I’ve heard a lot about this God bloke over the years and he sounds like a very nice idea but I must confess to some genuine misgivings about his existence. In fact I have a nagging doubt that simply won’t be shaken off despite hours of singing round a camp fire and sitting very still in a big room while a series of boring old men go on and on about their special book. Here are my top ten reasons why God doesn’t exist.

1 - I have never met him. I keep hearing people going on and on about how God is everywhere. Well I’m pretty well travelled and I’ve never once bumped into him. I also notice that lots of people claim they have heard him speak to them but none of them can give you a physical description. That’s pretty suspicious in my book.

2 – There seems to be a lot of disagreement about what God looks like. Does God have a gender? Is he black, white or somewhere in between? The most popular picture in my country shows him as an old guy with a big white beard (like Santa Claus who I also don’t believe in) but does God even age? I’ve heard the whole “God created man in his own image” but we don’t all look alike so which one of us is the image of God?

3 – If I’m walking in the desert and I find a watch then yeah I must admit I would assume that it was made by a watchmaker but that’s because I know that watchmakers make watches. When it comes to trees or animals I’ll stick with evolution.

4 – Organised religion. I have noticed that not only do organised religions completely disagree about who worships the right God. They all sound pretty similar but apparently there are important differences. In fact many organised religions seem to think they are important enough to kill for. They seem to engage in lots of violent, intolerant nastiness. Unless God is a mean spirited bigot I suspect he won’t approve of any of them.

5 – Why would an all powerful being create a bunch of neurotic creatures and leave them to fend for themselves and then still feel they had the right to judge them? God is the like ultimate absent parent who still thinks he has a right to tell you what to do with your life even although he never came to watch you play football or gave you that game console you prayed so hard for.

6 – Why would an omnipotent super being have any interest in us at all? We behave much like the rest of the animals on the planet there are just more of us and we are more organised about creating a big mess. What do we do that could possibly interest God and doesn’t he know everything anyway? If he existed he would be bored out of his mind watching me taking a crap every day.

7 – People keep changing the rules. If you take something like the bible (this applies to any religious writing) you’ll see it has been altered, edited and changed over the years and it still contradicts itself repeatedly. The Pope even decided he was infallible. How can he go from being fallible to infallible over night? Isn’t it more likely that people are just making this stuff up?

8 – Why did God used to do all sorts of interesting things but nowadays he does nothing? The parting of the Red Sea, the burning bush, sending Jesus down, Jonah in the whale all that stuff happened ages ago. If there was a miracle now everyone would believe in God because it would be filmed and posted on You Tube within seconds. So why did the miracles dry up now that we have the capacity to record them for posterity? Seems convenient doesn’t it?

9 – Why would God be sexist? That strikes me as a pretty typical trait of men and worse they seem to be trying to blame their rampant woman hating on God. “It isn’t us that think women should be slaves to the wishes of men, oh no, it is God himself...honest!” Yeah and God also said I should get the last biscuit in the tin so there!

10 – God has never touched me personally. Although it seems that by today’s standards if a strange old man touched you he’d be locked away many people still claim to believe in God because of some personal experience with him. They have a big life change or just a moment of quiet reflection and they interpret it as some kind of Godly contact. I don’t really get it but if they didn’t believe before it happened to them then why do they expect me to believe when I have never “been touched”?