Yes, I know. But then they immediately and repeatedly proclaim that they refuse to believe that any gods exist because they have not been given any evidence (that they will recognize as such) to convince them otherwise. So that out of one side of their mouths they claim they are agnostic, while out of the other side of their mouth they proclaim their atheism. And they try to justify this double-speak by hiding it behind some semantic nonsense about "unbelief". Even though their "unbelief" clearly defaults to disbelief: i.e., that no gods exist unless and until the theist can prove to them that they do.
Straw man.
You're comparing a colloquial definition of agnosticism: "I don't know," with a colloquial -- outdated and frequently corrected -- definition of atheism: "there is no God." The double-speak is an illusion.
Belief is actually quite irrelevant to anyone but the believer.
Yet it's the crux of this particular thread.
It's the claims we make about reality to each other that matter.
In casual social situations, yes. In discussions of ontology and epistemology, the specifics and justifications of the claims are crucial.
And claiming not to know if gods really exist or not while also claiming that gods don't exist unless they are proven to exists by the atheist's chosen methodology is going to be perceived as a disingenuous and two-faced proclamation every time,
Again, this is not the claim of atheism, as has been explained here on RF hundreds of times -- yet the misunderstanding keeps popping up.
It seems a useful straw man, convincing to the philosophically unsophisticated.
especially when the contradiction is pointed out and the claimant tries to hide or deny it using silly semantic double-speak (like they "unbelive" but don't disbelieve in the existence of any gods).
It's not double-speak; not a contradiction.
Definitions are crucial to any argument, and "disbelieve" is definitively ambiguous. This is why we use "lack of belief" or "non-belief" instead. We're clarifying, not hiding, nor are we denying anything but your misrepresentation of the argument.
Belief itself is not rational given the fact that we are not omniscient. Yet we engage in it all the time because we think we have to, to live in a world that we cannot ever fully understand or control. The "evidence" is everywhere, all around us, all the time. Nothing is ever "unevidenced". This claim of there being no evidence is more semantic double-speak meant to hide a bias against any evidence that does not serve our chosen methodology for achieving "belief".
True, there are gradations of evidence, but assessment of reliability seems to be a rare skill. Most people put a high value on gut feeling or conventionalism. Few seem to rationally and dispassionately analyze the truth-value of a proposition. Few seem to recognize a lack of concrete, objective, empirical evidence, in the face of general belief, as problematic. Some don't seem to grasp the invalidity of drawing conclusions despite a genuine lack of objective evidence.
Withholding belief, pending objective evidence, under the "methodology" of logic," is not semantic double-speak.
And the fact that all these self-proclaimed "rational skeptics" fight so hard to defend and maintain that nonsensical double-speak only serves to exemplify the willful ignorance and bias behind it to those of us that have not fallen for it. (Not to say that we are not prone to our own examples of willful ignorance and bias.)
We "fight so hard" because theists and conventionalists keep bringing the subject up. It's
you fighting; we're just replying.
We make and defend a rational conclusion. We assume the subject's been put to bed, only to find it dragged back into the parlor, propped up with the same invalid arguments we'd previously debunked.