It's not about rejecting all gods ever, just whatever meets your personal idea of gods.
IMO, anything that you don't consider to be gods doesn't matter one bit regarding your disbelief in gods.
We are talking about different things
Me: Someone who disbelieves in the existence of whatever they consider to be gods. [Just as an example, perhaps they have only considered Abrahamic God and generic polytheist gods and believe both are mythical]
You: Someone who disbelieves in the existence of every single god and god concept ever created whether they are aware of them or otherwise and has individually crossed each of their names and definitions off a list.
You're misrepresenting what I'm saying. Seeing how in my last post, I gave two examples of god-concepts that I
don't disbelieve in (the Sun and Haille Selassie), you should know better than to characterize my position the way you just did.
Most people don't believe that their knowledge of gods is complete; many people believe their concept of god, whatever it is, to include gods they haven't encountered yet.
This is why you keep thinking people don't use the word the way they claim they do. You misunderstand the way they are using it.
No; you're misunderstanding what I'm saying.
First off: keep in mind that we're talking about a multi-step process, and so far, our discussion is stuck on the first step: recognizing that there's even a god-concept to consider. After that, there are still more steps before we get to actually rejecting the god-concept:
- evaluating the god-concept
- concluding that the god-concept is false
And we need to do this for everything we believe would be a god - individually or by category - before it can be said that we've rejected all gods. We haven't even gotten that far yet. Some god-concepts we're aware of can't be evaluated; some god-concepts we can evaluate can't be rationally concluded to be false.
When talking about claims regarding existence, I see no difference between false and not true.
When we're talking about our beliefs regarding claims, the two states are actually:
- to accept the claim
- not to accept the claim.
And "X is true" and "X is false" are separate claims. Accepting both claims creates a conflict, but any other combination is fair game, including accepting neither claim.
For me, the difference between I don't believe that exists and I believe that doesn't exist is grammatical. Others believe it is cognitive.
Each to their own.
It sounds like you fall into a category I mentioned earlier: people who hold the position that atheists can't be rational... because what you're saying would create an irrational requirement for atheists. Weird for an atheist to do this, but as you say: each to their own.