I cannot make a statement as obviously true as: There is no such thing as a planet where there lives a race of sentient kleenex tissues who sleep under rocks
It would be impossible for me to prove, although it should be obvious, someone to whom it did not seem obvious would demand that I give them proof of such a statement. How could I ever expect to prove that there is no planet out there with a sentient race of kleenex living on it? I'd have to take a person who required such proof to every planet in our solar system, kick over every rock to prove it to them. After we're done looking under every rock in the solar system, it would not be enough. I would have to then take our insistant friend to the next nearest solar system, kick over every rock on all the planets in THAT system...
It's a pretty big universe, eventually I'd get very tired of taking our friend around knocking over rocks to show him there are no sentient kleenex sleeping under them. Even if I were tireless and immortal and managed to get through the whole of the galaxy this way, visiting every star system and turning over every rock to prove the non-existence of these sentient Kleenex... it still wouldn't be enough. There are as many galaxies in our universe as there are stars in our galaxy... I'd have to visit every single planet in the universe to prove that statement.
For that reason I cannot say "There is no such thing as God". Not only is it a threatening way to state my position, it's a statement that cannot be proven, because like the statement in red up there, it's a universal negative.
But I can say something along the lines of "I do not accept the idea that there is such a thing as God". Using this same way of stating my position I can also say "I do not accept the idea that there is such a thing as a race of sentient Kleenex that sleep under rocks" and I can state this with confidence because all I'm saying is that I do not accept the sentient kleenex concept or the god concept into my model of the universe.
Many believers of God do not see the difference, and still demand proof of the non-existance of god before I can take the position of not believing in him... they insist that to know there is no such thing as god would mean I would need to know everything. I don't have to disprove the existence of god to not believe in him, nor do I have to know everything... I will explain why.
The idea that one must know everything in order to not believe in god originates and functions well inside an theistic paradigm perfectly but falls apart when you remove one key ingredient. The axiom that there is in fact a god.
An axiom is defined as a proposition that is not suceptible to proof or disproof, it's truth is assumed to be self evident. A theistic paradigm comes bundled with this axiom as an inextricable component.
So when a theist hears an atheist say that there is no god, from his theistic perspective, what he sees is the atheist reaching into his model of the universe and removing the item called god. Then he asks the atheist how he could do that since the atheist does not know EVERYTHING and therefore cannot say with certainty that the item called god does not belong in the model of the universe. At this point most atheists who are not properly equipped with all the tools of logic and reasoning will either revert to an theistic paradigm, unable to argue with the flawed logic, or simply claim to be agnostic and this be relieved of the burden of making their case.
Then you get someone like myself, fascinated by the inner workings of, well, everything... and motivated to learn. Religion confused me as a child and I assumed I didn't have the ability to understand it, so I accepted it blindly, trusting that everyone else knew what they were talking about. Most people take that confusion and give it little to no importance but I seemed to excell in my other studies so I didn't see why religion should be any different.
I became an altar-boy, I went to catholic school, I joined a prayer group... and on top of all that I even went to Sunday school. I got kicked out of Sunday school for asking too many questions. At first the questions were met with surprise, then impatience and eventually anger. I don't know if they thought I was already atheist at this point, I was not, I believed in god and an afterlife I just didn't understand it.
I asked questions like 'What part of ourselves, the us that walks around and thinks is the soul and what part is the body?' to which the answer was the soul is everything you are... you are your soul. So my next question would be along the lines of 'What happens when a child dies, does his soul remain a child forever or does it become an adult when it dies?' as most children I was anxious to grow up and didn't like the idea of having to be a child forever if I died. Then there was the time I asked 'If the soul is immortal and cannot come to harm, and we are our souls, why is it people can have brain damage or go insane, is their soul the same way?' these were all honest questions asked with genuine curiosity.
Even being kicked out of Sunday school didn't stop me. I had already begun to show extraordinary ability and awesome intelligence... everyone talked about being one of God's soldiers, I was going to be better than that, I was going to be one of God's Elite Forces! My plans were to become a priest, I was thinking I'd be a Jesuit Priest, respected and revered. My family couldn't be more proud! But I still was confused by many things and had many questions so I took it upon myself at the age of 13 to take some college courses is parapsychology. I read books on all sorts of metaphysics and afterlife related materials... out of body experiences, near death experiences. There was so much material and I read everything I could.
I learned so much, and it was all a sticky mess of contradictions... delving deeper into religion didn't clarify things, it muddied them even more! I won't begin to go into all the differnet supernatural fields of study I went into, suffice to say I can hold my own in a debate on the nuts and bolts of philosophy right on through to speaking intelligently on the concept of Astral Projection.
It wasn't till something difficult occured in my life that made me angry at he whom I was studying to become a Elite Forces soldier for... I was pissed off at God for allowing such a horrible thing to happen to me. I hated him... I wanted to hurt him so I told him I would stop believing in him because, really... what else could a human do?
That was the scariest moment in my life... the moment I angrily decided to not belive in him... it was as if a blindfold had been removed from my eyes... everything that I had struggled so hard to comprehend seemed perfectly clear. Life was no longer a jumble of contradictory paradoxes, it was logical and made perfect sense!
I can't describe the terror that this realization induced... I immediately went right back to my religion, there must be a god... there HAS to be, where do all the people go when they die? They can't just cease to exist! But it was too late, I already had a taste of reality, there was no turning back. Oh, I told myself there was a god... I told myself I had a soul and that I would never die, but now and then I would come across a concept or problem that seemed confusing to me. Since I had such an amazing epiphany when I factored god out of the equation, I would apply that new atheistic paradigm to what confused me at the moment and each time I would find it made everything crystal clear.
This made me very angry... I couldn't believe I'd wasted my entire life up till this point devoting my time to something of no substance. I began to apply the atheistic paradigm to my thinking on a much more frequent basis and eventually over the course of 6 months or so was able to completely abandon the theistic paradigm.
I was so angry for many years... I would go to the alt.atheism channel and argue with the christians and others who would come in there looking to convert people. I talked to my sisters about it, they both saw I had reason on my side, started their own investigations and eventually came to the same conclusions themselves. There is no god.
So that's the story of my religious beliefs and how I came to have them. I don't necessarily feel I need to share my beliefs with the world, I know how things really are and that's a powerful thing. I am part of an elite force, it's just a different one than I had imagined.