Ask an Atheist: Is Atheism Disbelief or a Lack of Belief?

There isn’t much of a difference beyond the semantics. Remember everybody is born an atheist, and remains so for all the many god(s) they never come to believe in during their lives. As most people do not live in places where their religion isn’t the majority, it is all too easy for individual religions to imagine the issue only in terms of their own belief or non, not a smorgasbord of equally certain convictions that are quite mutually exclusive as doctrinal packages.

Why doesn’t a person believe in Zeus (lots of people in Europe used to a few thousand years ago)? The reasons to be skeptical of their belief extend implicitly to all religious convictions. That a particular religion had (or still has) sincere adherents only shows its functional utility and popularity, not that it is true. This must be the case given that, whatever religion an individual believes in, most of the people on earth haven’t believed it (an example being Christianity today, where 2.6 billion believers are still outnumbered by 4.4 billion non-Christians). So whatever religion a person believes in, they are implicitly declaring all the others wrong, and are just as much an atheist regarding those faiths as full-tilt atheists are.

The ability of humans to firmly believe so many mutually contradictory faiths casts into doubt the very notion that any of them are likely to be more true than any other, and that in the absence of uniquely impressive evidence (say, only one religion manifesting successful miraculous healing after prayer, or a deity being more actively communicative so that genuine conversations can ensue instead of affirmations resting only on readings of ancient texts) the atheist looks at the competing “truths” and concludes “none of the above” as the most likely option.