Flat Earth Atheist - Television Tropes & Idioms

Near of Death Note follows his own set of morals, bringing us this quote:
"Nobody can tell what is right and what is wrong, what is righteous and what is evil. Even if there is a God, and I had his teachings before me, I would think it through and decide if that was Right or Wrong myself."
- Then again, the gods in Death Note aren't exactly worthy of worship.
In One Piece's Skypeia arc, Zoro says he doesn't believe in God. Considering the main enemy in that arc is apparently God, (It's later revealed that he isn't, and it's just a title for the ruler of Skypeia) this just adds to how badass he is.
Seto Kaiba in Yu-Gi-Oh says Screw Destiny to the long history of Duel Monsters and of his rivalry with Yugi, even when he is told outright and went through the entire Millennium World arc. Of course, he goes on to found Duel Academia, a school existing solely for the purpose of being a roach motel for Eldritch Abominations, but not until the main Yu-Gi-Oh series itself is over.
- Kaiba is a very special case. It's not so much that he refuses to believe in the supernatural...it's just that he refuses to care. Well, again, not until the series is over, anyway. Even then it's more "There's a lot of weirdos out there, but my school can play the game better than them, because I made it."
  - Kaiba actually seems to be unable to fully accept the supernatural when he DOES think about it, part of his motivation in the Battle City Arc is to win to prove that it doesn't exist.
Mr. Satan of Dragonball Z was completely oblivious that the superpowered main characters were stronger than him, thinking it all to be a trick (I don't think he did the research on Roshi, Tien, and Goku...) and later on a dream. After the Cell saga, it becomes a Kayfabe put up by Goku and his fellows. Mr. Satan ends up bribing Android 18 to throw a fight against him so as to maintain the illusion that he's the strongest.
Edward Elric claims to be agnostic. This despite the fact that not only has he met God, but had a few body parts stolen by it.
- This might be more showing off because in the same chapter Ed states that his loss of body parts and Al's body is due to trying to enter God's domain. Also the actions of the Truth are mainly presented as a being punishing humans for their ego.
- It's fair to note that the creature he meets is the being who guards the gate that holds all of the knowledge of the universe. He is never stated to be the creator of the universe, nor a being to be worshipped. His actual statement ("I am what you call the world. Or perhaps the universe, or perhaps God, or perhaps truth, or perhaps all, or perhaps one, and I am also... you.") is more to imply that he doesn't have a true name or form (he is a definition-less creature roughly in the shape of a man). This doesn't make atheism impractical in the setting.

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Ted Knight, Starman, who hung around the JSA for a long time but was still convinced that science explained all of it... somehow.
- Depending On The Writer, it sometimes did (for a certain definition of "science", anyhow...) And most of the actual "gods" in the setting were actually Sufficiently Advanced Aliens anyway.
The modern Mr. Terrific in the Justice Society of America is an atheist, and he was questioned about this and gave the example mentioned (that there were godlike, or close enough entities running around who didn't call themselves gods). In the DC Universe, he has a point. The Guardians of Oa, for instance, are pretty much close to gods but no one from an advanced civilization calls them that. Self-styled gods like the New Gods, who include people like Darkseid, Big Barda and Scott ("Mr. Miracle") Free are anything but omnipotent and can be killed. As far as he (and probably others like Batman) figures, every god is just a Sufficiently Advanced Alien and not a god god.
- It's worth pointing out that Mr. Terrific is inconsistently written. Sometimes he has excellent reasons for his beliefs and sometimes he doesn't, Depending On The Writer. Some writers like to use him as a Strawman Atheist.
- This is all really kind of stupid when you realize he became the second Mister Terrific after being told the lifestory of the first by Spectre — WHO IS THE WRATH OF GOD
  - To be fair to Terrific II, there's been (pseudo) scientific explanations for gods (say hello to the beings from New Genesis!), and a lot of godlike aliens, things with delusions of grandeur. He probably thinks that there's a rational explanation for Spectre and his creator, it just hasn't been found yet.
  - Also, Spectre isn't exactly open about his job title. It took how many years before we readers learned?
Doctor Terrance Thirteen, the Ghost Breaker, is The DCU's preeminent Flat Earth Atheist (literally), earnestly believing that aliens (like Superman), magicians (like Doctor Fate) and supernatural beings (like the Spectre) simply don't exist at all. Needless to say, he's treated unilaterally as a joke. Ironically, in his original appearances before continuity held sway, the ghosts and magicians he went up against always were fake and his skepticism was presented as a virtuous trait; but when continuity started drawing all DC books into one reality, he was first shown the spirit of his dead father by the Spectre, then he was teamed with the very mystical Phantom Stranger, and from then on he was always wrong, simply because the Stranger's very existence demanded it be so. Dr. 13 currently lives outside of the time stream, aware of his own fictional nature; he is teamed with an alien, a vampire, a French caveman, and a talking vampire gorilla with Nazi leanings; his daughter is a rather powerful witch; and he believes none of this.
- There have been two alternate takes on Dr. 13, making his skepticism something other than Plot Induced Stupidity. In Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic, the fact he doesn't believe in magic means it simply doesn't work around him, in a cross between Clap Your Hands If You Believe and Weirdness Censor. In Grant Morrison's Zatanna he visits a mystical dimension and is happy to admit something's happening, but defines it all in scientific terms. (Quantum mechanics and M-theory get a lot of crap past the scientific radar.)
  - "Maybe the 'M' stands for 'magic'"
In an issue of DC's Checkmate, a wizard describes magic to an atheist skeptic as "the cheat codes to the universe."
- The Drummer uses almost the exact same explanation to Hand Wave magic into the realm of his infomancer powers.
In the Marvel Universe, Science Heroes like Iron Man and Hank Pym acknowledge that Thor might be an actual God (though they tend to think of him and all other mythological beings as closer to Sufficiently Advanced Aliens) and that characters like Doctor Strange, The Beyonder, and the Scarlet Witch are doing something beyond their comprehension. That doesn't mean they're comfortable with not understanding what's going on, don't stop looking for ways to explain it, or that they're specifically religious. The closest we ever get is one or two incidents of straight-up desperation praying after all viable options have been exhausted.
Quasar started out his series as an athiest/antitheist, but after the seminal "Cosmos In Collision" storyline a couple of years in, he became more of an agnostic ("Maybe I'm not the atheist I thought I was. Maybe I just haven't discovered the god that's right for me..."). This was likely helped by the fact that in said storyline, he died and was resurrected.
- It should be noted that God is called One-above-all and looks like Jack Kirby and met the Fantastic Four.
Touched on by the City Of Heroes comic books. A sizable portion of the titular city has been overrun by zombies powered by the magics of ancient evil "gods", another group of mages literally summon ghosts and devils and gods regularly within city limits, and one of the major canon heroes literally makes his armor out of demons. Many heroes still scoff at the concept of Prometheus and Zeus when talking to the former is an important part of making the local phlebotinum work again.
The hero of The Savage Dragon remained an atheist even after being sent to Hell (by a villain's magic), witnessing a fistfight between God and Satan, and having a conversation with God. His rationale throughout the whole ordeal was that it was just some weird dream. Later storylines have involved Godworld, a planet housing every god of every pantheon, but these gods are treated like any other superpowered menace, with the question of their legitimacy being unimportant to the story.
Brainiac 5 of the Legion Of Super Heroes. In the postboot continuity he scoffs at his teammate Shikari's feelings about finding a way home during the "Legion Lost" storyline. (In his defense, though, the setting he lives in is at the "sufficiently advanced technology" stage or close to it.)
The snarky Loveable Rogue drow elf Downer from Kyle Stanley Hunter's comics Downer: Wandering Monster and Downer: Fool's Errand calls himself an atheist, depite the fact that he lives in a Dungeons And Dragons world rife with magic and deities. Downer is a thief, a mercenary and an outcast from mainstream drow society because of his inability to access even the most basic inborn magical abilities that other drow elves have, but mainly because he harbors a special hatred for the Church of Lolth the Spider-Queen, the sadistic goddess that rules over most of drowkind. Downer does not acknowledge or follow any Higher Power, which poses a problem for him as no normal cleric will heal his injuries or resurrect him when he dies; when Downer's foot was shot off by a gun, he went to a necromancer to get a replacement. Downer has been killed several times, twice he was raised from the dead by his boss in the Thieves Guild (quite possibly with the help of a rogue cleric or archivist), and once by an artifact called the Ulolok, an avatar of Chaos, an "entity capable of reshaping the multiverse". On the cosmic chessboard where powerful players were vying for control of the Ulolok and ascension to Godhood, Downer was the wild card, because he was not interested in that power for himself. Sent to deliver the Ulolok to its destination, he first went along with it, but after having being pushed around too much for his taste, he instead went rogue and decided to keep the Ulolok (his little pet "piglet" as he called it) out of everyone else's hands. Ironically, in the end it was Downer himself who ascended to become the God of the Game (for about five minutes) when the Ulolok channeled its power through a slain Downer.
Batman has an... "interesting" place to fit in here. Many people have tried to pin down Batman's religion, but the only real consensus is that, whatever it is, it's Lapsed to be sure. Especially in recent comics, Batman will acknowledge the existence of "ghosts," "magic," etc., but does not believe they are anything super-natural; even magic has rules and laws, and it only takes sufficient study to find out exactly what those are, according to him.
- Which is how an actual scientist would (or should) react to evidence of magic, if you think about it...
- As appeared once somewhere on this very wiki, Batman's philosophy goes "If there is a God, he'd better have a really good explanation for this crap."
  - Presumably, if he were to have a face-to-face with God and he didn't have said explanation, Batman would beat him. Badly.
  - What's more, he likely has several plans for just such an occasion.
  - Could such a meeting occur? I mean, he is The Goddamn Batman
  - Then again, This Troper distinctly recalls reading a graphic novel, where Batman's monologue states "What kind of God allows a ten-year-old boy's parents to be murdered right in front of him? What kind of god allows a monster like The Joker to exist?"
  - Oddly, in the Elseworlds story Crimson Mist (in which VampireBatman, stake removed, goes on a rampage and revokes the Joker Immunity of everyone except the already-dead Joker), we did get something religious out of Batman. (Of course, it's an Elseworlds story, and as such is 100% non-canonical). Gordon expressed the old "may God have mercy on our souls" about-to-die sentiment, and Bats' narration basically said "well, probably on yours, but not mine."
Goofy, who is usually the most naive and gullible individual in the Disney pantheon, turns into a very persistent sceptic every time he gets a visit an old-style witch named Hazel. No matter how many fantastic tricks Hazel does for him, he absolutely refuses to belive that she is a real witch who can do real magic.

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Not quite atheism, but in Erik the Viking the Christian Missionary who accompanies the Vikings on their quest staunchly refuses to believe in the Norse Gods and mythology... even when they're standing outside the gates of Valhalla. Of course, he can't see it, because he doesn't believe in it, but it certainly causes a great deal of frustration with his crewmates.
- Turns out to be a plot device when the Missionary is the only one who can leave Valhalla to save them all, since he doesn't believe in it.
In a somewhat Fridge Logical example, Han Solo from Star Wars. At the start of Episode IV he doesn't believe in the Force, despite the fact that the Jedi were a major power in the galaxy up until about 18 years ago.
- Han's wife, brother-in-law, and all three of his children: all Jedi. Apparently the Force likes irony.
  - In should be noted that in a galaxy filled with countless trillions of people, the Jedi numbered in the mere thousands. The vast majority of people would never have even seen a Jedi in person, let alone seen their powers in action. Odds are (yeah, I know, Never Tell Me The Odds) that Han never had either before meeting Obi-Wan. That the Jedi are real doesn't by itself prove the Force they believe in is too, and Han had already seen a few explicitly fake religions (even accidentally creating one of them himself).
  - Note also that he never denies Obi-Wan's claims of having unusual abilities. He just doesn't believe that the Force controls everything — and Han is right. The Force both affects and is affected by the actions of every living thing in the Star Wars universe.
- This troper has been under the impression, since the release of Revenge of the Sith, that Palpatine likely did his best to completely erase all public knowledge of the Force. He did his best to kill all the Jedi, he never made it known that he was a Dark Side Force user to anyone he left alive, and there was widespread, if not universal, disbelief in the force by the beginning of A New Hope. All that was left of the Jedi was their history as a religion and "relic of the corrupt Old Republic." There was nothing about their magical powers besides rumor and myth.
  - One possibility is that the galaxy at large became convinced that since the Jedi failed to predict or prevent the destruction of their order, the Force wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.
  - It also helps that, for the most part, the Force is fairly subtle — sure, there's telekinesis, but how often do you see Jedi using that as part of their day-to-day life? The precognition and telepathy powers were much more important to doing their jobs, and those could more easily be explained away, particularly by people who never met a Jedi themselves. Notably at least two humanoid species (the Falleen and the Zeltrons) can control their pheromones to influence others; a Jedi Mind Trick could be explained by the unfamiliar as a similar biological 'trick'.
- Don't forget the guy on the Death Star who said, "Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the Rebels' hidden fortress—" at which point he is cut off by Darth Vader crushing his windpipe with the Force.
  - However that could be interpreted as him doubting the power of the Force, rather than its existence. Vader had just claimed that "the ability to destroy entire planets is insignificant next to the power of the Force", which sounds like hyperbole given that he hasn't really done anything much yet.
In Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, the title character gets attacked by a mob of atheists. "You don't know us, because we've never talked to you before!" Yeah, it's a weird movie.
At the start of Ghostbusters 2, the ghostbusters have been shut down as frauds and many characters don't believe in ghosts. This is despite New York being attacked by a giant marshmallow man at the end of the first movie.
A real Wall Banger is in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which posits that all the world governments have managed to pass the Transformers' existence off as an urban legend. Mind you, the first film's climax was a huge battle in a major city witnessed by hundreds of people.
- Not to defend Transformers 2's plot, but this troper got the feeling that a fair number of people still believed in the Cybertronian's existence, and those that didn't did so because said eye-witnesses were "crazy"
The Wizard Of Oz: A man made of tin who's been sent by a wizard to kill a witch with a talking lion doesn't believe in ghosts.

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This crops up a lot in Discworld, where atheists are often hit with lightning on clear and sunny days. The main philosopher on religious nature was "Charcoal" Abraxas (whom you could recognize by the burning smell). Note that Pratchett goes on to create a world of flat earth atheists anyway: Two characters in a total of thirty-odd books are pious for more than being the butt of jokes, one with a healthy dose of strawman. Recurring characters sidestep the lightning issue by the way that the supernatural works on the Disc — knowing that something exists is not the same as believing in it — and treat the gods with indifference and varying amounts of disdain. The gods are generally portrayed as decadent fools who couldn't lift themselves from irrelevance to save the world, and their priests as hedonist fraudsters.
- This is a little unfair. The culture of Ankh-Morpork is distinctly English, and in England it's not the done thing to make a very great public deal about one's religion. The population at large seem to regard the churches as reliably there for births and weddings and deaths, in the same way as the Church of England. Well, unless some showboating conman has recently unearthed a vast fortune supposedly as a gift from the gods, anyway.
  - Perhaps not all that unfair — Terry Pratchett is a member of the British Humanist Association and while (unlike certain other fantasy writers) he never lets his views on religion override his stories, I don't think it is out there to say faith gets a pretty rough treatment in Discworld books.
  - It's certainly fair to say that organised religion gets put down an awful lot in the books (especially Small Gods — go figure), but faith itself is dealt with quite respectfully. Even the staunchiest of anti-theists in the books, Granny Weatherwax, has faith, not in any particular deity, but faith in general.
  - But so do a lot of atheists. Just because you don't believe there's any sort of divine being doesn't mean you can't have faith in humanity.
- Feet of Clay features Dorfl, a golem who will only believe in gods when they can be proven by rational debate. Offler decides to settle this by hitting him with a lightning bolt but Dorfl simply shrugs this off, saying, "I Don't Call That Much Of An Argument". It seems that Dorfl is the gods' worst nightmare — a ceramic atheist. Fireproof!
- In Small Gods, one Ephebian philosopher says (this is paraphrased), "Once in awhile we get another philosopher in here talking about how the gods don't exist. Then we find their sandals, still smoking with a little sign saying 'Yes we do.'"
- The gods also aren't very fond of being fooled with. A footnote in Hogfather describes one philosopher indulging in the Discworld equivalent of Pascal's Wager... only to wake up in the afterlife surrounded by a lot of deities with pointed sticks who don't like smart-asses.
- In The Science of Discworld, the wizards experimentally create a little round world in a glass container (Earth). Finding that it seems to run on scientific rules rather than gods and magic confuses most of them but delights Ponder Stibbons, who has always been a secret fan of logic.
- Let's not forget atheist Sergeant Simony in Small Gods, who tells the manifested god Om, "Don't think you can get round me by existing!"
  - Om himself comments to the effect that an atheist's (such as Simony) belief in a God's non-existence is more desirable than a person who doesn't care. He also compliments Simony on his determination.
- Granny Weatherwax is something of a Flat Earth Skeptic. Despite possessing vast magical powers, most of the "witchcraft" she actually uses involves simple tricks, herbal remedies, and "headology" (like psychology, except its focused solely on manipulating people (for their own good, according to Granny)). At one point she catches a sword in her bare hand, and is highly critical of the onlooking Muggles for assuming she used magic instead of, say, a piece of iron tucked into her palm. Of course, she actually did use magic to stop the sword from cutting her, but she doesn't feel that excuses the crowd's Skepticism Failure.
- Given the stated fact that the Discworld is flat and full of gods, the Omnians could be considered Round-Disc Monotheists along the same theme as Flat Earth Atheists.
  - They do eventually give up the Monotheism...sort of. Om is no longer the only god, just the "only god worth worshipping."
- This Troper has seen (and participated in) discussion of whether, since there is a god for literally every concept ever conceived by mankind, there is in fact a god of atheism in the Disc's pantheon. Since a disc atheist has to have overwhelming conviction to hold on to his or her beliefs, disc gods derive their power from their believers, and Om says that the belief that they don't exist counts as belief for the god, such a god might actually be quite powerful.
  - But so nihilistic he or she would probably commit suicide shortly after coming into existence, or at least really, really confused.
  - The Lady? Nobody's sure whether she's actually a god, if you name her she can't help you anymore, and a group of gamblers who built a temple to her all died, forgot how but quite clearly her work. Multitasking, of course, with her more evident domain.
  - The god of evolution is an atheist (he believes in his work so strongly that the extra belief spilled over and allows him to exist). Presumably, since gods can multitask (directly stated with Anoia, who had been promoted to also being goddess of general kitchen appliances and gadgets you don't recall the purpose of), he could also be the god of atheism.
  - This troper sees the god of evolution as being Pratchett's gentle poke at the sort of moderate religious person who believes that God must have created the universe and subsequently humanity, but used the Big Bang, abiogenesis and modified descent to do so.
- It will be interesting to see how Pratchett's reported epiphany of some sort on religion affects how he portrays religion in Discworld.
  - Presumably something on the lines of the Nation. That is, not very different.
  - This was disproven in an interview, ironically titled "Terry Pratchett hints he may have found God", where he says religion is useless and false, but comforting.
Similarly, in the last The Chronicles Of Narnia novel, The Last Battle, a group of dwarfs who had turned atheist after being burned by the cult of "Tashlan" manages to trap themselves in an inverted Lotus Eater Machine effect when they were brought into Heaven during The End Of Narnia As We Know It.
- The scene is an excellent examination of the Christian point-of-view regarding those who refuse to believe in God not out of any rational position but merely because "We can't be sure, and we don't want to be taken in."
  - In defense of the dwarfs, they actually can't see any paradise or heaven or Aslan, so from their point of view it's perfectly rational not to believe in it.
  - Which is, of course, the philosophical conundrum of the scene: do the dwarves disbelieve because they can't see, or can they not see because they refuse to believe? In The Great Divorce Lewis argues that this kind of self-justifying spiritual vicious circle, taken to its ultimate extreme, is exactly what Hell is; a continuous refusal to accept the Heaven that's being offered.
Richard from The Sword Of Truth series denounces the concept of an afterlife where people are rewarded or punished for their actions, because "nobody has ever come back from the grave to describe conditions in the next life." This despite having personally conversed with the spirits of the dead at least three times, and having been adopted into a tribe whose culture revolves, at least in part, around seances to communicate with the spirits of one's ancestors. In one of these, he accidentally called up one of his own ancestors, his evil father (whom Richard had killed), who then escaped back into the world of the living and started wreaking even more havoc. So the character clearly knew better. I wonder who was really talking here?
In David Eddings' Elenium, the Elene people believe in only one God and their religion is almost exactly like the Catholic Church. Their God doesn't respond directly to them and they never see him. However, they do live on a planet with about 1,000 other gods. What is really weird is when the Church Knights (the military arm of the Church) need magic to fight magic, they get four priests from four of the other gods (who, again, the Church says don't exist) to teach them magic. And that magic is basically praying to the other gods (who according to them don't exist) for spells. Other races of people do find the Elene religion strange that way, especially the ones who actually meet their gods. Amazingly enough, Eddings gets it to work.
- This gets even more funny when the protagonists actually meet one of these other gods, who proceeds to tell them that their god is pretty boring at parties. Indeed, their god is acknowledged by other gods as being both real and incredibly powerful. He just never does anything.
- And funnier still when one of the highest ranking members of the Knights makes a comment to one of the Cardinals that maybe they didn't have to go outside the faith for their magics and basically gets told to just roll with it. Of course, that said churchman was once a Knight himself... The Elene God may have had the right idea, as it is repeatedly mentioned by other Gods that he is by far the most powerful thanks to his countless worshipers. That many of the Church Knights seem not to care much about their own God could be seen as funny or worrying.
- Funnier still was the character who told a goddess to her face that he was an atheist, even though he knew that she was a goddess. Granted, he meant that he wasn't affiliated with any particular religion, not that he didn't believe in gods.
- It becomes downright hilarious when you consider that the Big Bad of the first trilogy, whose armies were the entire reason the Church Knights learned magic in the first place, was another god. As was the Big Bad for the first two books of The Tamuli. Which includes, at one point, a reference to untold millions of other gods, a very Pratchettian horde of small unworshipped ones.
Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever from the Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant is a good example of the subtrope of the atheist dropped into a supernatural world. It takes him the whole first trilogy to accept that The Land isn't just a figment of his imagination.
- And even then he doesn't stop believing the Land is a hallucination. He just concludes that it's an important hallucination.
Fred Clark has pointed out that one primary character in the Left Behind series of novels was in Jerusalem when Israel was attacked with every single conventional and nuclear weapon Russia and Ethiopia possessed. The nukes exploded harmlessly "high in the atmosphere"; planes and conventional missiles were struck down by giant hailstones and fire from the sky, but fell only "between buildings and in deserted streets and fields"; and in the end, "not one casualty was reported in all of Israel". And not a single character considers the possibility that this — it can only be called a miracle — might be the result of divine intervention: "Here you have God appearing center stage," Clark says. "A direct, incontrovertible divine miracle witnessed by millions. Absolute, doubt-destroying, skeptic-shattering proof of the existence of God. There's freaking divine flame in the sky. Yet it produces nary a ripple of wonder, awe or spiritual searching. Alone among the millions who witnessed this event, Buck Williams is slightly prompted to be more 'spiritually attuned.'"
- To be fair it could be anything from aliens to obscene coincidence to secret government technology, in the eyes of a witness. More importantly (for version of Christianity these authors hold to) witnessing a miracle without being explicitly shown who or what caused it wouldn't be likely to cause anyone to suddenly acknowledge that they are sinners, that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life, which is the essential principle of Salvation that Fundamentalist Christians hold to. In fact, since the miracle resulted in the protection of Jerusalem, if it were to drive an atheist to believe in God, it would be far more likely to steer them towards Judaism than Christianity.
- I always saw this as them simply being unable to accept it. As offensive as this may sound to atheists, it's entirely posssible that, having basically told God to go fuck himself half their lives, many may be more terrified than awestruck by the sudden realization God exists and is now quite angry with humanity in general. Or more specifically, remember that scene in like every horror movie where someone says "There is no such thing as Jason/Freddie/That Guy From Scream/Etc!" and then turns around and gets stabbed...think about what must be going through his mind the second or two before he gets a knife in the face: "Oh crap...wow, I was so wrong it's literally hilarious. Oh well, screwed that pooch."
  - Of course, the above doesn't really explain why atheists would think that God, even if He existed, had a reason to be angry at humanity. Being the one who adamantly refused to adequately demonstrate His existence, He'd only have Himself to blame, after all. Unless He was really that petty, in which case it wouldn't be just the atheists who were screwed anyway...
  - I think the problem here is that people are giving the author far too much credit. Not that he's entirely to blame... within the Fundamentalist Christian movement as a whole, there's this idea that atheists are dumb, that we can see the evidence and reject it because we don't want it, refusing to understand that their position is 'not' obvious or self-evident to someone who wasn't raised in exactly the same way they were.
Early in Perdido Street Station, Issac expresses just such sentiments.
Dragaerans or at least the ones Vlad interacts with display signs of this — since they know that the gods are essentially only very powerful sorcerers, they believe in their existence but are less inclined to worship them. This is particularly true of Aliera, who is the daughter of one of the goddesses, Verra. Vlad gradually moves into the category, faced with the odd dichotomy between being taught to worship Verra and that she is constantly watching over him (this may actually be true), but royally pissed at how she has screwed around with his life. The gods themselves — or at least the one who we hear the most from — are somewhat testy at being regarded this way, stating that everybody is wrong about what gods are. Blood gets mentioned, and there's some strong hints that a better definition of godhood may be forthcoming in future books.
In Stephen King's novella "The Mist", the main character refers to a group of "rationalists" who refuse to accept that something very strange and dangerous is happening out in the titular mist as "The Flat Earth Society." I don't think the term comes up in the movie, though.
Mau, the hero of Terry Pratchett's Nation, refuses to believe that the gods are anything more than superstition and lazy thinking — despite being periodically shouted at by the spirits of his ancestors, and courted by Locaha, the god of death. As the old priest points out, though, this may be more anger that the gods have so thoroughly let him down than genuine atheism — after all, being the sole survivor of a tsunami has left him pretty goddamn traumatised.
- The gods themselves seem more like ineffectual echoes than genuine powers of the universe, so disbelieving them can be seen more as disbelief in their hype of themselves, rather than in their subjective existence (all observations of gods in the book is subjective — no omnipotent narrator's solution is presented).
- "Why do they want gods? We need people. That is what I believe. Without other people, we are nothing."
Arya the elf from The Inheritance Cycle. She's an elf, with teh magickzorz, and yet she rudely scoffs at the dwarves' religion. All this is set in a world of magic, dragons, the living spawning from the nonliving due to sorcerous arts, etc. The rest of the books aren't any better.
- Heck, all the elves are like that.
  - However, just because magic exists that doesn't mean gods do, it just means the laws of physics are different in that world than in ours.
  - In other words, saying that if there's elves and magic then there must be gods is falling for If Jesus Then Aliens.
  - That's true to an extent. However, the elves don't just scoff at the dwarves' religion, but at even the theoretical possibility of any religion or even supernatural beings, despite the overwhelming evidence of supernatural creatures and powers just hanging out all around them.
  - Religion and the supernatural are two very different things. The elves don't deny the existence of the supernatural, they just deny the existence of gods because they haven't seen any. Which is perfectly logical.
  - The most common supernatural element in the books is magic, a force that more or less allows the user to break the laws of reality. Though based on a language, the highly subjective nature of magic makes it both unsystematic and illogical. Even in such a setting atheism isn't illogical. Forcing one's unsolicited and hostile views on someone for detailing their beliefs when asked is not only illogical, but asinine. In short, the existence of supernatural elements doesn't prove the existence of God, but it does make someone look like a jerk for questioning a person for having beliefs that are just as logical as, say, magic.
  - That has nothing to do with this trope, however.
The Tolnedrans in The Belgariad worship a God that loves money, which sent them down a road to love money more than Gods, so that they're effectively atheist businessmen, and their God couldn't be happier with them. Most Tolnedran characters will cling to their atheism no matter how much the world's supernatural elements prod at them, including a scene where General Varana spends an entire tactical meeting facing away from the other commanders so that he won't have to see the sorcerers he's working with shapeshifting and casting spells.
In The Dresden Files, Sanya is a Russian man who was once possessed by a Fallen Angel and offered redemption and a kickass magic sword from the hand of the Archangel Michael himself. Yet to this day, he claims it might have been Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, a dream he's currently having in a coma, or a hallucination of some sort. On the complete other hand, he takes the existence of Demons, Faeries, and Wizards without much question.
- To be fair, the demons are just beings from another dimension called The Nevernever, the fairies are just creatures from another dimension called Fairie, and Odin, the valkries, and most other gods exist as well. While angels and demons in the christian sense exist, there's still no telling whether God is just this universe's equivalent of the Fairie Queens, or if he really is the creator of all universes and everything in them. Plus, you kind of have to believe in things you've personally killed.
The Mi-Go, HP Lovecraft's "Fungi from Yuggoth," appear to be an entire race of these, at least according to some Cthulhu Mythos materials. Though they live in a world overflowing with monstrous, supernatural beings with horrific powers, rather than worshiping them as gods like most mortals aware of their existence, they plan to use their science to either control or destroy these entities. In contrast to the hopelessness that surrounds any human confrontation with the Mythos' various cosmic horrors, you get the feeling that the Mi-Go might just have some chance of pulling it off, probably because, unlike humans, their science is not inhibited by old-fashioned limitations like ethics. When you think about it, they may just be the scariest damn things in the entire Mythos.
Jayce in the Instruments of Humanity series considers himself an agnostic even though he belongs to an order founded by angel and has met and killed many a demon himself. He claims it's because he's never personally met an angel or knows anyone who has but he does know that holy water, sacred ground and blessed weapons work because he uses them on a regular basis!
Jalil in the Everworld books is a teenaged atheist from this world sucked into a world where various mythological deities are real. He's fairly smart about it, but more-or-less claims them to be Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and/or that the laws of physics in this world are just different and assumed to be "magic."
- Interestingly, this series plays with the trope with another character: April, a devout Christian brought to Everworld. While she seems more open to displays of the obviously supernatural, she also claims the various deities aren't "real gods" while at the same time having a small crisis of faith.
Allan Carpentier, the hero of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Inferno, believes that the world he finds himself in is just a copy of Dante's Inferno built by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. By the end of the first book he has become convinced otherwise but has yet to decide whether or not God Is Evil.
In Saturn's Children by Charles Stross, all the characters are robots (though that word is considered obscene). Most of them, based on design schematics and such, believe that they were created by human beings. A few, however, believe in the holy doctrine of Evolution, and its prophets Darwin, Dawkins, and Gould.
In Warbreaker, Lightsong is a god who doesn't believe in his own religion. He has an epiphany towards the end. Another character, Siri, is married to the God King but doesn't believe in him. In both cases, though, they believe in the existance of the potential deities, just not their divinity.
In Towing Jehovah by James Morrow, God Is Dead and his two-mile corpse is floating in the Atlantic Ocean. The Vatican hires a disgraced oil tanker captain to tow God's body to the Arctic where it can be kept on ice before it rots away or is devoured by sharks. One of their primary antagonists is the Central Park West Enlightenment League, who upon hearing the news, try to destroy the corpse with bombs to remove concrete evidence of a deity. One of their members does remark if they were truly committed to scientific reasoning they should try to study the corpse and accept the possibility they'd been wrong all along, but the majority reject her.

Close Literature

An episode of the spinoff series Young Hercules featured a teenage, atheist Pythagoras who refuses to believe in the Greek gods. This puts him and everyone around him in extreme danger of said gods striking them down, until Hercules, and a run-in with Strife, manages to convince him that the gods are real after all. Or at least, he quickly adds, there are beings that seem to be gods...
Played with in an episode of Star Trek Voyager. Neelix is killed in an accident, then revived by Borg nanoprobes, and is disturbed by not having experienced any kind of afterlife. He then makes use of Chakotay's vision-quest device, and sees (among other things) his dead sister in the vision. She tells him that she's not real and there is no afterlife, then rapidly rots into dust. Considering how real the visions appear to be, and that Chakotay seems certain they have a genuine spiritual element, why not ask "How are you talking to me, then?" Also, apparently the weapon that killed her was some kind of weird technobabble device that left the disintegrated people sort-of alive and theoretically reconstructable...
- Deep Space Nine also offers many classic examples of Flat Earth Atheists, specifically, in regard to the Bajoran Religion. Despite the existence of bona-fide holy relics in the form of the Orbs of the Prophets and the sworn statements of several high-ranking Starfleet officers, the Federation still treats the Bajoran Religion as mere "fairy tales". Prophecies and visions of the future are almost always dismissed as hallucinations and wild speculation, despite the well known fact that the beings known as "the Prophets" exist outside of normal time and are perfectly capable of giving visions and inspiring prophecies.
  - That's still more along the lines of the Trek No Such Thing As Space Jesus staple, then this.
Torchwood's Jack Harkness is a possible example. The finale of the first series opens with him scoffing while another character reads from the Bible. By the end of the episode, he's fought a monster named Abaddon. Whether or not a lot of the characters are supernatural, though, is ambiguous.
- Justified in that at this point Jack has died and got better several hundred times and does not consider the resulting experiences consistent with the existence of God. He's also been consistently searching for proof of something after death, but all he's gotten from people who've been there is, "None, I got nuthin'."
In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Buffy fights Demons, has been to Hell, has been to Heaven, has fought a Hell God and still remains doubtful of God's actual existence. While not really Atheism, it is some light Agnosticism at least.
- Since Joss Whedon is himself an atheist, that's probably a case of Author On Board.
  - He's a good enough writer not to let that get in the way of his story. He doesn't believe in magic or spirits or anything in the real world, but that doesn't stop him. Indeed, the magic of Buffy has distinct elements of being rather natural, just on a different level.
  - It should be pointed out that witches Amy, Tara and Willow have at various times called upon the Greek goddesses Artemis, Flora and Hecate (in ways totally inappropriate to their spheres of influence but that's another argument) and the Egyptian god Osiris. In fact when she attempted to ressurect Tara either Osiris himself or his representative (unsure which) appeared and gave her a great big NO!.
- On the other hand, she's been fighting monsters that are determined to send all of the creation that a god would supposedly care about to hell, and the only help said creation gets is a single teen-to-young adult girl, who's destined to die horribly, usually before she's onld enough to buy beer. It took the effort of her and her nakama (another thing the powers that be (or at least the Watchers) said she shouldn't have) to say Screw Destiny to all that. One can hardly blame her for believing God is either asleep at the switch, doesn't care, or doesn't exist.
  - Though if you follow that logic, the fact that the world hasn't fallen into hell, and that Buffy and friends always do win, even when the odds are overwhelmingly against them, may lend credence to a "maybe he's working through you" argument.
  - They know who the good powers are, and they explicitly called them bastards. From Buffy's perspective, the good guys just aren't worthy of worship, nor do they appear to need it, nor are they ever seen seeking it.
- And then there are the residents of Sunnydale, who mostly refuse to believe in vampires and demons despite all the supernatural mayhem that is constantly happening in their town. They do seem to finally get the hint in the final season, though; at which point everyone packs up and leaves town.

Close Live Action TV

In Hamlet, the title character gives a speech in which he calls death "The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns" in spite of the fact that he's spoken with the ghost of his father. Plot Hole, anyone?
- Well, a good part of Hamlet's indecision and inaction stems from his questioning whether he genuinely saw a ghost or had a vision, rather than just hallucinating or being misled. The fact that he believes that "no traveler returns" from the afterlife would definitely contribute to his doubt of the ghost's reality, so he may well escape this trope.
  - The problem with this is that the ghost was seen by at least four other people — Barnardo, Francisco, and Marcellus and Horatio before Hamlet ever encounters it, which strongly suggests against the hallucination theory, and Horatio is not only Hamlet's dearest friend but a rational scholar.
- More obviously, there's the popular conception that ghosts never did go to "the undiscovered country" — they're only sticking around because there's Unfinished Business, and they don't return when they cross over. Dying and becoming a ghost would thus not be representative of what death and the afterlife are like.
- To confuse the matter, Old Hamlet explicitly states that he is "Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,/And for the day confined to fast in fires". He's either in Hell or Purgatory, but Hamlet forgets when he monologues about his own fear of death.
  - Which makes this yet another example of Shakespeare introducing Protestant vs. Catholic theology into his plays. If the Catholics were right, there is a Purgatory, and ghosts exist — those dead but not in either Heaven or Hell, allowed to wander and deal with Unfinished Business (usually at night or between certain hours, according the folk Catholicism of the 1600s). If the Protestants (including the Church of England) were right, there is no such place as Purgatory, and the dead go immediately to the afterlife. The so-called ghost could be his father's dead spirit, in the religion of Denmark at the time. Or, in the religion of England and Wittenberg (where Hamlet had been living), it could be a demon with the purpose of tempting Hamlet junior into the combined sin of regicide and avunculicide.

Close Theater

A few Dungeons And Dragons settings have examples of this.
- The Eberron setting avoids this trope entirely. Divine Magic is the product of faith, Arcane Magic is just a force of the world. Someone with the proper training could have divine magic if he believed enough. Its even possible for clerics to turn from their religion and keep their spells. In fact, some mortals (and undead) have set up faiths centered around them, and their clerics get divine magic. Gods do not take physical form (except for one, The Traveler, and even then its more the stuff of myth, like in ancient Greece). There are miracles who COULD be the work of the gods, but that is opened to interpretation. In the setting, the actual existence of gods is up to a character's belief, as the gods do not act as proactively as they do in the Forgotten Realms for example. Fiends are the original occupants of the material plane, and their religious implications are downplayed. Angels and Devils are just outsiders. There are even some books that suggest the gods are based on the legends of certain Dragons.
- In the Forgotten Realms, there are still atheists. This is despite the fact that gods regularly take physical forms and rampage around the country side, and that new gods rise while others die in every decade. Really, the existence of gods would be no more questionable then that of President Obama... Incidently, there's a Fate Worse Than Death reserved for Atheists (and those who, ironically, decide to worship the Overgod Ao).
- In another Dungeons And Dragons world setting, The World of Greyhawk/Oerth, the native clergy of the Flanaess is opposed by the so-called Sceptics movement established primarily in the County and Duchy of Urnst. The more extreme members of the movement believe that the gods of Oerth are pure fiction and that their clerics are frauds, with clerical magic not granted by divine sources but coming from within like arcane magic or psionics. The more moderate Sceptics admit the existence of beings called gods, but they claim that these gods did not actually create Oerth and furthermore many of them started out as mortals who ascended to demigod status and later to godhood. Therefore the Sceptics deny these gods their faith. They're little more than a fringe group, and the one time a Sceptic gained political power, it turned out to be a disaster — one of the previous Dukes of Urnst drastically raised church taxes when he took the throne, caused a series of riots in the nation's capital, and ended up dying when no cleric would heal him after he was wounded in battle with mountain raiders.
- Since Planescape is a Clap Your Hands If You Believe setting this is common, although the Athar tends to be more Nay Theist than this, there are others who are not. (the fact that the Powers, while existing, aren't neccessarily the prime movers and shakers of the setting helps) there is also an adventure involving killing a god by *inducing* Flat Earth Atheism: A Mind Control device that you could use to give a suggestion to the entire population of a prime-material plane that their God did not exist... Which would make that belief come true.
- In Ravenloft, atheism is common in Lamordia, a domain where mad-scientist-style skepticism prevails. In other domains, heretical philosophers sometimes speculate that divine magic is actually derived from the Dark Powers, rather than the gods it's commonly attributed to; however, as most ordinary people have never even heard of the D Ps, theirs remains a minority opinion. (Out of character, it's left up to the DM to choose.)
In Warhammer40000, the Emperor of Mankind wanted to eliminate all religious beliefs from the Imperium and make mankind trust in science and logic, all was going well until some of his sons sided with the Chaos Gods and started a galactic-wide rebellion. The cosmic irony is that after these events the Emperor became the official divinity of the Imperium, and it seems he is now forced to work by his faithful people to save mankind from extinction...
- The Tau also qualify — they believe in the power of logic and science, and refuse to believe in the idea of the truly supernatural, even after repeated battles with Chaos, the Eldar, and the Sisters of Battle. Bear in mind that these races employ, respectively, daemons and humans mutated by the Dark Gods (and sometimes both in the same creatures), living avatars of a war god present as figures of molten iron carrying a giant sword and an ever-bleeding hand, and what can only be described as divine magic to the point of one of their heroines self-resurrecting and having a few beings tantamount to angels.
  - There are alternative explanations (they're wrong, but that doesn't mean they don't exist). Mutant humans could have been physically modified like Space Marines, some forms of daemon could be aliens with teleport gear, and Soulstorm, if it existed, would have shown the Tau hunting for the technology behind the Battle Sister acts of faith (needless to say, without finding it).
  - Um, isn't it less that the Tau don't believe in things like Chaos and psykers and more that they're unfamiliar with them? Being inherently less psionic than humans, there are no Tau psykers, so they've never had any experience with things like daemons. They aren't disbelievers, they're outright ignorant. Hence the short story where a Tau army believes they slew Slaanesh- they had no idea about the existence of Chaos Space Marines at the time, so they were unware that Slaanesh was the name of that band's patron deity as opposed to their commander. It's this ignorance that makes them so dangerous in the eyes of the Imperium; they consider the Tau Too Dumb To Live.
  - Also, aren't there a lot of (pseudo) scientific explanations for the more magical effects of 40k? Daemons, for example, are the literal embodiment of emotions from a parallel dimension that touches all sentient minds- and as such, they aren't subject to the normal rules of physics. The "Acts of Faith" from the Sisters of Battle could be explained in much the same way as the Ork "psychic field"; so many minds with psi-potential, all focused on the same thing, unconsciously draw Warp energy and rewrite reality in limited ways to accomplish things that aren't normally possible.
In Warhammer, the citizens of the Empire (no, not that Empire) largely refuse to acknowledge the existence of the Skaven, a race of maniacal subterranean ratmen. Clearly in a world populated by Dragons, Giants, Lizardmen, the living dead, and goat-headed mutants, three-foot-tall intelligent bipedal rats are just too much. All this after the Skaven have openly attacked the Empire (mostly Middenland) a number of times, and just recently have tried to NUKE Middenheim, Middenland's capital.
- According to some sources, the problem is not of their existence, but the idea that they have their own civilization instead of being just another form of mutant beastman.
  - The Skaven myth is one of the more dubious points of the setting — there are supposed to be more Skaven than humans, they like to abduct cattle and/or humans for slaves and chow, they've fought several wars and they're openly acknowledged by the elves and dwarves allied to the Empire as well as some other human nations directly at the Empire's borders.
  - The RPG sourcebook about the Skaven tried to make some sense of it and summed its report up with the words "There are two myths about the Skaven: The first is that they don't exist. The second is that anyone believes in the first."
- You also got Necoho the Doubter, the chaos god of... atheism...
The Palladium RPG Beyond The Supernatural featured Nega-Psychics, whose unbelief was so strong it actually (if ironically) disrupts any magic or psionics around them. In Rifts, however, where it's kind of hard to disbelieve a dragon staring you in the face, it became more of a matter of defiance.
- Similarly, GURPS has the Mundane advantage, which at its highest level will enforce dull normality around its owner by turning werewolves and aliens into guys in rubber masks and magic into cheap fireworks.
- The same thing appears in Unknown Armies. There is an NPC whose skepticism is so strong, he has an antimagic aura. Which, in turn, makes any attempt to prove the existence of the Unnatural to him impossible.

Close Tabletop Games

Planescape: Torment has the NPC Fall-From-Grace who, in a world brimming with gods and monsters and other such things, is agnostic. She's the party cleric. She's also a chaste succubus and proprietress of a brothel that doesn't involve sex. It's that kind of game.
- Note that Planescape is a Clap Your Hands If You Believe setting, where belief literally shapes reality (and clerical magic is just one form of reality-shaping). Grace draws her power from the Sensate Philosophy.
In Metal Gear Solid 2, Ocelot loudly decries the existence of the supernatural, despite the fact that he used to work with an Ax Crazy floating psychic, a shaman with flying tattoos, an arguable vampire who could pin people to their shadows, a ridiculously old man who only comes to life in battle and can communicate with forest spirits, a man who could shoot bees, and a ghost; once manipulated an elaborate chain of events involving two (arguably three) non-floating psychics; and is routinely being possessed by a ghost living in Ocelot's transplanted arm. However, this line was added by the translator; in the original Japanese, he only says that technology can replicate the supernatural.
- In Metal Gear Solid 4, however, and as specified in the database, , the "possessed by his arm" thing turned out to be real during the events of MGS2, but fake in MGS4. In between he has the arm removed, but he maintains the illusion through hypnosis and NANOMACHINES. Apparently possessing/getting possessed by people is in the blood. Oh, and Vamp's powers are equal parts nanomachine/badassery.
There happens to be an ~~atheist~~ antitheist in a God game. None of the godly power this troper threw at him could persuade him. But that's all right, tossing him about was quite amusing.
- What's rather interesting to note is that he was a significant source of belief anyway, if used properly; while he claimed not to believe in you, you could pick him up anywhere he was — even if he was outside of your control, which is something you can't do for anything else in the game, except for your creature. He also extended a small radius of influence around him, so in effect, he was a believer, he just didn't like you.
While not god, in the 3rd Ace Attorney, Edgeworth's disbelief in Spirit Channeling is odd, seeing as how he has sat across from a dead women (who he prosecuted the murder of!) in court...
- It's possible this is less honest skepticism and more a kind of willful denial, due to the role that spirit channeling played in the DL-6 trial. It's easier to believe that spirit channeling is fraud than to accept that his father's departed spirit was called back to testify about his own murder and they still couldn't get a conviction...
In World of Warcraft, Gnome characters are limited to classes that practice mundane martial arts (warriors and rogues) or arcane magic (magi and warlocks). The reason? They are a race of primarily atheists who can't play any class that requires faith in a higher power, such as the Light or nature spirits. Despite living with and fighting alongside priests, paladins, druids, and the like.
- Times change; the third expansion will be adding gnome priests to the game, around the same time an ancient subterranean dragon tries to end the world. No word yet on whether the attempted apocalypse is spurring them to religion, or if they just grow to understand the inherent recuperative opportunities and cultural stabilisation afforded by a community-focused spiritual observation and calibration organisation. Could be the Gnomes even adopt science itself as their faith.
Gannayev from Mask of the Betrayer adamantly refuses to believe that gods exist and has been known to get into massive bitchfights with the priests of Kelemvor over it (one of which you get to jump into. We suggest you don't try to prove Gann wrong, if you value your relationship-related stat boosts). He persists in this delusion even after he meets not one but two gods in person (or switches to Nay-Theism, he doesn't claify which).
- To be fair, Gann seems to think they are simply vary powerful spirits, in line with Okku, the so-called Bear God who freely admits he's just a powerful spirit.
The player character in Morrowind ends up as a sort of atheist god: NP Cs think you're a god, but you seem unconvinced.
- Well, maybe you were. This Troper was lovin' it.
- The Dwemer fit this as a species of Flat Earth Atheists. They acknowledge the existence of powerful beings such as the Daedra, but do not accept them as gods. It's not an unreasonable stance to take in truth.
  - One Dwemer tale tells of a Dwemer who tricks Azura with a box containing a mirror. After she correctly guesses what the box holds, he opens the box and the mirror makes it appear as if the box was empty, 'proving' she is fallible and so not a god. He dies that night, a smile on his face. Of course, the Dunmer tell a different story: Azura sees through the tricks and strikes him down there and then...I prefer the Dwemer version.
  - In the sequal, Oblivion, Ilsi God-Hater appears to be this at first. turns out she actually worships Mehrunes Dagon, and doesn't want anyone to guess.
  - One of her speechs sums up her views
    "The gods don't do a damn thing. Do they even exist? How could anyone tell? Daedra Lords, sure. They exist. They do things. Bad things, mostly, but things you can see. The gods? They don't do a damn thing. So why do we build big chapels and sit around and mumble, and ask them to save us from this and that? It's stupid. And chapels and priests and folks grovelling on their knees, they're stupid, too."
In Touhou Project: Immaterial And Missing Power, Sakuya lets Reimu know she doesn't believe in the gods when Reimu trys to solicit her for a donation to her shrine.
Ghostbusters again! By the time of the Video Game, the events of the two films — including two massive ghostly uprisings in New York, a God of Destruction in the form of a marshmallow mascot attacking the city, the Museum of Natural History being engulfed by goo, and the Statue of Liberty taking a stroll through Manhattan — mean that everyone believes the Ghostbusters are the real thing... except Obstructive Bureaucrat Walter Peck, who continues to believe they're nothing but dangerous frauds pulling an impossibly elaborate hoax. It's implied he might be a Gozer cultist that's just faking it to cover his sinister true motivations. Turns out he's not, and after the events of the game, which include another Gozer attack, a supernatural event at the Museum of Natural History at which Peck is personally present and is actually possessed, an island rising out of the Hudson River then sinking back into it again, another massive ghostly uprising — this time including Central Park turning into a massive otherworldly graveyard, and being personally abducted by the ghost of Ivo Shandor who had been possessing the Mayor and personally witnessing the first half of the Ghostbusters' battle with him... he still thinks they're nothing more than dangerous frauds that need to be shut down.
Final Fantasy X has Rikku, who in world of crazy creatures and the like, refuses to believe that the "Farplane" is actually the afterlife, insisting that it's just an illusion.
In Star Ocean, after you've visited the king of Van and been told the legend of the Demon World, Iria and Ronixis (your two teammates who are from a scientifically advanced Earth) have a private talk about gods and demons and superstition, and why they shouldn't just accept the supernatural elements of planet Roak and instead look for logical explanations. This flies in the face of the fact that Iria can shoot energy from her hands, while Ronixis has put aside his starship captain comission to become a powerful Heraldric mage who calls down lightning and fire on his foes.

Close Video Games

Spider Cliff: Eliza, and to a lesser extent Barlow.

Close Web Animation

In a Shortpacked! strip, a transformer claims to be an atheist. This wouldn't be a problem, except they live on their planet-sized creator.
- This is actually based on Jetfire's personality in the comics. It's a long-running implicit joke that he believes in some odd kind of evolution which is obviously ridiculous (although the levers-and-pulleys thing was actually canon at one point). The above comic is not exaggerating.
  - The fact that he was made by a very intelligent designer (Shockwave) in the marvel comics makes this even funnier
- Likewise, Dreadmoon of the Insecticomics is an atheist and skeptic. Somehow he manages to reconcile this with the fact that his commander has an immortal spark, people can and have been brought back from the dead, and they have done battle against the powerful minions of a chaos god who is the closest thing Transformers have to the Devil.
  - And now they're doing battle against the chaos god himself. This does not seem to have caused any crises of faith.
Cleric from 8-Bit Theatre. In his line of work he can't afford to show favourites.
- According to a recent strip the gods like this attitude since they know he isn't trying to suck up to them.
1/0 featured the character Marcus, who became so angry at the comic's creator Tailsteak that he willingly acquired a fourth wall — an inability to hear Tailsteak, see the comic's layout, have real-world knowledge, basically to realise in any way he was a character in a comic. Marcus remained stolidly convinced he was the Only Sane Man despite Tailsteak's continuous creation of life, inventing laws of physics, and generally interfering with the comic's world in an obvious fashion. Ironically, to rationalise all the ghosts and golems and such, Marcus eventually had to create his own increasingly-convoluted religion. Eventually, he reaches such levels of Strawman Political (very clearly representing atheism, agnosticism, pantheism, and polytheism at various points) that Petitus chews out the Christian author for his Anvilicious Author Tract.
Roger, the main character of Go Fish, is a great example of this trope. Despite being recruited to be a god's contact on Earth, meeting various gods and angels, and actually visiting the realm where the gods live, he still identifies himself as an atheist in a recent comic
In The Last Days Of Foxhound, Psycho Mantis, who is a psychic, refuses to believe in ghosts. Lampshaded in the last 3 panels here.
- Making this even funnier is the fact that in Metal Gear Solid 4 Mantis shows up as a ghost.
Exterminatus Now: After getting chewed out by Virus for trying to arrest a ~~Jehovah's~~ Dagohma's Witness, Eastwood reveals that he does not believe in gods, demons, or the supernatural, despite personally witnessing the existence of such as part of his job. "It's easy. All it takes is a little faith."
In Sluggy Freelance Kent refuses to believe in vampires even after seeing several for himself. It's later theorized, however, that Kent does realize vampires are real, but admitting that would also mean admitting he was wrong. Ain't no way that's gonna happen.

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The mechans of Tales Of MU are proponents of the scientific method in a world where, when you try to eff the ineffable, the ineffable effs back.
- Tales Of MU also has a god, Arkhanos, who encourages their followers to not be 100% sure of said deity's (or any other deity's) godhood. Or gender, for that matter. Arkhanites like to point out that while divine magic works and gods have made well-documented appearances, it's possible that they're simply much better at magic than "mortals."
- The best example of this is Steff, who is a follower of both Mechanism and and Arkhanism despite being in a relationship with both a half-demon and a semi-divine harvest spirit who regularly converses with her creator deity.
- It can be argued that the scientific method should still work in that setting — if you demonstrably have gods and magic, you simply need to account for them in your theories because anything else would be unscientific. Of course, Mack is not the most unbiased of narrators in the first place...
- It should also be noted that the M Universe contains multiple religions, each with its own distinct (and is some cases conflicting) mythology/theology, all of which are apparently real. So it's fairly easy to see how people might get confused. To quote the author:
  In most fantasy worlds, because “the gods are real”, there’s one set of myths which are only myths in that they’re mythic in scope… they’re essentially true and everybody knows them and agrees on them, and if there’s any dissent it’s a big story point because either the dissenters are eeeeeevillll or they’re secretly the good guys. Even if the elves have one set of myths and the dwarves have another, it’s only because they have different gods and their myths only deal with their corner of the world. With everything else they fight about, you rarely see the dwarves and elves falling out because one believes the world was made from the bones of Fireaxe Grimbeer and the other thinks it was fashioned in seven days by Emostar Vaguelygay, because those gods are real in the story and therefore not subject to this kind of disagreement.I don’t really buy the logic there. Our world is made of real and we can’t often agree on any two things inside it. Ignoring the possibility of any actual divine/supernatural stuff existing in our world, all of our conflicting myths and legends came about because of real, (at one time) verifiable events: wars, people, seasons, animals, whatever. Adding another class or two of things to those lists wouldn’t change the essential nature of the beast, which is that 1) we like to make stuff up when we don’t know something and 2) we frequently don’t know shit.
The shared universe Metamor Keep has Virmir, a powerful mage who doesn't believe gods exist in a world where priests summon the gods to bargain with them for favors on a semi-regular basis. Even more ironically it's suggested that his grandfather is some kind of demon or minor god.
- Though Metamor's resident priestess seems to share some beliefs with the Arkhanites mentioned above.

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In The Simpsons, although God and Jesus Christ have been shown to exist, and Homer has had numerous run-ins with the Almighty, he's still able in the episode "HOM-R" to construct a mathematical proof of God's nonexistence while trying to devise a flat tax proposal. This is of course just another of the many times where the show openly ignores continuity for the sake of a quick joke.
In the South Park episode "Cartmanland", Kyle loses faith in God. This is despite the fact that the boys have met Jesus and Satan in the past. In one episode, they even meet god itself. Although, it could be that he just believes that God doesn't care, as opposed to God doesn't exist. Never mind that he is Jewish, while knowing that Jesus exists and has holy powers. Also, it is South Park.
- Additionally, Mohamed, Buddha and Joseph Smith also exist and have ~~holy powers~~ superpowers. They Fight Crime!
- Not to mention that God is actually, apparently, a giant spider. At least, the Catholic God.
  - The giant spider wasn't the Catholic God, Jesus is the Catholic God. The giant spider was merely a representation of the traditions that infect many catholic services that have no real root in the teachings of Christ.
  - The real God is, for lack of a better description, a bunyip.
Mandy is rendered immune to the Tooth Fairy's powers by revealing, to his face, that she doesn't believe in him.
Brian of Family Guy is a professed atheist despite the fact that God and Jesus are frequently seen in Quahog and the former once smited the family with Exodus-like plagues. However, it is Family Guy.
- And he is an Author Avatar.
- What's interesting is in the episode "If I'm Dyin', I'm Lyin'" Brian is the one who points out the plagues to Peter and then slaps him declaring that the reason things are happening is "God...is...pissed!"
  - Not to mention in the "Surfin' Bird" episode, Jesus had dinner at the Griffin household, among other interactions.
  - This reached its height of ridiculousness when Jesus showed up at the Griffin house again just to tell them that all religions are crap. Brian then gloated that he'd been proven right....because Jesus said so.
Albeit it's only in the second episode of Avatar The Last Airbender, one wonders how Sokka can express such skepticism as Katara states that the Avatar reincarnates through the four nations, when Sokka's new best friend is the Avatar.
- To be fair, in a world where people can control elements, believing in a person born with the power to control all 4 is fairly easy, but believing that he or she is the reincarnation of the previous guy is another thing. Regardlessly, he quits doubting the existence of spirits once he actually spends time in the spirit world and instead merely takes a dismissive/uninterested view of them.
Pick any Christmas movie or Christmas Special in which Santa Claus is real and actively delivers presents to a large fraction of the world's children, yet the vast majority of adults do not believe in him. Let me review the situation: Mysterious packages show up under Christmas trees that Mom and Dad certainly don't remember buying. Little Sally in the hovel next door ends up with an expensive doll in her stocking despite her parents barely being able to afford necessities and keeping the doors locked for fear of burglars. Yet despite these otherwise inexplicable occurrences, people dismiss Santa as a fairy tale or "stuff for babies."
- Worse, in the Christmas movies/specials where Santa Claus not only exists, but doesn't even actually hide his existence — to the point where you'd easily be able to see the man just by waiting outside on Christmas Eve, or even by telephoning the North Pole.
- The same would apply to the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, where they also actively deliver presents to children.
- This exact trope is what proved to this troper that Santa doesn't exist.
Doc Saturday from The Secret Saturdays actively disbelieves in magic despite being married to someone who does (and wields a magical fire sword), having a son with supernatural powers, and continually doing battle against things like evil alternate reality doppelgangers, killer salt monsters, and an evil Large Ham out to conquer the world by unleashing a mythical god of evil.
The Duck Tales episode "The Curse of Castle Mc Duck" begins with Scrooge and his nephews being skeptical about the existence of ghosts, despite the fact that several previous episodes show them witnessing ghosts. The moral of this episode, about there being a scientific explanation for everything, is also pretty stupid in light of the fact that half the episodes of the show feature supernatural events.
- Arguably, Scrooge and co. are just being cautious. Just because you know ghosts exist doesn't mean that you should immediately accept any event that seems supernatural as such. Mind you, I'm sure this was just the writer's shooting themselves in the foot.
In an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, Squidward says he doesn't belive in ghosts (or more specifically the Flying Dutchman), which is odd considering the Flying Dutchman appeared to the entire town in the Halloween episode and Squidward was zapped over and over and tortured by the Flying Dutchman in another episode.
In B Movie Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, the titular women come to accept that their various nature gods are false after they fail to kill the human astronauts. At the end, they declare the humans' dead robot to be their new god. This ignores the fact that their prayers to the gods, although failing to kill the humans, did cause volcanic eruptions and floods, and killed the robot that they accept as the "strongest god".
Another Batman example comes from the Batman Beyond episode "Revenant". An invisible force is terrorizing the school, which Terry's friends think is a ghost. This conversation ensues:
Bruce: These people believe anything they can't explain is magic.
Terry: Naturally, you don't believe in that kind of thing.
Bruce: Of course, I do. I've seen it all. Demons (Etrigan), witch boys (Gotham Knight ep "The Demon Within"), immortals (Ra's al-Ghul), zombies (Solomon Grundy). But this thing ... I don't know. It just feels so ... high school.

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This article explains just why one would be a Flat Earth Atheist, using the example of the DC Universe.

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