Interesting. Her conception of what constitutes 'knowledge' is, surprisingly, extremely narrow; I wouldn't have thought that from someone who, for example, has taken such controversial feminist stands as she has in her fiction...

Symatics, we have been down that road. Every living thing lives on the assumption that perception is reality. If we call that belief, we can also call it religion. Whatever.
One would then have to be agnostic about there being planets somewhere made of blue cheese. So what. I believe there aren't, that is my religion!

I was hoping for better from Atwood, but her ignorance about atheism turned me right off. I've never seen any evidence for the existence of god or any reason to believe; therefore I don't. If someone can prove his/her existence scientifically, then I'll believe. A far cry from either religion or an absolute stand.

Agnostics don't know, atheists don't believe.

I am an agnostic atheist.

The usual misconceptions about atheism. Someone needs to read up on weak atheism and strong atheism.

Atheists in general DO NOT BELIEVE. Only strong-atheists BELIEVE there is no God. And whether that belief qualifies as religious in yet another question, whose answer is not an obvious "yes". Not all beliefs are religious, after all.

The way I see it: Atheists DO NOT BELIEVE in God. Agnostics, on the other hand, consider the existence God as a valid possibility. Atheists reject religion as a valid possibility the same way they would reject Russell's Teapot and the idea that our reality is really a Matrix-like virtual reality. Fiction is still fiction even if it cannot be proven to be untrue, and as such technically has a "possibility" of being true. Fiction is fiction untill proven otherwise, and the truthness of obvious fiction should not be considered a valid possibility.

"Atheism is a religion." Gawd, I'm sick of the trite old shibboleth. Whenever someone says "atheism is just another religion", I want to slap them and say, "that's like saying health is just another disease."

Had an interesting encounter on an airplane a few days ago, sitting next to a very nice woman, a WSJ-reading piano teacher who lives in Milwaukee, quite well read, who asked me a lot of questions about the university, students' attitudes toward all kinds of things etc. when she found out what I did. Really pleasant interaction; even said she hoped her daughter would have someone like me as a teacher someday... until the subject turned to (you guessed it) religion and I admitted that not only was I not a Christian (though I had been raised to be Lutheran, as she was), I didn't even believe in god. She got very nervous and politely said that while she couldn't agree with what I'd been saying (about anything, I assumed at that point) she hoped that I would 'be well.' It was as if I'd told her I had just landed from Venus. Don't think she'd consider my atheism as 'another kind of religion'. She seemed genuinely disturbed, almost scared. Never had that experience before, though participating on this blog has probably made me hyperaware of people's reactions to this subject.

Note to KristianZ: "Fiction is fiction until proven otherwise, and the truthness of obvious fiction should not be considered a valid possibility." say what? everything is fiction at some level, isn't it, because of the nature of language?

"Everything is fiction", why yes it is, he thought to himself. So how is he going to come to some unified, non-binary, non-polar truthiness about everything using words?

Well, that's another story. (Filled with sound and fury).

"The nature of language", is that anything like the structure of English? :)

ab-so-lute-ly

Better had Atwood said that atheism is a dogma. Her agnosticism is closer to Pyrrhonian skepticism, which would suspend judgment whether G-d exists and so avoid the self-refutation of a dogmatic skepticism (if the skeptic claims that "nothing can be known," you can ask whether he knows that.)
You could also call atheism a theology -- the most minimal of theologies.

Well, not grammatically speaking, Dabodius... if 'theology' is the study of 'theos,' i.e. the term for god in greek, and 'a/theistic' is the negation of that. I'll grant you that there is probably a more elegant way of suggesting that one doesn't believe in god that doesn't include use/negation of the term. But in a discourse such as that of the west, always already saturated with religious signification, that isn't as easy as it might sound... the assumption is that one 'believes.' Hence, I gather, the reason that Mitch has titled his book a history of 'disbelief' rather than a history of atheism...? (and it's less dogmatic, too ;)

Most atheists define "atheist" a lot differently than Atwood does.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0DQf9yzsAo