Why don’t some people believe in God?

I first started out religious. Then one day, I asked a question: Why do sooo many people believe in other gods?

So I started to research the problem. I read their holy texts, watched their sermons, and listened to the believers of those religions talk about their beliefs.

I realized that the believers in other gods were just like me. They were sincere and generally good people. The only difference was that most of them were brought up in a different religious setting.

Christians

Hindus

Muslims

Buddhists

Then I asked another question: If my god is the one true god, why would he allow so many other sincere and good people be led astray? Wouldn’t a god make an effort to make sure people knew who was the real god? And if one of their gods was real, why didn’t that god make sure that I knew who the real one was?

The only group that had a solid answer for this were atheists. They said the reason we believe in sincerely believe in so many different gods was that none of those gods were actually real.

Atheists

I started to listen to atheists and learned that many of them were just like me at one point: Good and sincere people who couldn’t understand why a god let the world get a certain way. They searched for answers and couldn’t find any.

I learned that atheists knew my religion better than I did. They would pick out parts of the holy texts that we seemed to always gloss over. I would learn that my god would endorse, and often conducted, genocide and murder many times in the holy text. Children were often targeted and slaughtered (ie: Passover). Women were to always be subservient to men. Slavery was legal and regulated to the point where you knew exactly how much you can beat a slave and get away with it.

I learned that the bible would have us believe in factual absurdities about reality. Did humans really come from just two people? Are we all the products of incest? Was the planet really flooded at one point? Where would have all of the water come from and where did it all go? How in the world would you fit two of every kind of animal, predator and prey alike, on a boat for an entire year and keep them alive? How would animals survive generations of inbreeding afterwards? How would have salt-water marine life and fresh-water marine life survive this event?

Why would an all-powerful god need to sacrifice a part of himself to himself to change the rules that he himself made and enforced? Can you really call it a sacrifice if, in the end, that god didn’t really give up anything? Why would an all-powerful god demand to be worshipped and threaten an eternity of pain if we didn’t?

On and on the questions went until I finally conceded the obvious: The god that I believed in didn’t actually exist. It was the invention of a people from a time who had different morals and a different understanding of the universe.

Furthermore, all of the other religions fell into the same problems. No other religion seemed to fit our morals or observations of the universe. They were artificially created by people too.

That’s why I’m an atheist. I don’t hate your god. I just don’t think it ever existed.