Steve:

Your expanded explanation clarifies beautifully, for which thanks.

Why you choose the label atheist (absence of god) rather than a-gnostic (not knowing one way or the other) is an interesting puzzle.

If someone says that they --through personal spiritual epiphany or taking mushrooms or wearing green headphones--have come to "know" God, it seems to me that within their own vocabulary they are perfectly within their rights to say and mean it. After all, an Infinite Spiritual Power is not exactly objective, the way a molecule of hydrocarbon is, and therefore not subject to the rules of objective replicability that we hold engineers and scientists to.

It therefore seems to me that those are agnostic who see clearly that they do not know , and those are gnostic who say they do. Unless, of course, they are just lying through their teeth in order to get at choirboys, or some such.