Primarily, I'm
apatheist. Except insofar as philosophical discussions such as this (and other inevitable encounters), I consider neither the possibility nor the impossibility of God/gods of any importance at all. (I actually coined that term for myself, out of nowhere, before I discovered that it had already been coined... And with basically the same intent behind it, fortunately!
)
But I (like everyone) was born an atheist, in the
broadest sense, and my parents were kind enough to never indoctrinate myself with any strong belief
or disbelief. (You tended to have to be noted as being "Church Of Scotland”/whatever, sometimes, such as when I joined the Cub Scouts, and I
respected the Lord's Prayer as words to be said at the appropriate junctures, but I think the general attitude from the Church-And-Chapel leaders was that they tolerated anyone not actively anti-theist, without trying to do more than drag us to saint's-day, Rememberence Day and Christmas services... By the time I was a Venture Scout, the lads (for it was only lads, back then) generally engineered some handy excuse to not attend anything 'churchy' except for Rememberence Sunday, which was considered worthwhile even under a secular adherence.)
I may not be "strongly atheist" (disbeliever), but I am
strongly agnostic. It's not that I do not know (or care, generally), but that it seems to me that one can
never know/'Know'. Either way. Sufficiently advanced aliens (and even sufficiently capable humans) can conjour up any "divine revelation" they might want to (especially if what is considered historically divine was already such engineered/chance misconceptions). And ineffable deities might well deliberately "never give Proof, for Proof denies Faith", if that's their whole particularly ineffable schtick. Give me an argument for the presence/absence of your chosen deity (or pantheon) and I can counter with why the absence/presence is just as possible to me. Not that I would object, in principle to your stance (so long as it's not so radical as to make you a bad person in a humanist sense).
But it doesn't really matter to me where you stand (which [x,y,z] coordinates you have on the [(a)thesm,(a)gnosticism,(a)pathetic] set of mostly mutually independent axes). More so if (as either theist or atheist) if you only think of atheism as hard, strong and/or explicit atheism, at which point I might explain that weak, soft and/or implicit atheism is definitely a thing. As I just have done.
I also disagree totally with Pascal's Wager. Given the chances of choosing the wrong deity to 'bet upon',
and that any deity worth their pillar-of-salt is going to be omniscient enough to know that it's just a cynical act of going through the motions, I think it as (if not more) likely that I'll be given at least whatever subscription there is to the neutral Limbo afterlife (should there be any such judgement and destination available, hereafter), just for being inoffensive and
trying to be a good human. I am of course a plaything of fate (if not Fate), but I don't actually oppose Zeus, Odin, Jehova, Xenu or Gaia (even if I might not be active in supporting any of them, or opposing their own mythic oppositions), unless there's some mysterious One True Path to Salvation being enforced that is therefore probably missed even by those who
nearly but don't quite understand the Truth. (You read your Holy Book in your native language? That's an Abomination Unto Nuggan, it should only ever be in the One True <Latin/Aramaic/Borogravian/Voynichese/8086-Assembler/whatever> and, despite making all the right thrice-daily obesiences and giving away 90% of your income to The Church, you've broken the celestial contract that you thought you were living up to...)
You know what: if I can be a not-bad-person during life (mostly, give or take wasting my time and others' on philosophical arguments, and not ruling out that
this is in
some official list or other of divine proscriptions), and especially don't try to make things worse for non-/mis-/over-believers who might (or might not) be entirely right, then I can at least make this level of existence better by an iota of global niceness. (Which might be exactly the
wrong thing to do, to get the 'reward' in the next level of existence, but no reason to chance to err in the other direction of risk/reward.)
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