Sorry but atheism makes no positive claims

Andrew puts up some email from atheists readers.

They get this interesting response:

Your atheist readers make the classic move of pretending to be the referee when in fact they are just another player on the field. They are treating it as an intellectual puzzle rather than what it actually is for every last of us: a lived commitment. This is why the term "Atheist" itself is so misleading. You're an atheist, fine. I'm an A-Vishnuist, and an A-Buddhist, and an A-Teapotist. Telling me what you don't believe tells me very little, but it's a really cool way to get into the conversation in such a way that everyone has to defend their positions except you -- you get to attack.

This would be valid were this merely an intellectual exercise. There you can usefully indulge the distinctly modern prejudice that doubt is more reasonable than belief. But you can no more avoid making a positive choice about the source of meaning in your life and the universe than you can avoid living in some country. You can talk about which country is best to live in, but the atheist pretends you can live in no country at all.

You gotta live somewhere, and you gotta believe in something, because your beliefs are being expressed every day in how you live your life. Atheists should be forced to articulate their positive position (say, secular humanism) as price of admission to the conversation. So when your reader wants to "put the burden of proof on the one making a specific, positive claim," I simply point out that living your life is a specific, positive claim, and thus everyone has to bear the burden of proof equally.

Analogies can be fun: what if I live on a boat in international water -- or would that be agnosticism?

But I don't see why we should have to bear a burden of proof if I'm not making a positive claim. I too am an A-Vishnuist, an A-Buddhist, an A-Teapotist, but also an a-theist. Living my life is not a "specific, positive claim" any more than a monkey or a dog living its life is a "specific, positive claim". We're all atheists unless we have a positive belief in something that qualifies as "theism". Some of us atheists might be "secular humanists", others not.

I am secular. But I am not a humanist, because I believe that future nonhuman sapient beings should be persons too. There is nothing about my philosophy of life that restricts itself to humanity, other than the fact that humans are currently the only known sentient beings.