A Civil Religious Debate

Well the word has no real definition. The concept (as commonly encountered among Christians) has no real substance, but is rather a collection of odd personality traits, like the need to be worshipped, and anger or compassion, when this is or is not received, and then equally ill-defined "abilities," like that to (somehow) create matter where there was once nothing, among other things.

The word isn't descriptive, it's merely a reference to a sort of emotional connection some people have with an abstract concept. So.....among those who share your beliefs, you'll probably be understood. Among those who can differentiate between fantasy and reality, or who just don't have an overriding motivation to ignore the distinction, you will be misunderstood.

However, since I'm one of the latter, I would advocate for the "....misunderstood" position.

Well, psychologically, there isn't a middle ground. If someone suggests something to you, you ordinarily deny it or accept it.

However, the actual claim of Atheism is merely that there is no evidence for any sort of god-thing, and not the direct statement "there is no god."

For it is impossible to prove a negative, like "there is no god." Or, like, "there are no unicorns," or "there are no wormholes."

We might, at some point, find something which indicating, neccesarily, that there was some kind of being, some kind of intelligence, out there, that we might call a god. Or we might find a unicorn, or astrophysics might discover a wormhole (If I've kept up to date with my astrophysics), and then these things would have been proved. But you can't prove the negative of them, and until they are proved, the claims are merely indeterminate, neither true nor false.

Actually, given Quantum Mechanics, this seems to be a property of the universe. Of reality itself, that is.

Things which are unobserved have indeterminate states.