Does Atheism = No beliefs?

To start with, I'd call it not a belief system. That on its own doesn't make a system of thought any more than a disbelief in leprechauns does.

Is there no limit to your pedantry? Consider that the system implies believing itself exists and that the additional claim is that no god exists. Can you bring yourself to call it that then? Why must you so strongly cling to dodging it?

good point. Sometimes we forget to consider how others might think. Not everyone thinks alike by any means.If I read a story of fiction, I may acknowledge that some of the characters believe certain ways about certain elements of the story but this in and of itself does not mean I share the belief(s) that the characters in the story express.If I personally have a belief about God or about some element or thing that cannot be objectively proven or evidenced (hence belief) I cannot expect others to share my belief or even to understand it beyond acknowledgement of it.

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A person could come to the question of gods existing on their own, and then later reject the idea and go on to proclaim that they don't.
  —cS

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So someone with no concept of gods could invent gods then dismiss them? Ok he has a hypothesis, a kind of claim I guess, then rejects it for lack of supporting evidence. It's now gone away.It's only the fact that others make the claim that god(s) exist that the claim still stands and has to be rejected again and again. If you say there is a god and I say there isn't, is that not a response to your claim?

I have infinite reserves of accuracy. ... ? Callit what then? Huh?

But in this circumstance, the logic stands. It is akin to someone having an idea, attempting to verify the veracity of that idea, realizing that the idea does not hold water, and then moving on to the next idea.For example, if I have an idea of planting a tree in my backyard. I go to the backyard, perform measurements, do an assessment and then realize that the tree won't fit or its roots would undermine the other plants in my backyard. So I decide against that idea. Have I rejected the idea of planting a tree or have I accepted in the positive that I now have a non-existent tree in my backyard? Theists came about as humans became self aware and began to hypothesize about their surroundings and how nature functioned. They originally began to consider concepts like 'spirits' that manifested in things like trees, rivers, etc. It was their way of describing the behavior of certain things in nature that they couldn't otherwise quantify because they lacked the baseline understanding of how things work. From there, the concepts of 'spirits' began to transform into ideas regarding pixies, forest folk, and eventually they started to anthropomorphize these things as 'gods'. The end result over thousands of years was a myriad of religious beliefs.But I can guarantee you that as some of these ideas were being posited, there were individuals in that time frame that didn't believe in spirits, pixies, etc. The rejection of claims requires the claim to exist. And as such, yes, the concept of atheism merely only being a response to a claim is exactly accurate.

So it isn't just a lack of response after all?

uh?

Well, they say that baldness is just a lack of hair - not a hair colour. You don't go around telling people you're bald.So, if atheism is just a lack of belief - not an active disbelief - then you don't need to go around telling people you don't believe. There's no need for a "response" to belief at all.

I don't go around telling people that leprechauns don't exist. Nonetheless, I would never have explicitly come to the conclusion that they don't unless someone else had first invented the concept of leprechauns.

I'm just saying that no response is actually necessary.

That's possibly one of the dumbest arguments for arguments sake that you've come out with yet and there's a lot of competition. Except that believers try to use their beliefs to make me do things I don't want to and I regard as daft and dangerous in accordance to their beliefs. You know, like remove evolution from education, fund churches to spout nonsense and not shop on Sundays. Another bunch want to kill me. The hell I'll respond.

That's different. You omitted the part where they go around proclaiming that gods don't exist. Would that make them not an atheist? No, it's not only that. People can and do proselytize atheism even when others aren't making claims to them. Sure, but proclaiming atheism without a claim to respond to is still atheism despite not being a response to a claim. As I said, atheism is not just a response to a claim.Again:

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Atheism is, in the broadest sense, the absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is the rejection of belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.
From wikipedia

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Note that in moving to "a response to claim", you have gone from the broadest sense of simply being an absence of belief to the less broad sense of being the rejection of a belief.And so far, your obstinance has prevented you from being able to admit that the narrowest sense of the word even exists.

You, too, omitted the part where you go on to proclaim that the idea is wrong. Funny how you guys just remove that part instead of addressing it.Are you no longer an atheist if you proselytize? You could inform your roommate that you cannot have a tree in the back yard. "Only natural beings exist on this planet and none of the extra-things that anybody may come up with are going to be real. None of them exist. Disbelieve them all, son, and go and spread this truth. There are no hidden beings around us." You're wrong to call it merely that. I can be more, there is a narrower sense of the word:

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Atheism is, in the broadest sense, the absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is the rejection of belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.
From wikipedia

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It doesn't require a claim to take that position nor to proclaim it yourself.

I respectfully disagree with this assessment though in regards to strict objective evidence I cannot refute it.So I'll leave it alone and allow you the same right to your belief as you allow me my right to mine.