I'm sorry, but before contemplating your other ideas, you are going to have to explain the above because when people communicate, they need to be speaking the same language. I will once again define theism as it is defined by every single dictionary and philosophy web page source i looked at. And all of them involve God or gods.
There are several problems with this perspective. One is that dictionaries do not document logical or reasonable word usage. They only document common word usage, which is very often illogical to the point of being absurd. There is nothing at all logical in the assumption that gay people are homosexual, or that homosexuals are especially gay. And yet if you look up the word gay in the dictionary you will find that it refers, now days, to being homosexual far more commonly than it is being used to refer to an emotional state. It's neither logical nor rational, and yet there it is. Because that's how we use the word these days.
And it got that way because people very often use words to deliberately NOT say what they really mean to imply, or to imply something far more influential than what they are actually saying. And this is especially true when it comes to discussing people's biases and prejudices, or areas of thought that people are not particularly knowledgeable about.
The point being that in a discussion wherein logic and reason are going to be the main methods of achieving understanding or consensus, we need the primary terms to be logical and reasonable, too. In this case the terms being theism and it's antithetical; atheism. And here is why your chosen definition of the term theism is not reasonable or logical: ... that theism is, "belief in God/gods". First of all, "belief in" is a statement
of surety, not of content. It refers to the degree to which one holds certain that their "idea of X" is the "truth of X". Which says nothing at all about the content of "X". So "believing in" (or not believing in) something is completely irrelevant to the something being discussed: i.e., theism and atheism. And to emphasize that point I would observe that there are many theists, and even religious theists, that do not "believe in" the existence of God/gods. Most Buddhists, for example. And most Taoists as well. And there are many other old and new and independent theologies of a similar sort. Even many Abrahamic religionists do not "believe in" God, strictly speaking, but rather trust in a chosen idea of God as a method of living, simply because doing that seems to work for them in a positive way. But
not because they have convinced themselves that their idea of God is the truth of God (i.e., belief).
So why would we use a definition of theism that doesn't even apply to a huge number of theists? And if we were to do so, what do we call all those theists that are being left out? Do we just ignore them? Are they now "atheists" because they don't "believe in God/gods"? Yet many agnostics don't believe in any gods, either. So do they also become atheists, now, too? How about the undecideds? They also don't "believe in any gods". Are they now atheists? And what about all those people who simply don't care about the existence of gods one way or another. The indifferent ones. Are they also atheists, now? What good is the term "atheist" if all these different people with all these different ideas and attitudes about the question of God's existence are being labeled as the same thing? And the only people NOT being labeled atheists by that definition are those who have convinced themselves that their idea of God is God.
And we haven't even discussed the many variations of the idea of "God" there are. Many of which conflict with the others. So which ideas of God are considered "God" and are therefor part of the definition of "theism" and which ideas of God are not included under the definition of "theism"? And if they are not "theism", then what are they? And what about Taoism or Buddhism and the others that neither endorse nor oppose the idea of God's existence, and instead accept
both perspectives into their ideological camps?
I seems to me that the thing everyone has in common when it comes to theism is the idea of there being some sort of creating and sustaining force that is NOT US, but that is effectively evident in the existential universe, or 'the world' that we are living in. And these people are seeking some way of relating themselves to this mysterious force.
And so the antithetical to that; the "atheist", would then be someone that does not accept the existence of such a creative, sustaining force. Nor any relation to it. (And keep in mind that the term "force" is being used very loosely here, as we do not know what it is, or what better to call it.)
