Well it is uplifting to know that most atheists are now more open to the possibility God exists. Most I have met don't share your view and are pretty much doom and gloom.
Ask the next atheist you meet how certain he is that God doesn't exist. If his answer is 100%, he's a moron, but most of them don't think the probability of God's existence is 0%...they just consider it low enough to not warrant serious consideration.
Again I implore you to review
Russell's Teapot.
Relatively few atheists will claim they have absolute certainty of anything; most just use induction to show why God's literal existence is improbable enough to not warrant serious concern (hence the reason Pascal's Wager is a total failure.)
Nunki notes
"Either way, to believe is only to point to a thought of yours and on that basis make a doomed prediction."
That's retarded. See my response to Nunki.
The T/T(i) in me appreciates the doubt or the possibility that my N/N(e) knowledge of God is a hallucination of some sorts. At the Same time my TP can appreciate the Pascalian logic that if my faith/N(e) is wrong than the worst case scenario is that I was a lot nicer to a lot more people than I would normally choose to be and I become worm food with egg on my face, jokes on me.
On the other hand if my faith/N(e) is right I have avoided eternal damnation and gained paradise. A bookmaker would clearly see the upsides to how I chose to bet my soul. I have raised this point before with both atheists and religious fundamentalists and both never give me a response I feel addresses this logic directly. They either seem to be of the view that it is a sin or cowardly to choose to logically hedge my bet towards the bigger payoff.
This is called Pascal's Wager and it's been repeatedly destroyed by so many different people that if you haven't yet heard about why it's absurd and totally ineffective, you're probably actively avoiding knowledge on the topic (or at least not actively seeking any new information/education.)
To explain in short, Pascal's Wager fails because the "infinite negative consequence" it promises is arbitrarily invented and never substantiated. It begs the question because I could offer precisely the same argument for anything--if you don't believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you'll suffer eternally; therefore, you have pot odds on believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, right?
I'm afraid your bookie would recognize what a horrible bet this really is. That's like saying, "I always bet on jack high in poker, just in case we get a phone call before the end of the hand saying the powers that be have decided that jack high now beats a royal flush (and all other hands)."
Can you PROVE DEFINITIVELY 100% that the official rules of poker will not change before my jack high loses? No? WELL THEN I'M STICKING TO MY STRATEGY.
Nevermind how ludicrously improbable this event is, it's not technically
totally impossible, so that's apparently an excuse to arbitrarily put 100% faith in it? Nope, sorry--don't buy it.
So according to Nunki's logic, I have no basis for assuming that the rules of poker will not change before the end of the hand, so it's equally effective to assume that they will. I hope you can see why that's so clearly absurd...he's openly claiming that reality has zero predictability whatsoever, which is just hilarious.