People are and have been saying that strong atheists are not the only atheists around. Dr Adequate has provided multiple reasonings already to demonstrate that fact.
You have effectively been telling people the opposite: from what I can see, you have stated that all atheists are strong atheists or that equivalently atheism requires positive belief in the nonexistence of gods. For example:
[quote=Damouse]By not having a belief in a god of any flavor, you form a belief pertaining to a lack of god.[/qs]
An atheist holds to the belief that theistic conclusions are wrong, and therefor holds to the belief that there is no god.
I believe there is no god.
I do not believe in god.
These are all ideas an atheist may have, and none of them are exclusive, even thought the first two express disbelief and belief about the same topic in equal measures.
Not so for any of these. Belief does not follow the law of excluded middle; that is, absence of one property does not and cannot conclude the presence of the opposite property. You are arguing that not being positive requires being negative; you completely ignore the neutral position.
This is why you are getting the flak.
Atheism only requires lack of belief in the existence of gods. Without any other modifier, one cannot tell whether they also believe in the nonexistence of gods or not.
Only relatively recently in this thread have the modifier words been used with the word atheist. The majority of the usage was just the one word label.
Because previously nobody was discussing the difference between strong and weak atheism. You brought up the subject -- again, after I thought the good Dr A had reasonably demonstrated to riVeRaT that it was not viable -- so people used the correct words to describe the ideas you were talking about to make what they were talking about unambiguous.
Im assuming an atheist to introduce himself as just an atheist solely based on my personal experience and a touch of social etiquette. By no means do i think that a rule.
And nobody has said otherwise. An atheist is an atheist regardless of whether they're 'strong' or 'weak', and most don't even consider the difference for the same reason they don't consider their atheism; they just don't need to.
But you have tried to argue that by introducing themselves as atheists, they must also believe that no god exists, a position which is obviously deficit in etiquette: they could easily not believe that no god exists too.
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