The Scathing Atheist

by Noah Lugeons

It baffles many atheists when religious folks say things like “I just don’t understand how you can believe in a world without God.”  They’re baffled because they’re quite certain that the theist is familiar with both of the constituent principles involved; god and not believing in something. How can a person who themselves rejects some beliefs be confounded by the notion of rejecting some beliefs?

The problem, of course, is one of cognitive dissonance. They’ve insulated the god-concept so much in their mind that they can’t apply reason to it in the same way that they can to claims of the paranormal or other religions. It sounds like I’m being dismissive, but how else can you possibly explain a person who thinks god has demanded the tip of their penis as a sacrifice laughing at how silly someone else’s beliefs are?

When I was a younger and less experienced atheist, I used to appeal to all the other religions that they didn’t believe in. I was often thwarted by hand-waving explanations of the various interpretations of the one god. It was only much later that I realized that intelligent people who have decided to ignore logic and be theists anyway have to build a hell of a defense around it. So much so that when they see somebody who has embraced the obvious, they don’t even know how we scaled the wall in the first place.

So I offer the chart above as a quick and easy visual aid for any theists that seem confused by your choice to reject all religious myths instead of all but one. And as it turns out, the Redditors love the charts and graphs, so expect to see more of them.