I was once accused of being an atheist by a Born Again (damn, I hate that phrase; how can you be born again with only a father and no mother?), who said it like I would say "child molester".
I had to think about that.
Since the word derives from the Greek atheos (a=without, theos=God), an atheist should merely be one without a God. (Rather than an agnostic, who just isn't sure, which seems wishywashy to me. Agnostic was coined from the Greek agnostos, a=without, gnostos=knowledge, by Professor T.H. Huxley in 1869.)
Looking it up, I rather liked this definition as well: "A person for whom the idea of god is senseless. Not to be confused with a person who hates (and neccessarily believes in the existence of) god."
But you always have to defer to the master definer, Ambrose Bierce:
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Does being an atheist imply the refutation of the existance of God?
If it's the cranky-old-man-in-the-sky-god of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths, always smoting and damning, absolutely.
I suspect that, whatever happens after I die, I will be surprised.
I'm sure my Born Again friends fear that it will be unpleasantly so.
I suspect that, given the complexity of the universe that we know (let alone the complexity of the universe that we don't know; remember, the world was still flat only 500 years ago), we're all going to be surprised.
Until then, I remain without a nice, obvious, all-written-down-in-the-Book, personal-savior-type God.
It doesn't mean that you can't believe in one (you benighted fool), but it does mean that you can't try and jam your delusional structure down my throat, or keep me from acting or saying what I believe.
If you can't abide that, I suggest you move to a nice theocracy, like Iran or Utah...
Columnbus et al knew the world was round. They had been traveling up and down the Mediterrian for centuries. They all knew the world was round. The question at the time was it's size. Chris thought the world was much smaller than the Spanish court scientist. Luckly for him that there was a continent between Spain and Asia or we would have never heard of him.
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