Well, if you find it meaningless to be able to differentiate between people who are theists and people who are not theists by calling them different things be my guest
An Englishman was visiting Belfast and happened upon a heated debate between an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant. One noticed the man and waved him over. He explained to the Englishman what the issue was and asked whether the Englishman was Catholic or Protestant. The Englishman responded "I don't believe in God". Without a moment's pause, the other man said "Yes, but
which God don't you believe in?"
There's a deeper problem than the name of the label. The real root of the problem is the assumption that a true "lack of belief" in something should, or even reasonably
can, be desired to have a label. If we look at language use, we don't tend to find people talking about lacking a belief (and I did this the other day using the tools I would use were I running an actual study, so it wasn't completely bogus, but by no means did I take the necessary care and planning for an experimental design).
There are often ideologies, beliefs, tenets, and so forth defined at least in part in opposition to one another.
We have the terms "pro-life" and the term "pro-choice". We don't have one that indicates non-commitment despite the importance of the issue.
We have conservatives and liberals, but the closest we get to "lack of belief" is "undecided".
We even have "team Edward" and "team Jacob", but my position isn't "I don't believe team Edward is better or that team Jacob is better" it is is I couldn't give a ****.
Nor is this only about pairs. There are lots of sociopolitical positions/ideologies that can be grouped into categories like environmentalism, welfare, power of the federal government, gun rights, the mental health system, education, etc.
I did my senior thesis for one of my majors on modality as an extension of previous work on epistemic modality. The model I used for my linguistic framework is called cognitive linguistics. It is opposed, rather fundamentally, to another central framework- generative linguistics. Unfortunately, there wasn't any professor with the requisite knowledge to evaluate the argument of my thesis, so I needed not only to support the argument but also do so in a way that explained a lot of technical terms. A few were kind enough to read my drafts to tell me if it was clear to a person without the right background, despite how insufferably boring they found it. By reading my drafts, they learned enough to get a gist of the two main positions. However, they couldn't have cared less.
What's relevant is
1) They lacked a belief in that they didn't know whether one side was right or not and thus couldn't believe either was
&
2) It never occurred to anybody what term we might use to describe the fact that they neither believed cognitive linguistics was the right approach to language nor believed it wasn't.
There are an infinite number of propositions one can make an epistemic judgement of, from important ones like whether "x should be done about global warming" to inconsequential ones like "there is a person in Britain right now who just dropped a pen". However, we almost never think to develop any term to describe non-commitment as we have general ones already: "I don't know", "I'm not sure", etc.
The reason the term "atheism" exists is because it is not of this type, and neither is "weak atheism". For if it were, to say "I don't believe in god" would have to mean "it's not true that I believe god doesn't exist, so therefore I acknowledge the possibility god might". If it were simply like saying "I don't believe either team Jacob is better or that team Edward is", we wouldn't have the word. We'd just use those we do all the time for all the countless instances where we neither believe nor disbelieve because we don't know and perhaps don't care either.
If he calls himself scientologist we can ask him what his view on gods are if we are only interested in that aspect of his beliefs
Scientologists do believe in a supreme, omnipotent being, but they do not refer to it as god. Neither do people who don't speak English. If you want to inquire as to their beliefs in a way that won't mean you end up with theists who believe humans are gods and atheists who believe in supremely powerful immortal entities, then you need to define what you mean by god.
We define weak atheism as an absence of belief and an absence of disbelief in gods.
Beliefs are evaluations of propositions (or can be formulated as such). Here's a proposition: "A god or gods exist". That is a truth-bearing statement (i.e., it is either true or false but not both).
Even if you say you don't know, that's a belief statement.
"It is impossible to assert something without expressing a belief."
Davis, W. A. (2003).
Meaning, expression and thought. Cambridge University Press.
To say one neither believes god exists nor disbelieves is to make an assertion and, as noted above, necessarily a belief.
The concept of "god" represented in your brain is "defined" for the most part by relations to other concepts or shared propertiesy e.g., the neural representation of the Greek pantheon, church, Jesus, Allah, immortality, omnipotence, etc. You do not, I presume, believe that Zeus is real. Nor is there any entity or entities that you relate your concept to that you believe exist. The concept, which does exist, has the property that you do not apply it to anything because you do not believe there is anything you can apply it to.
The greek word atheos literally means "godless, without god(s)". Not disbelieving in gods. The added meaning of disbelieving in gods came later.
Classical languages was one of my majors. The above is partly true. Greek religion was defined by practice not faith. Everybody believed in the gods, but some did not honor them and in particular would refuse to participate in civic cults. Christians were atheists. They not only had a god but worshipped that god. However, they did not perform religion (religion was performance). It also meant being abandoned by the gods. The term, as you say, had nothing to do with belief because what connected one to the gods was practice. However, at least as early as the 16th century the romance languages (including French, which is what the English comes from) kept the spirit of the term. There were no gods to honor and connection to god was through belief, so the same idea was present it's just that religion had changed. But this doesn't really matter. No Greek would
ever say that a child was born
atheos unless they were cursed by the gods or something.
What is a "default epistemic stance"?
There is none:
"Whenever we consider a proposition, there are three different attitudes we can take toward it. First, we can believe it or accept it as true. Second, we can disbelieve it, i.e. believe that it is false or believe its negation. Third, we can withhold belief in it or suspend judgment. We may illustrate these attitudes by reflecting on the attitudes of the theist, the atheist, and the agnostic toward the proposition that God exists."
Lemos, N. M. (2007).
An introduction to the theory of knowledge. Cambridge University Press.
An agnostic, someone who says of some proposition like "god exists" that they withhold belief in the truth of the proposition, are still making belief claims. They do not believe there is or isn't because they do not know, but that entails that the concept of god they have is not one they believe they can apply to anyting.
Weak atheism isn't a stance, it's the absence of a stance.
I understand how you are defining it. It's just quite literally physically impossible. The exception is if you don't know the language.
