Atheism

There is this famous quote from Richard Dawkins: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.“ 1/5

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I would go one step further and propose that not only is everyone an atheist to *some* degree, but none more so than an actual believer. Why? 2/5

Assuming N deities in human history (the exact value of N does not matter here — estimates of 10,000 are common), the believer believes in just 1 (or one pantheon), and firmly rejects the remaining N-1 because they are mutually exclusive (sometimes to the point of heresy). 3/5

The typical atheist rejects just one more deity, for a total of N, but not as firmly: the atheist’s lack of belief isn’t symmetrical to the believer’s faith. It’s just a default position that awaits incontrovertible evidence, without rejecting the tenuous possibility. 4/5

The believer’s position is, in aggregate, a much more resolute position against the existence of most deities than the atheist’s position against the existence of all deities. 5/5

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Yes. I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in any god. That doesn’t mean that I reject the possibility that a god exists; I don’t know that it does, nor which one it is of all the infinite possibilities. That’s still being an atheist, and yet is a softer position than a theist who refuses to consider any other god

if that's true, are these people you're talking about really atheists? and can you use "math" like this when you're dealing with infinites?

yeah, on the whole, convicted belief in any one deity is far more arrogant (and in my mind far more reprehensible) than the disbelief in any of it