Atheism is the universal claim that there is no God, that we can know it is such and cannot be otherwise. “God” and “not God” are both affirmative, truth-functional statements; in other words, the burden of evidence is on both Atheists and theists, but probably less so upon theists because their’s is not a rational god of human representations.

If a person says that Atheism is “a-theism”, they are–by definition–not an authentic Atheist. But on coming from Hitchens, I wouldn’t have had any doubts about that.

The only way to prevent the erosion of such religious thought from being grotesquely disfigured is to not think, not consider these implications, to have faith. That may even be fine. You can believe whatever you like.

That you used the word “may,” in “That may even be fine, prevents me from disagreeing with you, and I would never advocate coercion in matters of belief, so of course I would consider it permissible, even if it were not “fine” to exercise faith, although I consider the exercise of faith to be dishonest and unethical at best. I say that because I think that the exercise of faith, as best I can tell, is the deliberate attempt to believe something to a degree of certainty which exceeds what is warranted by the evidence. (Those words in that last sentence are very carefully chosen, and have been refined over a number of years.) If you are only certain to the degree which the evidence warrants, then you have no need of faith. If you wish to be more certain than that, then this is where it seems people latch onto the notion of faith. So, faith in inherently and inescapably dishonest and unethical, in that it involves lying to yourself about how certain you should be. In that respect, the exercise of faith is not in any way “fine,” though, in others, it is permissible, in that not permitting it is neither ethical nor possible (you can’t coerce a mans mind, even if you wanted to.)

He is a fraud, that is why he lost!