Having watched the whole of the following clip, it exposed me to a truism I had never before considered. That almost every religious person is an atheist. The denial of every god but their own is a denial of the existence of hundreds of gods.
A Little More Detail
The argument that almost every religious person is, in a sense, an atheist is a rhetorical device used to highlight a particular perspective on belief. It posits that a Christian, for example, who firmly denies the existence of the Hindu pantheon, the ancient Greek gods, or the deities of indigenous traditions, is functionally an atheist towards those specific gods. From this viewpoint, the devout monotheist does not merely prefer one god over others; they actively disbelieve in the literal existence of every other deity conceived by humanity. In this way, they share common ground with the atheist, who simply takes this process of disbelief one step further by including the Christian God in that same category of non-existent beings.
This perspective underscores that the difference between a theist and an atheist is often not one of kind but of number. The religious believer and the atheist both employ the same critical faculty of rejection; they simply disagree on the final entry on the list of entities to be dismissed. A Muslim who finds the concept of a divine trinity to be illogical and untrue is exercising a form of scepticism that an atheist would recognise and apply universally. Therefore, the world is not cleanly divided into those who believe in gods and those who do not, but is rather a spectrum where individuals believe in a differing number of gods, with atheists being those who believe in zero.
Consequently, this line of reasoning suggests that religious individuals are already well-practised in the act of atheism. They understand the mental process of examining a claim about a deity, evaluating the evidence (or lack thereof), and concluding that it is a human fabrication. The leap to a comprehensive atheism, then, is not an entirely foreign concept but an extension of a sceptical practice they already apply to every god but their own. It invites introspection, asking the believer to consider why their specific god is exempt from the same rigorous scrutiny they so readily apply to all others.
