Why are Agnosticism and Atheism treated like they are the same thing?
Agnosticism and Atheism are paired together like they are some packaged group. When you search Agnostic on Google it brings up searches that contain Atheism as well (with Atheism in bold to show that it search with it as a replacement world). This makes no sense to me. Yes an Agnostic person can be Atheist, but they may be Theist. An Atheist person can also be Agnostic but they might be Gnostic. These are two different ways of categorizing religious beliefs. The practice of grouping them together and using them interchangeable with each other is no different than use the term African-American and gay, Native American and transsexual, Hispanic and straight, and Caucasian and bisexual interchangeably (P.S. Ethnicity and sexual orientation were randomly generated into pairs). Yes each could be of the sexual orientation they are paired with, but they could also be any of the others because one has nothing to do with the other. It would be quite annoying to try to look up information concerning gay rights and receive nothing but information concerning African-American rights, or vice versa. So why should I have to dig through thousands of links concerning atheism to get to links concerning agnosticism. This only furthers the misunderstanding and ignorance of what Agnosticism is (because it is difficult to find things concerning it). We as members of the Agnostic community, and those of the Atheist community as well, should work to fix the tremendously aggravating, illogical, and unrepresentative problem.
Sorry this ended up becoming more of a rant then a question, but it is still valid.
@Johnny Maistre: No, you are incorrect on both accounts. Agnostic means that you believe that one cannot know whether there is a god or not as well as not being able to know qualities about it/them. This is a religious belief, it isn't looking for religious beliefs. An agnostic person can believe in gods, an afterlife, reincarnation, spiritual beings just like any gnostic theist. The only difference being that the believe one can't know for certain.
An atheist is a person that believes there is no god(s). Nothing more, nothing less. There are Buddhist that are atheist. This is because beliefs in spiritual beings, an eternal afterlife, and or a reincarnation cycle does not require a belief or disbelief in god. Also, Buddhist doesn't have a absolute set in stone belief in god(s). It is true though that many people use atheist to many that an individual believes there is nothing spiritual in existence, however this is an incorrect, although popular, usage.