How to be an Atheist?

[robvalue]

If this is at all serious...

"Atheist" is a description. You are are one, or you are not. Once you are one, it requires no effort and indeed you don't have a choice in the matter. You can't "try" not believing in something you believe in, any more than I can try believing I can fly. The mind is only changed by new evidence, or by a critical examination of how it has processed evidence it already has.

What you do have a choice about is how much of an effort you make to examine your own beliefs as objectively as possible, to understand why you believe things, and to discover whether the reasons are rational or not. A big clue is that if you bring "feelings" into it, you're not very likely being rational.

One last point which is often missed: being an atheist doesn't necessarily mean believing there is "no God". That is informally known as strong atheism. It can simply be just not being convinced there is one, but not believing that there isn't, either. In other words, undecided. That is still atheism. If "God" is simply described as an intelligence somehow responsible for this reality, that is my position. It's informally called weak atheism.