The true meaning of atheism is the belief that God is just as likely to exist as not

Firstly, I would like to point out that I do not completely agree with the definition of Atheism that you gave, being "The lack of belief in a deity", however, since I did not make any mention of this in the acceptance round and this is the definition I therefore agreed to use, this is the definition we will use. Despite this, I still believe that based off of our definition here I come to the same conclusion that the true meaning of atheism is the belief that god is just as likely to exist as not. I will spend the rest of my argument explaining how I came to this conclusion and why the voters should without a doubt, vote con to this notion. First off, I would like to bring up that this entire debate is in a sense just an argument over semantics- something that is often shunned away from the realm of debate. Despite this, I believe I have a strong semantic case for why this notion is false. Now the underlying premise to my argument is that any word that generalizes a group of people should have it's meaning derived more so from the qualities that those people who self identify with said group than by the concrete definition of the word. To give an example think of the word liberal. Now imagine a liberal person. What traits define this person? What you likely think of is a person who wants more welfare, or believes in the separation of church and state, or maybe a person who is pro choice, or possibly someone who favors a stronger governmental economic regulation. What you most likely did not think of is "open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values", which is the definition for liberal given by google(1). The reason for this difference between the definition and meaning of the word is that no definition could encapsulate the motivations and convictions of a group of people so diverse as liberals. There are self identifying liberals who hold on to some traditional values, such as the words "under god" within our pledge of allegiance, while other liberals do are willing to discard this traditional value. What makes a liberal a liberal is not adhering unconditionally to this simple definition, but identifying generally with the motivations and convictions of liberalism. Same is true for countless other groups, such as conservative, theist, capitalist, communist, feminist, and surely, atheist. Now that I have shown why the meaning of the word atheism is derived more accurately through the motivations and convictions of those who choose to self identify with the group of atheists or word of atheism, I need only prove that the motivations and convictions of people who self identify as atheists are more in not in line with the description "the belief that God is just as likely to exist as not". To do this, I will use a combination of quotes from figure-heads to the atheist ideology, as well as my personal experience in multiple forums for atheists. I would first like to look to a Facebook page that i personally "liked", called Atheist Republic(2). This page (unsurprisingly) is primarily liked by those who describe themselves as atheists (I don't want to randomly fabricate statistics, but it would be more than reasonable to assume that at least 95% of the people who like the page identify as atheist). This page is particularly relevant because throughout the time that I have "liked" it on Facebook, there has been a very active community that frequently comments on posts by the page and discusses issues related to religion. From this experience I can say that almost every one of these people feels strongly that god does not exist. Secondly, I would like to analyze the beliefs of the most prominent self described atheists in modern society. To be fair, rather than selecting these prominent atheists myself, I will use an article entitled "The 25 most influential living atheists", which is the first link to come up when I googled "most prominent atheists"(3). For the sake of time and avoiding redundancy, I will only be looking at the top two, who happen to be Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. A brief analysis of Richard Dawkins religious views will yield the irrefutable conclusion that rather than believing that god is "just as likely to exist as not", Dawkins believes vehemently that the likelihood of gods existence is negligible, as exemplified in his writings in- and the mere title of his book The God Delusion. Sam Harris is certainly in agreement with Dawkins on the likelihood of gods existence as shown by an article he wrote for the Huffington Post entitled "There is No God (And You Know It)" (4). The fact that the two "most influential living atheists" disbelieve in god rather than lack belief in god is solid evidence that the atheist community as a hole disbelieves in god rather than believing "that God is just as likely to exist as not", thus proving that the unifying conviction that makes an atheist identify as an atheist is the disbelief in god, rather than the lack of belief. My final point that I will make in this round is that believers of the idea "that God is just as likely to exist as not" already have a mainstream identification, and it is not atheists. This group of people identifies as religiously agnostic. The word agnostic is defined by google as "a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God"(5). The similarity between this definition of the word agnostic, and the "meaning" the pro must ascribe the the separate word of atheism is obvious. Why would the meaning of atheism be essentially the same thing as the definition (or in other words, meaning) of the word agnostic? This is one of the many reasons, the Pro's assertion that "The true meaning of atheism is the belief that God is just as likely to exist as not" is false. 1.https://www.google.com... 2.https://www.facebook.com... 3.http://superscholar.org... 4.http://www.huffingtonpost.com... 5.https://www.google.com...