Why don’t you believe in god?
This question is a common starting point for many a religious debate.
The religious stance in this case is that you – the non believer – must justify your disbelief.
I find that the best way to deal with this question is to ask – which god?
This question usually upsets my religious counterparts (especially monotheists), but I ask it not to annoy them (OK, maybe sometimes also to slightly annoy them) but mostly to get them to understand just how relative and subjective their specific god hypothesis is in the first place. Your religious counterpart is, in effect, trying to use their relative and subjective platform to establish a non sequitur conclusion that only their specific deity exists, and then, as they hope nobody notices their logical contortion act, fashion a loaded question around this silly conclusion (thereby presenting you with not one but two classic logical fallacies rolled into one short question).
The first thing to keep in mind is that a loaded question does not deserve to be answered – cannot actually be answered – because it attempts to build into it a baseless premise. By attempting to answer this loaded question you would be, in effect, falling in the trap it sets, and then having to argue your way out of its baseless premise.
All you need to do in order to illustrate the problem with this question is ask your counterpart why he doesn’t believe in Zeus or Lord Vishnu or Quetzalcoatl. Your counterpart might reply that those “other deities” are not real, and that only his deity is; at which point you should ask him how he knows that, or rather – how he could possibly know such a thing. Your counterpart, at this stage, not only would have committed the exact same “offense” he was initially accusing you of (disbelieving something without a reason), but he would be attempting to establish fundamental differences between his deity and all other deities without providing a single shred of reason or evidence with which to back it up.
So, my dear religious counterpart, when you can tell me why you don’t believe in Zeus, Vishnu, Odin and Santa Claus, I might tell you why I don’t believe in Yahweh.