Anonymous asked this question on 5/18/2000:
Why are you an atheist?
QueerByChoice gave this response on 5/18/2000:
When I was about three years old, my preschool teacher asked the class to draw a picture of God. I had heard the word
QueerByChoice gave this follow-up answer on 5/18/2000:
"God" before this but no one had ever explained to me exactly who this "God" person was. My mother had been raised a devout Catholic but had lost her faith before I was born, and my father had been taken to a Protestant church occasionally as a kid but had never really been taught to be very religious. By the time I was born, neither one of them had much interest in religion anymore and they didn't have much opinion one way or the other about whether God existed. So when my preschool teacher told the class to draw God, I'd heard the word "God" before but I didn't know anything about who "God" was supposed to be except that I had a vague impression he was a very important and powerful man, sort of like the President. Anyway, my preschool teacher was horrified by my ignorance, so I went home from preschool that day wondering what all the fuss was about and asked my mother who this "God" person was.
My mother said something like this: "Well, a lot of people think there's a being called God who has the power to do absolutely anything at all just by thinking about it and who created everything that has ever existed. But you can't see this being, and nobody can prove whether it exists or not. Some people don't believe it exists, but a lot of people believe that it does exist and they just say they don't need to see any proof, they just trust that this being exists."
I told my mother, "That's silly - everybody knows magic isn't real. Nobody has the power to do absolutely anything at all just by thinking about it." And she replied, "Oh, people who think that are called atheists. But you're too young to decide forever right now, so when you grow up you might change your mind."
Well, I never did change my mind. I still do not see any sense in having blind faith in the existence of a being that no one has ever seen or touched or offered me a shred of proof for the existence of it and which defies all known laws of physics, biology and chemistry by supposedly existing everywhere at once without containing a single atom of mass, supposedly being alive and conscious yet containing not a single cell in its body, and in fact having no body and no mass whatsoever yet supposedly somehow still existing. And I also find it EXTREMELY suspicious to consider how very useful this concept of a "God" is to those who want to promote their own selfish ends and assert their power over others. This "God" person is consistently portrayed as conveniently white, male, homophobic, and invariably 100% on the side of whoever purports to speak for him. In baseball games, players and fans on both teams are absolutely convinced that this God person is rooting exclusively for THEIR team. And each and every person who prays to this "God" person invariably hears exactly what they want to hear - that they are forgiven for their past sins and that God agrees with their current belief system 100%. How convenient it must be for all the homophobic racist sexist ministers to be able to claim they speak not merely for themselves but for some kind of all-powerful white male GOD when they preach that women were meant to be slaves to their husbands and same-sex love was meant to be treated like dirt instead of like the sacred emotion it is. And how convenient too, that as they preach these things they pass around collection baskets telling all the poor, nonwhite, female and non-hetero churchgoers that GOD wants them to devote their last pennies of savings to a GODly cause, and then of course all those pennies conveniently go to "charitable" organizations like the Salvation Army which give out food to the poor ONLY on the condition that the poor sit through hours of lecturing on how the very nonwhite non-hetero women who donated the food in the first place are designated by GOD as inferior beings whose only place is to take orders from their husbands and never, ever, ever suppose that they have a right to become ministers themselves, much less to worship at the altar of a black lesbian Goddess who might have a shred more actual LOVE for them than the white male homophobic God they've all been talked into being the slaves of.
QueerByChoice
QueerByChoice gave this follow-up answer on 5/18/2000:
P.S. Sorry about the mid-sentence interruption in the first paragraph. My "follow-up answer" should be read as a continuation of the same sentence I was in the middle of when AskMe.com cut me off.
The average rating for this answer is 5.
Anonymous rated this answer a 5.
Wow. That is the best answer I have ever gotten to ANY queation here at all. And the best answer to why someone doesnt believe in God. You truely are a special person, weather you see it or not.