My Friends Tell Me I'm Not an Atheist It's remarkable how many of my friends insist that I'm not an atheist. It seems pretty obvious to me that I don't believe a god exists, and that makes me an atheist. However, these people are there, so insistent that I cannot be an atheist. “You’re too nice,” they say, or “you really believe it, but you don’t know it” (how’s that again?). Sometimes I hear something like "You believe in something, and it really is God" or "you are still searching, but you will find it" (he is welcome to stop by my house at any time). But when I have time to converse with these people, it usually comes down to this: I'm really an agnostic, they say, because I'm willing to admit that I don't know that there is no God. It's apparently so important to people to believe that I'm "really just an agnostic" that I find it a haunting sign of religion's hold on people. It is tragic that the mere thought of a good friend or relative being a true, avowed atheist is so horrible that it must be denied. Sometimes I have the opportunity to explain that I am an atheist not because I know there is no God. , but because I don't believe that to be the case. If someone insisted that their pet fish could talk, I really couldn't say that I knew that wasn't the case, especially if I couldn't go see for myself, but they would still fair for me to say that there is no talking fish. . The relevance of this is that I don't believe that God exists any more than I believe that fish can talk. Granted, I have not examined every species of fish, or even every fish, and I could never accomplish such a feat, but to assert that they exist is so contrary to my personal experience and reliable facts that I just won't do it. believe it unless very definitive proof is provided. Of course, if I visit someone's pet fish and it talks to me, I'm always wiser to test the possibilities of trickery or madness before believing it can really talk. But if I found a lot of talking fish, trustworthy people confirmed it, scientists published carefully researched papers about them, and newspapers headlined "INCREDIBLE DISCOVERY: FISH TALKING!" then it would be more than reasonable to believe that they existed.