Viviane: I can't know whether or not there is no deity, of course, but since I have no evidence that any exists, certainly not any that anyone has told me about, I live functionally as an atheist and indeed consider myself one.
This appears to be a sensible reasoning. But let me ask you this: A child of one year old who holds no belief that deities exist. Is that child atheist? Because according to the simplistic definition that "atheism is a disbelief in deities", a child is atheist. And so is a person who has a severe mental handicap from birth. They don't believe in deities, ergo, are they atheists? It's not so simple. There must be something more to atheism than simply disbelief in deities.
- I posit that the overtly rejection of deities on the premise that they don't exist should be called atheism.
- I posit that the disbelief in deities based on lack of objective evidence for their existence is skepticism.
- I posit that the inability to believe or disbelieve in deities based on the premise that they are unknowable is agnosticism.
My proposition is that there is a fourth stand: That the only thing that can be said about deities is that they are absent, not present, from the known universe, thus leaving the questions of belief or disbelief, existence or non-existence, entirely open. This I coined absentheism but feel free to call it anything else if you come up with a more suitable term.
All of the above are theoretical positions.
However, you introduced another concept: functional atheist. That is, regardless of how your intellectual position towards deities is, your attitude in life is consistent with a belief that deities don't exist. This functional atheism is very much on the same domain of attitude of an apatheist, who "regards the question of the existence or non-existence of a god or gods to be essentially meaningless and irrelevant".
Eden