**Well, any atheist worth his or her salt will admit that our conviction is unprovable. Not "beliefs" by the way. Beliefs don't enter into this for atheists. Unfortunately, that completely nullifies your final point about being no different from religious people.**

If an atheist tells me that the fundamental constituent of the universe is matter, he first has to tell me what matter is. He can't because science can't. Objects are just clouds of molecules. Molecules are clouds of certain atoms. Atoms are clouds of what? Physicists say an atom is is made up of particles that are really waves. Waves of what? "Waves of chance." What is that? So ultimately, we don't know what matter is but you would have us believe it is the fundamental constituent of the universe. Isn't that not terribly different than saying the universe was made by a mysterious spook in the sky whose ways and means we don't really know anything about? Same dogma, slightly different rhetoric.

**There is no equal and opposite equivalence between what I think and what a believer believes in.**

But couldn't a believer could say the same about another believer?

**That has been said so many times that it's getting hard to know what to think about people who fail to take it on board.**

Not really. I agree with atheists when they say that non-belief in a god is not in itself a belief. That's a common believer tactic. It's not your non-belief I wish to address simply because I agree with it. It's what you posted earlier--that matter is the fundamental constituent of the universe and that everything else, including consciousness, arises from it epiphenomenally. You posted that as a (false) corollary to atheism, i.e. to be an atheist, I must believe that because it follows from having no belief in a god. THAT is a belief for which there is not a shred of evidence which a subscriber must buy on faith alone.