[Serious] Why are you an Atheist?

[Mister Agenda]

Any sufficiently advanced being could convince me it was God. As a mere mortal, I am not competent to tell the difference between God and any number of conceivable powerful beings capable of powerful feats or just manipulating my perceptions. For that matter, I can imagine having great difficulty telling God from a hallucinatory experience.

Even if God were real, there are logical problems with it being able to prove that it's the reputed tri-Omni deity that created all of existence (except itself because it was always there, for some reason or none). A real God couldn't do anything to convince us that aforementioned perception manipulators couldn't. It can't demonstrate that it's the tri-Omni Creator, it can only demonstrate that it's really powerful, or at least appears to be. Once you're above a certain level of power or illusion, we mortals can't tell the difference.

That said, I will gladly believe any reality or perception warper that claims to be God if it keeps it from torturing me.

I have to agree. If I believed that this God was like many have made him out to be I would have nothing to do with him and would decide not to believe in him. I would gather all the evidence I could muster to disprove his existence. I would pile it up so high nothing else could be seen. I would religiously worship that pile of rubbish faithfully every morning.

For the most part man has constructed god in their image not the other way around. This construction is made of a being that is unbending, revengeful, and arbitrary. He has been depicted as a being willing and wanting to torcher those who disagree with him. However, this is a malconstruction and unsupported in scripture. Believe he exists or not, at least accept the fact that his character has been maligned from what scripture teaches.

I didn't decide not to believe. How would that even work? I read the Bible cover-to-cover twice, and although it cured me of being a Christian, it didn't make me an atheist. I still believed in God, I just didn't think he, she, or it inspired the Bible. I thought too highly of God to believe the biblical depiction of God.

I used to believe in just about everything: Alien abduction, ancient aliens, Bigfoot, ESP, ghosts, the Loch Ness Monster, spirits, supernatural miracles, and so on. I thought the Duke University studies had proven ESP beyond a reasonable doubt. Then a couple of guys demonstrated how easy it was to fool the scientists involved, and when Duke tightened up its protocols to eliminate deception whether conscious or unconscious, their results were equal to chance alone.

I started to become more skeptical. I started to ask about the quality of evidence supporting fantastic claims. God was the last fantastical being I stopped believing in, and all I did was apply the same standard to claims about God that I was applying to claims about the paranormal.

Assuming that you don't believe in every god ever claimed, is it your process to gather all the evidence you can to disprove their existence because you don't like their character, or do you just find the claims that those gods exist unconvincing?