LGBTQ+

And there’s the straw man, right on schedule…

If you go back and read what i actually said, I never made that broad and obviously inaccurate claim.

What strawman, what are you on about? Your argument that disbelief requires faith is adjacent to another common but tangentially related accusation against atheism that is clearly wrong. I'm pointing out the parallel as the reason why I'm using those same tropes to refute it because they were popularized online in the early 00s when the religious right was was spreading their bullshit--that's it. It has nothing to do with anything else that we're arguing about. It was filler.

My point, literally from the very first sentence that I wrote, concerned only those atheists, like Dawkins, who don’t stop at disbelief, but instead hold to an affirmative belief that God does not exist.

And that's what I've been arguing about, no? I'm saying he's justified and that his position is completely valid and devoid of faith. I'm not ignoring your argument. In fact, I already explained why I think it's a pointless distinction to make. Are you sure you're not ignoring my argument instead?

that belief does not have sufficient evidence to prove its truth

And I'm telling you it doesn't need evidence because of its very premise. At the scientific level of rigor, yes, I fully agree with you that it cannot be disproved, that it needs a rigorous theoretical framework, and yada yada yada, to take a definitive position however ridiculous that is to onlookers who aren't obsessive. But at the engineering level of everyday life that requires rounding the numbers so we can live our lives, it's perfectly valid and sensible as it would be with any other baseless idea of that nature, hence why I brought up the Unicorn. So I ask again, would you have faith answering no if I ask you if you believe in the PIU's omnipresent & omnipotent existence? The answer is obviously no because such a thing can't exist for many, many reasons. So why are popular gods the sole exception that requires faith to reject?

and therefore to hold nonetheless that it is in fact true is an act of faith

I already said it's only an act of faith if we had any shred of evidence of the possibilities of deities. The possibility does not exist in the first place to require faith. It's a mere rejection of a baseless idea and you're saying otherwise by applying a strict epistemological rule arbitrarily.

(And by applying that epistemological rule arbitrarily is precisely what makes people think atheism is a position of faith when it's not, hence why I brought that up at all. But it's not related. It had nothing to do with what you were saying directly! It's just a parallel of this other fundamental line of argument, which is why I'm using those same devices to refute it.)

And more broadly, that’s exactly why I never claim that it’s a universal position and I never make claims about atheism broadly, and in fact, every single damned time that I try to address this topic, I go out of my way to make it clear that I’m referring only to the specific subset of atheists who do in fact hold to that belief.

Sure, but I'm not accusing you of any of that. I'm only arguing for what Dawkins is doing which is squarely within the subject matter. If I seem to bleed outside the lines with my argument it's only because of the fundamental nature of this line of thinking. (And am I really bleeding outside the lines, though? I was very conscious of that going in and I thought I was being precise.)

someone like you shows up and slaps that damned strawman on me and proceeds to tediously recite all of the same tired and entirely irrelevant cant you’ve now recited.

Nah, you need to reread carefully what I'm saying and stop assuming.