Comment Re:Knowledge (Score 1) 1037
No, the point is that atheism isn't a faith. There are no atheist doctrines. There is no atheist holy book. Faith means believing in something. Not believing something (like existence of a God) doesn't constitute a faith. Lack of faith is not a faith.
I think it depends on how you define "faith". It seems that many atheists use it in a pejorative sense to refer to beliefs which they regard as baseless and silly. (Some theists do too and see their own "faith" in things they know to be absurd as a badge of honor.) But that is not what the word is supposed to mean. Strictly speaking "faith" refers to loyalty or trust. For example, a patient may have faith in a surgeon and consent to an operation. A lender might have faith in the borrower's ability to repay the loan. Such faith may be justified, or it may be misplaced.
A belief in the obvious (such as that the sky is blue) is not a faith. Faith is a confidence in future performance based on past performance. In the Bible "faith" refers not to a religion but to confidence that God will fulfill his promises made to believers based on a record of fulfilling such promises in the past. In Hebrews chapter 11 well-known figures from the Hebrew Bible are described as "men of faith" because they sacrificed present comfort or even their lives because they had faith (confidence) that God would make it up to them later.
If we ignore the modern religious definition and use either the everyday or the biblical definition, then atheism is a faith. It is a faith because the atheist seems no sign that god is acting and so is confident that god does not exist and intends to make life decisions on that basis.
Atheism does not and cannot have a book purporting to contain divine revelation. But it does have beliefs. It answers many of the same questions which religions answer: where did we come from, why are we here, what happens to us when we die, how can we attain immortality. (The answers are very different.) Their are also atheistic philosophies which give guidance on questions of behavior and ethics.
So, I understand why many atheists dislike the application of the term "faith" to their belief systems, but I don't think it is actually incorrect.