Introduction

After coming to some sort of understanding of why we don't believe in the Christian God, most people next proceed to wonder how we cannot believe in any god, or at least a creator of some sort. This article attempts to address some of those questions.

Why do you not believe in other religions?

Actually, atheists are seldom asked this question. The reason is pretty simple: if you are not a member of another religion, it is likely that you already recognize it to be nonsense anyways, and you don't feel the need to ask why someone else doesn't believe in it.

Buddha, Ganesha, Zeus, and Quetzlcoatl

It's the same reason why one adult never asks another adult why they don't believe in Santa Claus. They already know the answer.

Atheists feel largely the same way about other religions as you do. The only difference is, we also feel the same way about your religion as you do about other religions. (Incidentally, all of the people from those other religions feel the same way about your religion as we do.)

Every religion thinks that they are the ones who got it right, and everyone else is crazy or misguided. Atheists think you are all crazy and misguided. (I kid… sort of.)

But here is a very important distinction between atheism and religion: unlike religious people, atheists don't claim to know anything. We don't claim to have all the answers to many of the great questions about Life, The Universe, and Everything. We might have some ideas, and some more supported than others. We simply recognize that no one else has the answers either.

Remember, atheism is not a belief system. It is simply the absence of belief.

How can you NOT believe in a creator?

Many people look around at the apparent complexity of the universe and are understandably amazed. They assume that something this vast and this complex must have been created by someone or something. And they are particularly confused when atheists say that they don't feel the same way.

How can atheists be so pig-headed or closed-minded? Well, we need to look at it from a couple of different perspectives.

Running in Circles

First, we are always running into the problem of "infinite regress". Which is just a fancy way of saying, "Who created the creator?" In other words, if anything this complex requires a creator, then that creator (who we would therefore assume is equally complex) must have been created also. And his creator must have had a creator, and so on, and so on.

This is usually the point in the conversation where the religious person contradicts his initial assumption (that everything must be created) by stating that there can and must be something that did not require a creator — in this case, their god of choice. But this presents several more unanswerable problems, namely, where does this creator exist? Another article on this website addresses why the concept of something existing outside of space and time is not only very contradictory, but also largely meaningless.

Alternative Theories

Some atheists are even willing to concede the point that the highly complex nature of the universe suggests that there is some other force or "higher power" behind it's creation. But this doesn't mean they believe in any god the way most religions think about it.

To an atheist, it is just as likely that the universe was created by an ultra-intelligent species of creatures from another dimension or universe. If that description sounds like nonsense to you, understand that it really has no more or less basis in reality that any other theory of creation put forward by the major religious philosophies of today. Thus the reason all of those other philosophies also sound like nonsense to us. There is no real proof for any of them; they are all essentially a form of wild conjecture resulting from human imagination.

Do Atheists Think All Religious People are Delusional?

Delusional is a very strong word, and it carries a lot of negative emotion. I don't much care for it to be used in this context myself.

When an atheist calls you delusional, they don't think you are crazy in the same way as someone who is confined to the mental ward at the hospital, locked in a room with rubber walls, believes he is Abraham Lincoln, and yells at the voices in his head to free the slaves.

But try to see things from the atheist's perspective for a moment.

First, you have an imaginary friend. You believe he is with you all the time, following you everywhere, watching you at all times.

You believe that you talk to this friend on a regular basis… and that he often talks back. Maybe it's in words, or maybe it is in feelings or thoughts or ideas that enter your head, but you believe you are in fact holding a conversation of sorts with this person.

Occasionally things happen in your life that you don't entirely understand, and you often attribute them to actions taken by your imaginary friend – even though there is no real evidence on which to base this belief. Or sometimes you believe these things were done on his behalf by one of his helpers, whom you refer to with such words as "angels" or "spirits".

You believe that, when you die, you will go to one of two places for all eternity: either a blissful paradise or a fiery prison. The actual details of these two alternatives vary widely from one individual to the next, but the general idea is the same. You believe in this despite the fact that the only evidence for such a place is in a book written thousands of years ago by primitive and superstitious men. (The same men who thought the world was flat and square, who thought diseases like schizophrenia or epilepsy were actually demonic possession, and who previously believed that thunderbolts were cast around by angry men in the sky.)

Some (though not all) of you believe in stories of talking serpents, of parting seas, of global floods, of men walking on water and turning water into wine. These are stories that, had they come from ANY other source, you yourself would laugh at them and instantly recognize them as fiction. But because they come from the same ancient textbook mentioned previously, you accept them as absolutely true "on faith".

Not only can none of the things in which you believe be proven by any means we have at our disposal, a great many of them can be disproven, either through logical deduction, or by physical evidence.

So, when an atheist says that religious beliefs are a delusion… it isn't entirely without merit. If you are Christian, I realize that all of the things I listed above make perfect sense to you. You think that I just don't understand; perhaps I'm just too closed-minded. All of these things seem completely real to you, despite all evidence to the contrary. And that, my friend, is the essence of delusion.