Every once in a while someone asks me, with the sudden leer of a half-starved mid-food-chain predator thinking it's finally about to get a snack, whether I'm an agnostic or an atheist. Usually this comes right after I've said I'm an atheist, which kind of spoils the surprise of the prepared follow-up attack, which attempts to structurally equate theism and atheism as mortal assertions about the immortal, rendering atheism vaguely self-undermining. Thus, in theory, I'd be forced to concede that I'm "only" an agnostic, and presumably if the worst objection one may raise against religion is that "we don't know", then religious belief is a more reasonable response than it might be if it were allowable to just say "no".  

But it is allowable to just say no. In fact, theism and atheism are not structurally equivalent. Theism is the set of mortal assertions about the immortal. Atheism is a rejection of making mortal assertions about the immortal. Religion is not a real question, it's metaphor cowering beligerently as axiom, and thus it can neither require nor benefit from answers. I should be no more defined or labeled by my disbelief in gods than by my disbelief in elves. Myth is where we keep our old placeholders for the things we didn't used to know how to know. The good myths are the ones that are worth something as art after we stop inanely insisting that they're still, or were ever, science.