I suspect this article may rest on a misinterpretation of the quoted sentence from American Atheists: “Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods.” Here, in this Medium article, the author wonders what could possibly be the difference between “disbelief” and “lack of belief” and suggests that, for binary options, there is no difference. As in the author’s example of the hidden ball: If I believe there is a ball, and if I believe it is either red or blue, and if I don’t believe it’s red, then I must believe it’s blue. But that conclusion, “the ball is blue,” requires accepting those three premises. The atheist doesn’t accept those premises. It’s the theists who argue about the color of the ball: red Christian, blue Muslim, or whatever other options they might consider. The theist says: There is a ball and it has some color. The atheist says: There is no ball. The more agnostic approach (which is also somewhat compatible with the theist and atheist stances) is that, be there a ball or no, no one will ever know for sure that it exists and still less could we ever know what color it is. The sentence from American Atheists didn’t clearly communicate this, although their word “denial” was a clue. In one sense of the word “denial,” one has to provisionally accept something before denying it; “denial” amounts to switching sides. It’s more like midcareer apostasy than lifelong lack of belief. Or, similarly, another kind of denial is consciously taking a contrarian position to what someone else believes. So either you are speaking against your own former position or you are speaking against someone else’s position. That is denial. It is the performative sense of the word. So, in this sense of “denial,” the atheist isn’t denying that the ball is red and thereby accepting that it’s blue. Nor is the atheist exactly “denying” that the ball exists, either, if the word “denial” carries the connotation of lying or resisting authority. It’s the subtlety between asking “Is the emperor, in fact, naked?” and “Do you deny that the emperor is wearing clothes?” The latter functions more as an accusation about whether you accept authority. If you don’t accept any part of the premise to begin with, that is, if you haven’t already participated in pageantry around a naked emperor and aren’t committed to upholding the farce, then you are more like the truth-telling child in the story who simply says: “The emperor has no clothes!” The child isn’t really “denying” anything because the child wasn’t asked anything and doesn’t understand the political consequences of public denial of authority. The child is just stating what seems to be an obvious fact. The atheist is stating that the ball does not exist. The ball isn’t there to be denied. The atheist is just pointing to that emptiness. No clothes on the emperor; no ball in the hand.