believe."
Sounds pretty much the same to me,
And that's where you're wrong. Not(not X) is only equal to X in sitautions that are boolean. Belief is not boolean. So "Believe there is no god" is a MUCH, MUCH bolder assertion than merely "Not believe there is a god".
Either way, you are either saying, or swaying towards saying, "there is no God."
I'm only "swaying toward" it if you assume the default postiion is to start somewhere halfway between ahteism and theism. The whole point of atheism is that that's not the right place to put the default hypothesis.
And at any rate, even if I was "swaying toward" saying there is no god, that is a far cry from your false claim that it's the same thing as just saying it outright.
Just because you don't like the choice of words, it does not mean that the words are wrong.
It is wrong to attribute opinions to people which they don't actually hold, and that's precisely what you're doing.
Your post included the point that this guy's accuracy was one reason (of several) that he shouldn't be modded down. My point is that that accuracy isn't even relevant one way or the other to moderation, or at least it *shouldn't* be. Whether he was accurate or not shouldn't even be a consideration.
Remember: although his belief may or may not be wrong, it is entirely possible for him to be right about a double standard.
True. But his claim that a double standard exists is precisely what I was talking about when I said I don't agree with him. I don't think such a double standard exists.
1. How marvelous. The natural forces of the tide and erosion formed this time piece. Look at how all the gears naturally evolved to keep time.
2. or Someone dropped their watch. To think of saying "2", one has to have exposure to previous examples of watches, and previous examples of other people existing. We don't have that benefit when examining if a god exists or not. Imagining the first and only instance of soemthing is far more complex than simply imagining an additional instance of something we've seen a zillion times before (a person with a watch).
If you want to have a serious discussion, you have to drop #5. If you leave it there then you are arguing a pointless tautology.
But even with the remaning 4, that's an example of one of the definitions that's specific enough to actually disprove with evidence. A being that knows all, and can do everything, everywhere, at any time, is responsible then for everything that goes on in the world. That means that when bad things happen to good people, it would be this being's fault. This is incompatable with the notion that this being is omnibenevolent. So all I have to do to shoot down this theory is find evidence of bad things happening to people in ways that would NORMALLY just be bad luck - nobody's fault - but with a god that can do something about it without spending any effort, these things become His Fault and destroy the notion of Him being omnibenevolent. Here's some examples:
Babies dying in earthquakes.
Contracting the black plague and dying.
A draught ruining crops for a year, making people starve.
Getting hit by lightning.
Getting hit by a tornado.
A volcano exploding. The usual counter-argument to the Problem of Evil is that god has to let evil continue or he interferes with free will and that would introduce more evil than it fixes. But that counter is built upon the false premise that all suffering by innocents is caused by other people, and as my examples above show, clearly this is not the case. Some suffering is just plain bad luck. (or at least it is dumb luck in a world in which your god isn't in charge of things. Put him in charge and there's no such thing as dumb luck.)
I have heard this argument a *LOT* before. It wasn't any more convincing this time around as it was the first hundred times it was presented.
Your response is predicated upon an incorrect definition of atheism that only includes STRONG atheism (which is a subset of all atheists, and it's generally a minority of atheists that actually fit that definition. Claiming all of them do is like claiming that all Christians are Baptists.)
The more general definition is that an atheist is somone that does not believe there exists a god. Unlike mathematical addition, belief does not have the associative property:
believe( not X )
not( believe X ) Are not exactly identical. The second line is atheism (where X="god exists"), the first line is called "strong atheism" and is in fact a subset of the second.
.. Leprechauns don't exist, but now many people feel the need to state an agnostic position...
That "now many people" was supposed to say "how many people". I made a bad typo that inverted the gist of that statement entirely. Damn I hate it when that happens. (Espeically "now" versus "how" - that's a common one because H and N are next to each other, and it almost always results in a sentence that actually does grammatically and semantically make sense, so it's not obvious it's a typo.)
This statement is exactly as inaccurate as the statement: "Hackers are people that break through computer security" - and it's just as inaccurate for all the same reasons. It's a definition that is only true for a certain subset of the whole, and yet the meme persists because the number of people in the public with the misconception that this is what this group is all about outnumbers the people actually in that group that keep trying to shout down this misuse of the word, to no effect.
I know perfectly well what an atheist is. I used to call myself an agnostic, and rile against athists for precisely the reasons you mention. Then I tried actually talking to some and listening. The public conception of what goes through their heads is WAY, WAY off. It's rare to find one that is convinced with utter conviction that there cannot be any sort of a god. They just feel that it makes a sensible default starting point, since that's they way a general skeptical mind approaches all such claims. Nobody has proof Leprechauns don't exist, but now many people feel the need to state an agnostic position with respect to leprechauns? Nobody has proof Santa Claus doesn't exist, yet how many people feel the need to state an agnpstic position with respect to Santa Claus? Atheists are just people that don't think it's right to treat the qeustion of god existing any differently. To treat it differently is the fallacy of special pleading.
The rest of your post is predicated on this misconception of what atheists think, so I won't bother responding to individual points raised about it.
Incedentally, "atheist" and "agnostic" are not generally capitalized. Normally such a point of trivial language wouldn't be relevant, but here it kind of is relevant. Capitalizing it seems to indicate that you view them as Movements with a capital M, when that's not really how they work.
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Most mail software doesn't try to be something better than Outlook, it just tries to be compatable on a different platform or with less cost.
But that, in itself *is* something better. If a software package makes it so that I can run an OS I can be productive with, instead of having to run Windows to talk to the rest of the company, then that's a benefit.
THe more likely explanation is that they aren't using a well-defined term. If they meant a server in the technical sense, then they can't let people run with IRC and instant messaging turned on and ready to recieve. And that's something they clearly want to let people do, so they aren't using the actual technical definition of a server. That of course immediately raises the question of what the hell DO they mean - and the answer is "Whatever they retroactively feel like saying is a service".
It's the same standard stuff - ban everything by default, then selectively enforce it.
Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide!!!
Look at the facts:
- There are a multitude of documented cases of swimmers dying because they got too much dihydrogen monoxide in their lungs.
- It is the primary component of acid rain.
- Factories spew it out into the environment, in both vaporous and liquid form, with wild abandon, and it's not even regulated.
- Dihydrogen monoxide contributes to the erosion of topsoil from our nation's precious farmland.
- It has been found contaminating nearly every riverbed and lake basin in the Continental United States.
- In cold weather, it drasticly reduces the effectiveness of a vehicle's brakes, and has thus been a contributing factor in thousands of traffic accidents.
- When dihydrogen monoxide sticks to structural surfaces, it often repeatedly crystalizes and decrystalizes, a process that degrades the strength of the structure, sometimes so dangerously that the structure, such as a bridge, completely collapses.
Come, join with me now and ban this terrible deadly chemical.
I noticed you changed your .sig to something less flameful. I do appreciate that.
What the hell kind of microkernel has graphical interfaces in ring zero? NT is certainly NOT a microkernel.
a field must remain chemical free for a minimum of five years
Uhhhmmm..... so no Dihydrogen Monoxide allowed then? (Seriously, WTF does "chemical free" mean?)
Fine, then charge by default until such a time as it is discovered to be your own company's fault. As soon as that's discovered, the charge for the call should be waived. To do otherwise is to create an economy of making more money the more bugs your product has.
That makes zero sense. What the heck do you mean by the phrase "seeing the creation from the earth", at a time when there isn't an earth there yet? A person viewing from the earth would see neither the sun nor the earth form first - they'd both already be there at the start before he starts observing.
You seem to be trying to weasel out of something by claiming a definitive source is invalid.
The part immediately following the bit you quoted proves that I'm not. I stated that even if the dictionary is correct it still doesn't support the narrow definition you used. I don't tolerate people who lie about what I said.
Your point is predicated upon the assumption that existing plants will be phased out if no new ones are made. They won't. If you choice is between decomissioning an old plant and replacing it with a new one, versus continuing to use the old one beyond it's safe lifetime, then a ban one making new ones is a bad idea because it forces people into using the old ones instead of decomissioning them. The world in which people just stop using the power and therefore you can close down the plants without replacing them is an imaginary fairy-tale world.
In a lot of cases, though, the change in meaning of a word happens becasue of ignorance - like the change in the meaning of "hacker" - the people who changed the meaning didn't *realize* they were changing the meaning. They thought they were accurately describing something using the original meaning. I do have a problem with that sort of thing, and that's why I don't like the term "organic food". It's just like ignoramouses who claim that something has "no chemicals" in it.
Apparently you think people who care about honesty are "utter boobs".
So, you slided back into insanity, then, just as predicted.
Oddly, very loosely-associative schizophrenics seem to be able to tickle themselves. This indicates some loss of the idea of "self," since the premise of tickling is that it has to surprise you.
False. I am extremely ticklish and I can be tickled even when I am fully aware ahead of time exactly when and where the tickle will occur (i.e. I'm watching the tickler's fingers). But even so I *still* cannot tickle myself. So it's not a matter of surprise that prevents you from being able to tickle yourself.
Literal, concrete interpretations of speech/writing (typically detected using a proverb test in which the patient is asked to explain a proverb or phrase like "loose lips sink ships")
Careful, this is just as much a test of cultural exposure as it is of mental health. "Loose lips sink ships" is a world war 2 reference that some people might not have much exposure to. Any turn of phrase like that which you care to use is going to have the same sort of problem.
Besides, I despise turns of phrase that are in the exact opposite direction of their literal interpretation, and so I don't use them in their figurative way. An example of this is "Aren't you going to the store?" Logically, an answer of "yes" should mean "I am not going to the store", but the figurative meaning is exactly the inverse of this. This doesn't make me schitzophrenic. It just means I disagree with the way a particular part of the langauge has evolved, and think that it is unnecessarily confusing, and so I've taken a decision not to persoanlly be part of the problem, by choosing not to propigate that usage myself.)
The difference is that the mechanic that's charging you to look at your car isn't the company that made your car. I see a large difference in ethics between these two practices:
1- Charge someone money to diagnose what is faulty with someone ELSE's product.
2- Charge someone money to diagnose what it faulty with your OWN product.
The solution to the oil shortage won't be to keep using oil but use it more conservatively (i.e. stop driving SUVs). The solution will be to use something else entirely instead of oil. This is the direction research should be going in, and FAST. Being a luddite is almost never the right solution to an environmental problem.
It is still stupid to be pro-environment while simultaneously anti-new-refineries. If you can't build a new refinery from scratch, then you can't ever make a refinery that pollutes less. You guarantee that the old technology keeps being used.
(It's kind of like the ban on new nuclear power plants. The older a nuclear plant gets, the more dangerous it becomes. If you won't let people build new ones, NOT EVEN FOR THE PURPOSE OF REPLACING existing ones, then you make the danger WORSE, not better.)
You mistranslated the opinion as written. You've already been shown that even using the dictionary definition, which is predjudiced because it's written by people who are not themselves atheists, even THEN it still doesn't render a definition as narrow as the one you're using.
And it shouldn't be all that threatening to an atheist. It only proves design, not the existence of the Judeo-Christian God.
It's encouraging that you realize that proving a creator exists does not prove Christianity correct (a LOT of people I argue with don't understand that). And yes, such a creator could exist. But there is a wide gulf of difference between "could" and "must". There is room for a creator, but the evidence does not make it a necessity. And the problem is that the moment you pick something specific without really having any evidence to back it up, your chance of being correct becomes infinitessimally close to zero.
And, I do not see evidence that the world must be designed just because it has some order to it. As you say, there are different levels of order. It is not unusual to find rare bits of seeming order in a random string of things. It's only unusual when EVERYTHING is ordered, and that's not the way the universe seems to me. The brain - fairly orderly. The Sun - not the slightest bit orderly.
(And if this is a deliberate design, then God is very, very sloppy since he wasted all that space in the universe just to get us way out here on the fringe to get the right conditions for life. The massive size of the universe destroys the notion of a god that cares about us specially, as far as I'm concerned. If there is a creator, then we're a side effect of whatever it was trying to do, not the main goal. (Either that or the hypothetical creator wasn't as powerful as people make it out to be, and this massive brute-force method was the only way to hope to get the right conditions for life to pop up somewhere - make billions of trials and eventually one of them will work out somewhere.)
You made the assertion that an omnibenevelent/omnipotent God is logically contradictory with the existence of natural evil. My reply was designed to refute that assertion. I'll assume we've laid that point to rest.
No. We haven't, because your reply undercut one of your own premises - the premise that god is omnibenevolent. To defend against my argument that omnibenevolence is incompatable with events in the world, you proposed that such a judgement call about the goodness of events by us mere mortals is impossible. Okay, fair enough, but then you fail to realize that this premise makes it impossible for YOU to call god omnibenevolent in the first place. At best you've just argued that the morality of god is unknowable to us, and thus you should remove "omnibenevolent" from the list of known properties of your god.
The reason a machine looks odd and we imagine it must have a creator is that it is not similar to the other things we see in the natural world. But if you talk of a creator OF the entire universe, there is no external thing to compare against to see if the world we live in has more order than one that was not directed would. The machine looks designed because it's different from natural things. But there isn't anything else to compare the universe itself to to make this same judgement about it. (It's ironic that you claim the natural world is designed when it's the difference between that natural world and designed things that makes us conclude THEY are designed.)
Anyway... it is in this manner that the existence of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God is not contradictory with natural evil. We could only make the claim of contradiction if we had full understanding, which we do not
Congrats - you've just made it impossible to claim anything is good either, since that would require the same level of full understanding. So I assume you'll stop claiming god is good now?
Presumably your answer to that would be "no", so then I'd ask - why is it that you feel qualified to judge something as good, but not judge something as evil - seems like a double-standard to me.
Disbelief is defined as "Refusal or reluctance to believe."
Sounds pretty much the same to me,
And that's where you're wrong. Not(not X) is only equal to X in sitautions that are boolean. Belief is not boolean. So "Believe there is no god" is a MUCH, MUCH bolder assertion than merely "Not believe there is a god".
Either way, you are either saying, or swaying towards saying, "there is no God."
I'm only "swaying toward" it if you assume the default postiion is to start somewhere halfway between ahteism and theism. The whole point of atheism is that that's not the right place to put the default hypothesis.
And at any rate, even if I was "swaying toward" saying there is no god, that is a far cry from your false claim that it's the same thing as just saying it outright.
Just because you don't like the choice of words, it does not mean that the words are wrong.
It is wrong to attribute opinions to people which they don't actually hold, and that's precisely what you're doing.
Your post included the point that this guy's accuracy was one reason (of several) that he shouldn't be modded down. My point is that that accuracy isn't even relevant one way or the other to moderation, or at least it *shouldn't* be. Whether he was accurate or not shouldn't even be a consideration.
Remember: although his belief may or may not be wrong, it is entirely possible for him to be right about a double standard.
True. But his claim that a double standard exists is precisely what I was talking about when I said I don't agree with him. I don't think such a double standard exists.
Would your first reaction be
1. How marvelous. The natural forces of the tide and erosion formed this time piece. Look at how all the gears naturally evolved to keep time.
2. or Someone dropped their watch.
To think of saying "2", one has to have exposure to previous examples of watches, and previous examples of other people existing. We don't have that benefit when examining if a god exists or not. Imagining the first and only instance of soemthing is far more complex than simply imagining an additional instance of something we've seen a zillion times before (a person with a watch).
God is:
1. Omnipotent
2. Omniscient
3. Omnibenevelent
4. Omnipresent
5. Necessary (can't cease to exist)
If you want to have a serious discussion, you have to drop #5. If you leave it there then you are arguing a pointless tautology.
But even with the remaning 4, that's an example of one of the definitions that's specific enough to actually disprove with evidence. A being that knows all, and can do everything, everywhere, at any time, is responsible then for everything that goes on in the world. That means that when bad things happen to good people, it would be this being's fault. This is incompatable with the notion that this being is omnibenevolent. So all I have to do to shoot down this theory is find evidence of bad things happening to people in ways that would NORMALLY just be bad luck - nobody's fault - but with a god that can do something about it without spending any effort, these things become His Fault and destroy the notion of Him being omnibenevolent. Here's some examples:
Babies dying in earthquakes.
Contracting the black plague and dying.
A draught ruining crops for a year, making people starve.
Getting hit by lightning.
Getting hit by a tornado.
A volcano exploding.
The usual counter-argument to the Problem of Evil is that god has to let evil continue or he interferes with free will and that would introduce more evil than it fixes. But that counter is built upon the false premise that all suffering by innocents is caused by other people, and as my examples above show, clearly this is not the case. Some suffering is just plain bad luck. (or at least it is dumb luck in a world in which your god isn't in charge of things. Put him in charge and there's no such thing as dumb luck.)
I have heard this argument a *LOT* before. It wasn't any more convincing this time around as it was the first hundred times it was presented.
Your response is predicated upon an incorrect definition of atheism that only includes STRONG atheism (which is a subset of all atheists, and it's generally a minority of atheists that actually fit that definition. Claiming all of them do is like claiming that all Christians are Baptists.)
The more general definition is that an atheist is somone that does not believe there exists a god. Unlike mathematical addition, belief does not have the associative property:
believe( not X )
not( believe X )
Are not exactly identical. The second line is atheism (where X="god exists"), the first line is called "strong atheism" and is in fact a subset of the second.
That "now many people" was supposed to say "how many people". I made a bad typo that inverted the gist of that statement entirely. Damn I hate it when that happens. (Espeically "now" versus "how" - that's a common one because H and N are next to each other, and it almost always results in a sentence that actually does grammatically and semantically make sense, so it's not obvious it's a typo.)
Atheists claim that there is no God.
This statement is exactly as inaccurate as the statement: "Hackers are people that break through computer security" - and it's just as inaccurate for all the same reasons. It's a definition that is only true for a certain subset of the whole, and yet the meme persists because the number of people in the public with the misconception that this is what this group is all about outnumbers the people actually in that group that keep trying to shout down this misuse of the word, to no effect.
I know perfectly well what an atheist is. I used to call myself an agnostic, and rile against athists for precisely the reasons you mention. Then I tried actually talking to some and listening. The public conception of what goes through their heads is WAY, WAY off. It's rare to find one that is convinced with utter conviction that there cannot be any sort of a god. They just feel that it makes a sensible default starting point, since that's they way a general skeptical mind approaches all such claims. Nobody has proof Leprechauns don't exist, but now many people feel the need to state an agnostic position with respect to leprechauns? Nobody has proof Santa Claus doesn't exist, yet how many people feel the need to state an agnpstic position with respect to Santa Claus? Atheists are just people that don't think it's right to treat the qeustion of god existing any differently. To treat it differently is the fallacy of special pleading.
The rest of your post is predicated on this misconception of what atheists think, so I won't bother responding to individual points raised about it.
Incedentally, "atheist" and "agnostic" are not generally capitalized. Normally such a point of trivial language wouldn't be relevant, but here it kind of is relevant. Capitalizing it seems to indicate that you view them as Movements with a capital M, when that's not really how they work.