his assessment of atheism is pretty accurate. it does take a kind of faith to explicitly reject the idea of god. Unfortunately for him, Christianity is exactly the same.
Not really - if you're a rationalist, you assume non existence in the absence of proof, because of the unprovability of absence. If you're an empiricist, you assume non existence in the absence of direct observation.
An agnostic, as I assume you are given the tone of your comment, takes the stance either that whether or not a god exists is unknowable, which must imply that it is unprovable and unmeasurable, or that it hasn't been proven or measured yet. Via rationalism or empiricism, as defined above, an agnostic of either type is therefore, to all intents and purposes, an atheist.
To express it even more simply, the difference between an atheist and an agnostic is like that between a rationalist who, in the absence of all evidence, states a negative relationship, and one who states an unknown relationship - the thing is, if you state an unknown relationship, you still behave as if there is no relationship, so you're acting just like an atheist in every way except calling yourself one. If you behave as if there is a relationship even though stating it is unknown, you're into the territory of Pascal's wager which, when averaged over the whole phase space of possible unproved deities from zero to infinity, and for all possible responses to them, favours the negative response, as has been mentioned on FSTDT many times before.
If, on the other hand, you're agnostic but neither rationalist nor empiricist, then what exactly are you?
