Reply #20: It's not the accoutrements that are needed.

[Igel]

All that's needed is a "doxa", a belief or opinion (or, more commonly, a set of them), that must be held to be orthos or "right".

That said, I find it hard to think of a set of opinions that must be held to to be an orthodox atheist; there are few beliefs/opinions an atheist need hold, and those are usually so crucial to the definition that to violate them makes the erstwhile atheist a non-atheist.

Non-belief in a deity is pretty much it. After that usually comes a reliance on human cognition as sufficient, in principle, to understand things. Next is a person's capacity to define his/her own raison d'etre, goals, and to arrive at a principled decision as to what constitutes right or wrong in any given situation and the set of behaviors to defined as 'moral'; personally, I think the latter isn't needed, and suspect that many atheists don't actually produce their own reason for existing but instead merely parrot others' or go with what their parents taught them.

I suppose that a belief in an inchoate and inscrutable World Soul that we should all yearn to join ourselves with might be seen as compatible with atheism since it wouldn't constitute a theos, but would also allow the atheist to say that human cognition isn't sufficient. Perhaps a person holding such a belief could be called a heterodox atheist.