As an atheist, one of the most common questions I get asked – apart from “would you please leave?” – is “Why are you an atheist?” And it is a fair question: for the average person, it’s pretty hard to understand why a man would turn his back on tradition, social norms, and all semblance of common decency in order to pursue a life of nihilistic excess and death-worshipping futility. It’s perfectly natural for ordinary, hard-working Australians to assume that I am simply, at heart, an evil person, and let’s be honest, I’m pretty much asking for it. As a non-atheist of my acquaintance pointed out recently, “That Richard Dawkins really irritates me”, and it’s hard to argue in the face of that sort of logic.

However, I always think it’s good to look beneath the surface, and so I do like to take any opportunity I can to really “flesh out” my religious beliefs, so that people don’t make superficial judgments based on simplistic stereotypes, and instead make superficial judgments based on complex stereotypes. So I’m going to answer the question “Why am I an atheist” in a way that will hopefully clarify just as much as it disgusts.

I suppose the seeds of my atheism were sown in my teenage years, when I first realised how enjoyable it is to pointlessly rebel against authority. I remember the giddy thrill I felt when I spat in my father’s eye for no other reason than I was bored. It was exhilarating! I thought, “How can I spit in my father’s eye on a society-wide scale?” Atheism, of course, was the obvious answer. Forget spitting in the eye of my father – how big a rush would it be to spit in the face of The Father? And as I grew up, my need for showy, immature displays of empty oppositionalism has only grown more intense.

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