Read the Penn Jillette article that Charles Jowett posted a link to earlier. He makes the point that there is a step beyond mere atheism, where you go beyond not believing in God, to a state where you actively believe that there is no God. Now I would call the first mere agnosticism, but no matter. For me, to be an atheist means that I believe there is no God influencing the events of the world, there was no creator, and there is no afterlife.

Penn puts is this way:

“..Everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.”

Becoming an atheist is liberating: I offer the following passage from POB’s [Patrick O’Brian] “Ionian Mission,” describing the Bach Partita in D Minor. The pure simple English expressing powerful ideas is one of the reasons why I love POB’s writing so much.

“It was as though he were fox-hunting, mounted on a powerful, spirited horse, and as though on leaping a bank, perfectly in hand, the animal changed foot. And with the change of foot came a change in its being so that it was no longer a horse he was sitting on but a great rough beast, far more powerful, that was swarming along at great speed over an unknown countryside in pursuit of a quarry – what quarry he could not tell, but it was no longer the simple fox.”