My typical rejoiner is, “The same thing that happened before I was born.”
Most of the reactions I’ve gotten were through Facebook, to the tune of, “God exists whether you believe in him or not.” Not terribly exciting stuff.
…
Oh, I’ve had every religious conversation possible with my Dad who loves to debate this kind of thing. Other people will get in on the action, too, sometimes. For a lot of people it seems to come down to “oh, you don’t like this explanation? then explain EVERYTHING AND THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE.” Like, dude, god doesn’t even explain anything to begin with provided god is part of that everything (that is, exists).
But it’s all smoke and mirrors. People don’t believe in god for rational reasons. They just don’t. People don’t believe in most ANYTHING for rational reasons and it’s wrong to expect that god would be the sole exception to this. People believe in things for **psychological **reasons, atheists included.
The way beliefs tend to work is that we believe in them as a default. Then we check them for contradictions with our other beliefs. If they create dissonance, we have a negative emotional reaction and try to justify that belief until we feel more at peace with our beliefs. If we can resolve that dissonance, we’re all set until we encounter something else we need to explain away. If we can’t, we come up with the next best compromise. Eventually, if confronted with enough dissonant ideas in our head, we might come up with some explanations to explain away the old belief so we can accept the new ones. And the brain doesn’t like a vacuum. I didn’t quit smoking by telling myself not to smoke when I wanted a cigarette, I did it by telling myself to clean instead. My spelling never improved by remembering that “weird” is the one that doesn’t follow the i before e rule, but that “weird” was spelled “weird.” The brain doesn’t like accept a negative. So you can point out the inconsistencies all you want, but then you need EXPLAIN EVERYTHING AND THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE to replace god.
And some ideas are inherently more sticky than others. We have something called the contagion heuristic. Things that disgust us are contaminated when they come into contact with other things. The origin of this is fairly obvious. Don’t touch sick people or drink dirty water. But it also means that we can easily acquire new beliefs like “bad air,” or that certain places have “evil spirits” and that it might be a bad idea to wear that jacket your grandfather brought back from him from WWII that he says used to be Hitler’s. Tribes all over the world talk about their family members being “made from the same bones” or having “the same blood” or something similar because we inherited certain belief tendencies, but not the actual knowledge of genetics and DNA.
Sorry for the tangent there.
You do realize that there are large amounts of people that believe our souls are up in heaven before we’re born and we get to choose which families we want to be born into, right? When I’ve pressed people on this, they say that our baby selves don’t actually know how things will turn out once we get implanted into our earthly bodies, we just have to guess. So that’s the explanation for that.
I had a lovely lady working for me a few years ago. Nice Southern Baptist from Texas. She came to talk to me about something one day and veered off into Jesus country. I listened politely and then she asked me if I agreed with her assessment that Jesus was responsible for whatever good thing had recently happened to her. I smiled and told her no, I am an atheist. She was shocked. Mouth open, eyes wide, “But you’re such a good person!”
It was funny to me. She has broadened her parameters for good people. Win win.
Last year I wrote a letter to the editor for my very small hometown paper (pop. <1400). It was in response to a letter the previous week about an education bill in the province about bullying. The woman who wrote it seemed to think that the bill was going to persecute Christians. Utter crap.
It being a small town, I called each of my church going parents to let them know that I had written the letter and that it might be published. Dad got a few congratulatory phone calls. A lady at mass tapped my Mom on the shoulder and told her she liked her letter (Mom told her it was her daughter that wrote it, but thanked her). At church on Sunday, the librarian tapped my Dad on the shoulder and told him that she thought my letter was good, but expressed concern at my mention of not being a Christian. Dad assured her that she had misread it. I have been an atheist since highschool, and not secretive about it for the last ten years. I guess Dad missed the memo. He got more upset when I wore my contacts to his house and thought I had been wearing them for years and he didn’t notice.
I’ve had several reactions pretty close to this – just outright denial I could possibly be an atheist. They mean it as a compliment, I think, like I am somehow too good a person to really be an atheist. Or that I don’t even understand what I’m saying, because if I did I wouldn’t say it.
I don’t know about ‘best’, but I’ve had some memorable reactions.
A Muslim coworker once said, when he heard me say I was an atheist, that I was wrong and everyone believes in god.
I had a coworker at another place stop talking to me after finding out I was an atheist.
And then there was the old lady who heard me talking to a friend at a bus stop and insisted that I would burn in hell unless I accepted Jesus in my heart, and decided that the best way to respond to my refusal was to shriek this louder and louder until I submitted.
I’ve also been told that there’s no such thing as atheists. Talk about denial. I’ve also been asked how I know how to behave, since I don’t read the bible. As if Christians consult the bible before doing anything. Some of my friends and family members will joke with me if something bad happens to me that it’s because I’m an atheist. Hardy har har.
I’ve had 14 years of Catholic school, and my fair share of devoutly religious family members, but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an outlandish or inappropriate response. Mostly it’s just the usual “So you think the universe came from nothing?” conversation (if they offer any challenge at all, which typically they don’t). The only barely noteworthy reaction, which I think I’ve gotten a couple of times, was:
“So, you believe in Science, then?”
“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh … yeah. Sure. But you’re using those words in a *very *strange way.”
ETA: Oh, and I’d like to co-sign Cerealbox’s tangent (post #23).
Certain older friend, after I told her I consider myself atheist: “When are you going to grow up and start taking responsibility for your actions? You know you’re going to burn in hell forever if you don’t turn yourself around!”
I just smiled and said I’d take that chance.
I just went through this very argument with an online friend. He claims he doesn’t believe atheists exist, because once we proclaim that we believe gods don’t exist, they must exist for us not to believe.
Blows my mind.:smack:
I just the other day had someone proclaim that they believed in god, and I believed in science. But they said science the same way they might say turd.
Sometimes the only answer to: “You’re not an atheist, you just think you are.”
Is: “You don’t believe in God, you just think you do.”
And there’s the old question, “So you don’t believe and anything you can’t see or touch?”
I believe in many things I can’t see or touch, like science, reason, truth, freedom, integrity, love, and many other things. There are many reasons to believe in these things, but there’s no reason to believe in a God."
I always figured atheism was the ultimate expression of taking responsibility for your own actions. After all, you’ve got no one else to blame.
My best two sentence answer to “Then what stops you from being evil” is: “Is the only thing standing between you and mass murder your fear of God? I don’t do those things because I’m not a monster, not because I’m afraid of eternal damnation.” After the fact, if they’re really pissing you off and bothering you, especially in front of others, you can retort “You’re the one who said you’d be raping and killing people if you weren’t afraid of God.”
This doesn’t really happen in the UK but I was asked by an older guy at a party in Italy. His response 'But but, you MUST believe in God, any God will do, even a protestant one!". 
I can’t remember ever being hassled by it, but I also don’t remember it coming up much at all. Usually, if asked by a relative stranger, I’ll duck and say I was raised Catholic, but am not really religious.
The point I made when I had these conversations was that I am not conscious of the time or events that occurred before I was born. Alternate metaphysical theories notwithstanding, there is no reason to anticipate anything will be different after I die.
I think Daniel Dennett said something like, “no one really believes in God.” It’s a seductive idea but I want people to think I mean what I say so I have to believe that they mean what they say.