False. You do your cause a great disservice by advancing farcical arguments. Also please understand that atheists in the west arent the same as atheists in other parts of the world. I am not a westerner and my atheism stems from a lack of belief in deities who look nothing like the people and customs of the world from which I come from. Believing in these major religion deities is to believe in gods who specialize in negating vast sections of non-white human beings. A god who supposedly created me and my traditions only for them to be vituperated and offered as a basis for my inferiority.

Secondly, the sheer contempt for non-western lives that some western policymakers espouse on tv through constant calls for war and bombings reveals that god is useless at defending the weak. History — the history which is not written by the victors, the history not of the Israelites but of those who were slaughtered because they “stood in the way of god’s chosen people” — is a history in which one must come to terms with the reality of a god who only embraces you after large groups of your own people have been enslaved, colonized, massacred, raped and stripped of anything at all that gave you a sense of self and pride. A god who will allow a people to imagine a way of life only to send another people to subjugate them and destroy them. A god who specialises in writing the stories of those who spilled blood rather than those whose blood was spilled.

Lastly, I became an atheist quiet early when I realized that while it may have been “hard” for god to stop the bullets and whips of one’s oppressors, he could not even afford to so much as whisper in their ear to treat other human beings humanely. Not even a whisper. All across Africa are scattered temples of people who participated in horrific acts against “the darker race” whose “souls it was the responsibility of the lighter enlightened race to train and to save”. As they prayed in these great cathedrals, Sunday after Sunday, god failed to say: these too are my people. I made them beautifully brown as I made you beautifully white. No. He couldn’t even extend them that. So of what use is he, really?

So no. I am not an atheist like Dawkins (who spent his early years in my country and whose father was a British colonial officer stationed there: a history he, in spite of his adherence to western humanism, conspicuously fails to mention or discuss in depth) or Krauss…

I am an atheist because I see all around me, in my world, people appealing not to gods but to other human beings to treat them better, and even these appeals fall on deaf ears. Neither the gods they pray to nor the people they beg are ever remotely affected to change their circumstances: the world remains largely impersonal, cruel and unjust, without guarantees: while peace and equality remain tenuous.

To this day, even the history of natives in America and the African slaves who were brought there, is resisted most forcefully in the so called bible belt. Clearly even now god has failed to whisper the true story of what happened through the thick walls of numerous southern churches in spite of an overwhelming record of misanthropic decadence.

Worshipping a god who really acts and intervenes is merely a form of privilege. The truth is people really believe in the power, will and ends of themselves and other men to impose themselves on others in the name of one or another god. God is nothing more than the might of the strongest worldly governments aided by their enormous military machines and hardened troops; he is merely the will of the most salient and widespread social conventions, attitudes and proclivities. Prayers are nothing more than appeals sent to those governments and authorities to safeguard the interests of the chosen and favored of the most powerful countries. The rest can pray all they want but their prayers will not ward off the mights of those governments who will wage war on them in order — notice the irony — to serve the will of the same god to whom the soon to be destroyed pray to for protection.

A certain truth said to be self evident about the equality of men, revealed itself only to be about the equality of certain men, even as other men existed as property. And those who had the most property were the most blessed of god.

Grapple with these issues and perhaps your theology might reflect the so called love one or other deity you claim to worship and represent has for people on the margins. Otherwise, its not a matter of believing in something. Its actually a matter of realizing that the horrors always directed at oneself by a so called loving lord in the sky are just excuses fabricated by people to make their conscience callous, so that violence may masquerade as faith and brutality as divine intervention.

No amount of praying would have turned those slave ships around nor stopped the wind from beating on their sails. All the miracles staged by this deity all seemed geared to introduce a brown people to an existence of exploitation and dehumanization in spite of their propitiations, cries and prayers. No miracle would turn all this around: and not even a whisper from him into the ear and heart of the profiting slave merchant to say: these are people just like you. Look how they bleed and suffer just as you would.

So. I am an atheist. If god exists, history shows that he works against me and that he definitely hates me.

Best.