I think I'm an atheist mainly for semantic reasons. People will tell you that God is love, the universe, a feeling of union with a larger entity, etc. All of those are things that I experience as being more or less real, but I don't typically refer to them as God. Specifically, I don't need to *personify* them (unless they're inherently personified, such as if someone considers consciousness to be God, in which case my difference with the theist in question would be almost purely semantic, although even that difference isn't quite absolute, as I think that God can be a genuinely good label for certain things, although I recognize the label as denoting something basically conceptual and therefore imaginary, which is probably where my deepest difference would lie), and if I personify them at all, I do it in a more whimsical than serious way, regarding the personification as an imaginary *representation* rather than something that is identical to the things it stands for. I also am familiar with many of the same stories about God that theists are familiar with, and these stories and the characters in them exist "in my head," just as they do for theists; they're just as real to me, in that sense, as they are to theists. The difference, in that regard, between myself and a theist is, in large part, my response to those thoughtforms. I don't proclaim those stories to be real, objective events; they're imaginary to me; they exist only in my head. They're not even memories of mine about the objective world, or at least things that I heard second-hand. It isn't so much that I'm skeptical about them; it's that they're simply not real to me, in any way whatsoever, except in the way that any "mere" story might be real to me. And I have to say that most of the stories about God impress me as being a great deal *less* realistic than many of the stories I encounter, particularly stories meant to describe events from popular history, such as the French Revolution. In short God, seems fictional to me, which is practically just to repeat that I'm an atheist. Even if "God" were to appear before me, in some form, it would just be someone calling themselves "God." In what sense would they *really* be God? They would merely be someone named God. It seems to me that I never could really meet God, because it would always just be someone calling themselves by that name, even if they happened to possess extraordinary powers. I hardly even know what God is supposed to be. There are lots of theological things said about him, but theology seems to me to be little more than a sophisticated form of glossolalia: words that may sound pleasant, but which don't communicate anything clear or coherent. At times, theological descriptions even contain genuine mistakes of reasoning, and if you want to know the truth, I think this is usually the case. So I'm left with a description of a powerful being that, for all I know, might exist, although it seems extremely doubtful, and I don't feel any particular reason to call him God. That, in a nutshell, is why I consider myself an atheist.