Proof for being an atheist

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I think what the question really was is why you guys are atheists because no one is born with automatic knowledge or a particular set of beliefs. A person of faith does wonder what the decision is based on. Kinda like a psychology question on upbringing to reasoning.  Is it that there is just simply know proof or you just don't know? Sometimes people of a particular faith do wonder about why the rejection thereof and I think that is why you guys get alot of these types of questions because of the curiosity of no belief in something more powerful than the human race.  I have honestly wondered that myself throughout my life.  I just never really had a chance to ask a true atheist those questions.  Before I just ran into this site, I did not know that there was a difference in the atheist views like agnostic versus the other.  I thought all atheists believe in no God or gods at all which could be over-generalizing the veiw. I also know that people sometimes troll the site to push religion down a person's own throat or on a group of people.  That is the last thing anyone wants from another individual.  It can also be a touchy subject for some people.

A better question to ask is, "Why is almost everyone who is raised in Saudi Arabia going to become convinced that Allah is God? And why is almost everyone who is raised in the United States going to become convinced that Yahweh/Jehovah/Jesus is God?"

We are all born without a religious program installed on the computer of our brains. There is some evidence that a common tendency toward religious sentiment may be genetic, but that's a different issue, having a lot to do with how we see patterns and answer questions about the world based on our social and pattern-seeking hardware, based on tribal hunter-gatherer evolution.  At some point, the cultural program becomes installed on our brain, sometimes in little details we pick up (this is why installing religious symbols everywhere is so important to Believers, like crosses on the highway and trying to have leaders we respect lead us or our children in prayer) or in the teachings of our family traditions, and voila, the person is a Believer in The Truth™.

We are not atheists because we're mad at the efforts I just described. We're atheists because our brains reject the programming of our culture, since we can clearly see that in every other culture it is also just programming... if you think about it, you also believe that in Saudi Arabia it's just programming. You just look the other way for the "local" version of the same thing.

(Edit: Oops, forgot a clause in my either/or.)