It’s not that I’m an atheist, it’s that god doesn’t exist.
Efilzeo
Italy
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It’s not that I’m an atheist, it’s that god doesn’t exist.
Efilzeo
Italy
Nice one.
This “Why I am an atheist” is full of win. It can has one biscuit.
Louis
tl;dr
And you’re too lazy to make one?
Glen Davidson
It’s certainly true that none of the gods known on this planet exist. The most popular ones are some of the poorest constructed fictional characters ever created. You have to know that any deity who took itself seriously would be well aware of the concept of critical thinking and give you presentation that would knock the socks off the most incredulous, curmudgeonly skeptic.
Don’t these people know that any ‘supreme being’ would be well aware that WE are aware of scams and the human penchant for coloring the truth (some more liberally than others)? Even as poor a character as the old testament deity should laugh at the suggestion of taking anything purely on faith.
This is actually a great point, why do we need to label ourselves because we don’t buy in to someone else’s fairy tale? We’re just normal.
Okay. That guy wins at the Why I am an Atheist game. We are not worthy.
….think I would prefer…”It’s not that I’m an atheist, it’s that gods don’t exist “
Kinda weird to use a plural noun for something which has a quantity of zero, but yeah.
Pure awesome. Must be a descendant of Bruno.
Beauty eh!
This is now my FB status. A perfect passive aggressive response to my elderly cousin’s frequent posting of Jesus porn.
+1,000,000 points for lower-case “g” in “god”.
I would also like to present you with an Internet High Five.
I think Efilzeo’s point is the word atheist is unnecessary. I sort of agree. Perhaps using the word atheist gives too much respect for the word theist. Theist is just another word for idiot. So maybe a good alternative to the word atheist would be “not an idiot”.
What a wonderfully minimalist statement. I’ve seen the cute construction, “We’re all Zeus atheists and Ra atheists” — notwithstanding the common origins of Zeus, Ra, and the Hebrew god — and the first time I heard it I remember thinking it was interesting there really isn’t a word for that. It’s not that I’m a Zeus agnostic; there is no Zeus. Funny.
Is it? Are you saying that all theists are idiots, or that all idiots are theists?
That would only even begin to work if all idiots were theists.
Just piling on to say this is full of win.
I recently had an argument on Facebook with a friend who trotted out the old “atheism is a religion” B.S. He wanted to equate my confidence that god doesn’t exists to someone else’s confidence that he does and Jesus was his son. I tried to explain that it’s only our cultural programming that makes him equate the two, when my confidence that god doesn’t exist is more akin to his confidence that unicorns don’t exist. God is just a privileged fair tale.
What I should have said was: “It’s not that I’m an atheist, it’s that god doesn’t exist.”
Nice. Succinct. Personally I can’t do succinct but I do admire it.
Best one yet.
It’s not that I don’t believe in god(s), it’s that I’ve never heard of a god that I found even remotely believable.
Bravo!
Hands Efilzeo a prize of one internets.
Awesome.
@damonbarth (#6)
My (then 10-year old) son overheard in conversation with a friend whose parents are Christian:
Friend: “Are you a Christian?”
Son: (in matter-of-fact tone) “No. I’m just normal.”
No atheist indoctrination required, just the freedom to think for himself.
At Christmas lunch last year my (teenage) son made the suggestion: “What if Jesus was just some guy named Jesus?”
This belongs in the “Yeah, me too” column, not in the “Why I am an atheist” column. A believer could just as smarmily say, “It’s not that I’m a theist; it’s that God exists.”
When I debate with believers, it’s irritating how often their ‘argument’ comes down to nothing more than reasserting their position. This appears to be what Efilzeo has done. I’m disappointed.
This is an Albert Camus quote: “I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”
This probably is more about reluctance to identify with any ‘group’ than anything else.
For example, the only community I’m interested in belonging to is the community of life on Earth (group: the biosphere). I deeply distrust the whole in-group/out-group business – understandable in chimpanzees, perhaps, but come on. Us vs. Them? Who needs that?
Nor do I think that god(s) and ‘afterlives’ have any existence in objective reality. But I’ve never thought of myself as an atheist, or an agnostic or even bothered with such definitions. It’s like having to repeatedly say that you don’t believe Peter Pan’s Neverland actually exists, and defining yourself as an ‘apeterpanist’ – the whole discussion is kind of ridiculous.
Religion is based of stories or myths invented by human beings, that’s all, but the underlying agenda is social control of various sorts, and always has been – the first examples of human writing are clay tablets that record donations to the ancient Sumerian temples. A con game run against the ignorant for the benefit of con artists, that’s all it’s ever been.
If you want to understand how objective reality, aka nature, aka the universe, actually works then you need to apply the scientific process, which involves testing theories via experiment and observation, among other things.
*delurk*
Really and truly the best atheist anecdote I have had the pleasure of reading.
*relurk*
best one.
Thank god (so to speak) for this one. I was beginning to think that atheists generally had diarrhea of the keyboard.
This one is kind of an anti-tautology to counter EVERY xtian who, when asked why the bible is true, will wheel out a quote (or quotes) from the bible. Then they don’t get your sarcasm when you say, ‘Well, fuck! You got me there!’
scaryduck says:
Er, no. When used as a name (as Efilzeo does) the use of the capital “G” is proper and necessary in English and many other languages. When used as a noun (one god, two gods) the lowercase letter is appropriate.
Of course, “God” is not actually a name, its usage as such is based on a mistake made by believers. According to the book they purport to believe in the name of the deity is Yahoo-Wahoo, or anything else you can make from the tetragrammaton.
Actually, it’s standard English to do so. How many are there? There are none. The pronoun “none” takes the plural form of the verb “to be,” it is plural strangely enough. (“Nothing” is singular though.)
Even weirder from a math perspective because in mathematics there is exactly one nothing (the null set).
Awesome, Efilzeo. Can I use it?
This sentiment, by the way, was expressed a few years ago by none other than Sam Harris. He actually took a lot of heat from the “atheist community” for suggesting that we drop the term from regular use, at least as a group identifier. He made some of the same arguments noted above.
Sadly, this strikes be as the logical equivalent of the theist who says that he believes in the Bible simply because it’s true.