I believe I put it best when my boyfriend Dave was pretending to be a Christbot for his expose on the “Chat-o-Matic Atheist Witnessing Tool”:

I have better things to do than wait around for god to come out from wherever he’s hiding. If he wants to reveal himself, I’ll evaluate the evidence when that happens. Until then, I’m not going to waste my time believing something on faith when there’s no evidence for it.

That’s it.

Re-reading that article reminded me of my number one complaint about theists who think they’re going to convert atheists by preaching on the internet: They LOVE false dichotomies. Either you believe in God or you worship Satan. If you don’t believe in God, it means you must be a nihilist, or you must be your own God.

They also LOVE to redefine words to suit their own purposes. Here’s a list of my pet-peeve word conflations that I see theists commit:

• They conflate “I don’t believe in any gods” with “I believe there is no god”.

  The truth is, you do not have to have an affirmative belief that something does not exist in order to not believe that it does exist.

  Consider: you do not have to have an affirmative belief that I do not have an elephant in my garage in order to be unconvinced that I do — and I hasten to add that the likelihood of there being an elephant in my garage is much higher than that of a god existing. You know that elephants exist, for one thing, and an elephant could theoretically fit in my garage, but that’s assuming I have an elephant (and a garage, for that matter), which is a pretty big assumption.

  You can hardly be faulted, therefore, for being an “a-Cassie-has-an-elephant-in-her-garage-ist”. And you have absolutely no basis to fault anyone for being an atheist.

• They conflate “it is theoretically possible that a god could exist” with “it is probable that a god exists”.

  It is theoretically possible that there could be a tornado heading this way right this second. That doesn’t mean I’m going to start boarding up the windows and head for the basement. I’m going to wait until somebody actually sees a tornado.

• They conflate “any god” with “my god”.

  Okay, let’s suspend reality for a moment and assume that you have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe and everything in it was created ex nihilo by an all-powerful deity. Am I now honor-bound to become a Christian and worship this deity with you in church on Sundays? Of course not. You haven’t proven that your god exists. To do that, you would need to prove the Resurrection, and good luck doing that.

• They conflate “love” with “hate”.

  Loving someone means accepting their right to be who they are, helping your neighbors out in times of need, and just generally being a nice person. It does not mean harassing them in their homes and places of business, telling them how much you’re going to enjoy watching them burn in hell, or hanging them from fences and trees. That’s hatred.

• They conflate “God” with themselves.

  I’ve always thought it was kind of ironic that many theists accuse atheists of worshipping themselves when, ostensibly, that is exactly what many theists are doing. They base their sweeping pronouncements on who is going to hell and who isn’t, and who deserves equal rights in this country and who doesn’t, on nothing more than their personal dislike of certain groups of people.

  “God” does not hate “fags”, or feminists, or liberals, or atheists any more than he hates shellfish or people who wear more than one type of fabric. The people who say that he does are hate-filled, black-hearted fanatics who can’t tell the difference between their own pathetically tiny minds and the mind of God.