Atheism is Irrational

OK! My applause to the contender for accepting the debate, thank-you. In this discussion I will try and support three claims: Positive Atheism - the belief that there is no God or the conscious removal of God from any thought process - is irrational. Implicit Atheism - the assertion of Atheism by default - doesn't occur. Atheist/Agnostic - is an extraneous melding of terms which comes at the cost of intellectual honesty. Positive Atheism:- The assertion that there is no God is fundamentally irrational. It is clearly something which cannot be supported with any evidence or reasoning. The positive Atheist will try to provide localized evidence to support their belief, or "non belief" if things get tough. This is usually along the lines of: "There have been 10'000 different religions in history, all of them telling us to worship different, mutually exclusive Gods, if they all contradict each other then the vast majority are necessarily wrong. At-least 9'999 are the construct of mans mind so I think it is reasonable to assume considering we have no positive evidence for any God, that there is no God" Or the less refined: "XYZ were just a bunch of sheep herders, they invented God for societal control. No miracle has ever been scientifically substantiated, least not the Jesus zombie" The problem with these kind of arguments is that Atheism doesn't pertain to religion, only to God. And it is not a claim about man-made Gods, which would obviously be self defeating, it is a universal claim/assumption/statement about God, depending on the weather. A universal claim can never substantiate itself by refuting a localized/specialized claim such as Christianity, Hinduism, Muslim. It is the same as if I were to espouse my universal disbelief of Ghosts, and rationalize this by arguing that your Mama who claims there is a Ghost in her kitchen is provably insane. Maybe your Mama is insane but to substantiate my -universal- disbelief I need to show that the fundamental concept of Ghosts is incoherent, NOT your Mama. Implicit Atheism:- The problem with "implicit" atheism, is that the Atheistic "disbelief" is in reality equivalent to -1, but the Atheist wants to try and dress it up as 0, therefore default. Worryingly though he has nothing to show why a person should come to the -conscious- development of "disbelief", and not simply "never thought about that before/not formed an opinion". I contend that -1 is disbelief, 0 is neutrality, +1 is belief, pertaining to Atheism, Agnosticism and Theism respectively. If a person were to deny this I would ask what other historical word there has been to represent the position of -1? We have millions in the English language, do you really contend we have never had a word to describe the position of a person who denies existence of God? We have.. It has always been "Atheist". This -1,0, +1 reasoning has been the accepted standard for hundreds of years because it makes sense, it is intuitive. The problem is, for hundreds of years nobody thought it fashionable to be Atheist, so no-one had to seriously defend it. That is until the turn of the 21st century, in the post 9/11 world where Atheism started gathering steam and began to necessitate genuine intellectual defense. At this time it became abundantly clear that Atheism could never be rationally asserted, so a-lot of word games and contortion of definitions started to occur. This allowed people to cling to their intellectual 'go faster' stripes and maintain their book sales, rather than sullenly drudge back to the unprofitable, unfashionable mediocrity of Agnosticism. Agnostic Atheism:- This is a person who is a real Atheist at heart, who holds that there is no God, but he simply cannot rationalize that far so thinks a softening prefix will make it all OK. Again it demonstrates this irrational desire for many Atheists to cling to a word like it is a badge of honour. They admit they cannot rationally sustain Atheism, but just want to let you know that they are anyway because its cool. Either "Agnostic" or "Atheist", is extraneous to their position. He will claim they are mutually compatible and that Agnosticism only pertains to knowledge so you can be both Agnostic Atheist and Agnostic Theist. Like I demonstrated though if you don't feel you have evidence to support something you must accept that your affirmation is irrational. Lack of knowledge simply explains the Agnostic position, it is not a completely independent tautology that can be applied ad-hoc. Well, that concludes my initial arguments. Thanks for reading and all the best to the contender!