It wasn't always like this.
I didn't wake up one day and decide to be an atheist . It happened the way most honest things happen, slowly, quietly, and only after I stopped being afraid to follow my own thought to its actual conclusion .
The belief in a super, omnipotent being that has made rules for you to follow, so as to attain peace in some afterlife, used to feel like just... background noise. The kind of thing you accept without examining, the way you accept that the sky is blue. But the moment I started applying common sense to it, the same common sense I'd apply to anything else, it started to unravel. And once it starts, it doesn't stop.
What I found on the other side wasn't emptiness. It was air.
Since we're going to be talking about this idea across many religions and they all have their own name for it, Bhagwan, Allah, God , and so on; let's just agree to call it the SOB: Super Omnipotent Being . We're referring to the idea , not to any one tradition's version of it. This keeps things clean and, sort of amusing too to be honest.
Alright. So, let's get into it.
Freedom is a word people throw around a lot, but what it means is deeply personal.
In a work environment, freedom for me means thinking, experimenting, implementing my own ideas and learning from what comes out of them. For a speaker, it might mean speaking wherever the thoughts lead, without fear of judgement. For a writer, writing wherever the mind wants to go.
But overall freedom, freedom in life , what is that?
Is it to live life on your own terms, in your own manner, with no external ledger keeping score of every choice you make? Yesss! That's it.
Jonathan Bach said something I've thought about often: "You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free."
Now apply that to the SOB.
If the SOB loves humans genuinely, as every religion insists it does...then why the endless constraints? Rules on what to eat, what to wear, who to love, how to pray, what to say and not say. We understand among humans that love with this many conditions is called something else. We call it toxic . We recognize the pattern: control framed as care, compliance framed as devotion.
If that's toxic in a human relationship, I'm not sure why altitude makes it noble.
So either the SOB does not know what real love is or the SOB is, in the very specific emotional sense, a toxic lover.
I'll leave that sitting there for a moment...
The moment I became an atheist, something quietly shifted.
You start using your common sense, not as a supplement to belief, but as the primary tool. You show kindness because it's the right thing, not because a watchful eye is keeping track. You look at a sunset and appreciate it for the extraordinary accident of physics it actually is: light scattering through an atmosphere, a rock orbiting a star,a collection of atoms that has, against all odds, become conscious and is now standing there noticing how beautiful it all is.
That, to me, is more astonishing than any miracle I was ever asked to believe in.
Imagine a life lived entirely on your own terms. Not perfectly nobody lives perfectly, but authentically. When a problem arises, you don't retreat behind an external saviour to plead for help. You commit to action. You meet the obstacle with everything you have, which is actually quite a lot once you stop outsourcing your strength.
This is the part that frustrates me about prayer, not the ritual itself, but the logic underneath it. The prayer is made. The problem remains, untouched, waiting. No outside force arrives. And when the problem grows, people pray harder. And when no answer comes, they turn the blame inward - maybe I sinned, maybe I wasn't faithful enough, maybe I deserved this .
That last move is the one that gets me. Taking suffering that belongs to the world and making it a personal moral failing. That is not peace. That is a system designed to produce guilt, and then offer itself as the only cure.
People often say you cannot prove the SOB doesn't exist. And technically, they're right that the burden of proof usually lies with those who make the positive claim. But let me, just this once, take that burden myself. I truly have freewill here ( No SOB. ). Let me use it.
Let's assume the SOB does exist. All-powerful, all-knowing, the deliberate creator of all life. Let's follow that assumption and see where it takes us.
If the SOB created all life; every creature that ever lived then the cat, the dinosaur, the bacterium are just as much its creation as we are. Yet not one of them is expected to pray. Not one of them has a rulebook . Not one of them faces hell for getting it wrong.
Only humans carry this cosmic debt . And not even all humans equally, only those who happen to be born into a culture where the right version of the SOB is explained to them.
A person born into a remote community, untouched by any of these religions, faces judgment by rules they were never given? That's not divine justice. That looks like arbitrary favouritism at best, and a system engineered to produce anxiety at worst.
If this is love , it is love with very strange geography...
The SOB , being all-powerful, could have simply created the world as it is; humans, animals, oceans, mountains, fully formed. Instead, the geological and fossil record shows us something different: billions of years of trial and error, entire species ruling the earth and then being wiped out, suffering without purpose, extinction without ceremony.
Why would an all-knowing, all-powerful being need a process that looks exactly like blind evolution ? Why the billions of years of waste and pain to arrive at something it could have produced directly?
You know what process would produce exactly this record? No designer. Just nature , and time , figuring things out on their own.
This is the one that I find hardest to argue around, if you're a believer.
If the SOB wants a relationship with us; wants us to know it, follow its rules, avoid the consequences of getting it wrong then...why...oh why...is the message so catastrophically unclear?
Thousands of religions. Hundreds of versions of the SOB . All claiming to be the one true way. All with different rules, different stories, different definitions of sin . And historically, all willing to fight. Sometimes violently over who is more ' right '.
An all-knowing being would know this confusion would happen. An all-loving being would not allow it. The fact that it happened...and keeps happening...is exactly what we'd expect if the religions were not handed down from above, but created by humans trying to explain what frightened them at the time, and trying to build societies around some shared group of rules, enforced in the name of a powerful being who watches over them .
That is not a criticism of those humans. That was a very reasonable thing to do, in the time and context they were doing it. But it does mean those rules were made for that time, and that context. And we are obviously not obligated to carry them forever.
So, if we assume the SOB exists, the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving SOB... then the world we actually see, with its arbitrary burden on one species, its billions of years of suffering and extinction, and its thousands of contradictory religions all claiming exclusive truth, doesn't fit.
The only version of SOB that would explain this world is one that is unjust, or incompetent, or deliberately obscure. And that doesn't match the description we started with.
The assumption contradicts itself.
Which leaves us, by reductio ad absurdum , with the simpler explanation: there is no SOB. There are only humans, nature, time, and the stories we tell ourselves to feel less alone in the dark, in the wide galaxy.
And here is what changes when you actually let that land.
The constraints you've been living inside weren't designed by a cosmic being at all. They were made by other humans! Long ago...for their needs at that time.
They were passed down through generations with the full force of guilt and fear and social consequence attached. And we absorbed them before we were old enough to question them.
But you can put them down at any time now.
Not with anger. Not with rebellion for its own sake. Just... put them down. Shed them the way you'd shed something that was never yours to carry in the first place.
Show kindness because it's right because you feel it to be right, in your own chest, with no audience required. Solve your own problems. Face uncertainty with steady steps and a steadier heart. Appreciate the universe for what it actually is: ancient, indifferent, astonishingly complex, and somehow producing beings like you and me who can sit here and wonder about it.
The real relief, doesn't come from handing your burden to a SOB...
It comes from realizing the burden was never real. And that, quietly , is the deepest freedom I know.
Every religion has its preachers. They stand on their podiums and declare their path the one true way out of this wilderness.
Let me preach too, then. But not to lead you out of this world.
Let me take you deeper into it.
I preach that reasoning should take the place of blind belief.
I preach that the false comfort of an "all-knowing" should be replaced by the brave, trembling beauty of uncertainty; the kind you face yourself.
I preach that your freedom is not a destination after your final breath .
Your freedom is here. Your freedom is now. Your freedom is YOU .