Why do atheists say we disbelieve in “gods” rather than “god”?

First of all, reblogging is cool. Stealing other people’s content is not. There’s a fine line between the two, but seriously (and you know who you are), please stop. At least add your own content. For example, how does your experience as an African American atheist differ from mine as a white South African? (I ask this particularly because many of my black South African atheist friends keep their atheism a secret. They would be disowned by their families as devil worshippers, or be subjected to exorcisms. They find safety in atheist groups on social media, and then even those groups get infiltrated by jackasses who proselytize, or threaten non-believers with eternal torment.) How did you break it to your family that you don’t believe in their religion? How are you treated by your peers, assuming you are open about your atheism? If you identify with my posts, why not refer to them and use them as a starting point for your own introspection? I’m sure you can, and that would be a whole lot better than simply doing the copypasta thing with my and others’ content. In my opinion, a good reader makes a good writer, and I see you have read some excellent content judging by the quality of the stuff you’ve reblogged or copied without attribution.

Moving on, one of the other (copypasta) posts on the blog I found recently via a pingback here, answered the question of today’s title. I figured it would be a good starting point for my own answer to that question, not that anybody has ever asked me.

The answer to the question posed seems obvious to me, but if I think back, I can remember a time when I heard that “atheists don’t believe in gods” and I did a double take. I must have been really young and still a believer, but I can understand how that statement can be confusing.

The confusion arises from the fact that you only believe in one “true” god, so when you say “God”, you implicitly mean that one, whichever one it may be. But there are other religions that you don’t believe in, and you don’t think of. You also project that one god onto everyone else’s beliefs, so even if someone of a different religions talks about god (with the same narrow-mindedness as you), you imagine your particular god.

As an atheist, I don’t believe in your god, or anyone else’s god, and (this is important) I do not prioritize your god above any other, even ones that nobody has believed in for thousands of years. Imagine a hypothetical tree god from some remote island. Let’s call him Joob-joob and pretend he looks like a tree monster from Diablo 3…

Joob-joob the good would-be wood god. (Joob rhymes with wood.)

… I also don’t differentiate between your god and others that I’ve never even heard of. They’re all made up by men. None of them are based on evidence and none exist outside of the minds of believers.

To conclude, you fail to understand that someone else “does not believe in gods” because you imagine only your one is the “real” god and disregard all others of other religions. I don’t. They’re all bullshit. They’re all just claims based on magical explanations for the unknown and wishful thinking, and despite your assumptions, the god of your claim is no more relevant to me than one of a claim made by someone who died several thousand years ago, whose “god” has long since been forgotten.

I bid you a good day, even if you are a plagiaristic arsehole.