Ganked from "The God Delusion"

[choccoweeble]

"The philosopher Bertram Russell had an analogy: Imagine there is a china teapot in orbit around the sun. You cannot disprove the existence of the teapot because it would be too small to be spotted by our telescopes. Nobody but a lunatic would say 'Well I'm prepared to believe in the teapot because I can't disprove it'. Maybe we have to be technically and strictly agnostic, but in practice we are all 'teapot atheists'. But now suppose that everybody in society - the teachers, the tribal elders - all had faith in the teapot. Stories of the teapot have been handed down for generations, it's part of the tradition of the society, there are holy books about the teapot. Then, somebody who did not believe in the teapot might be regarded as eccentric or even mad.
There's an infinte number of things like celestial teapots that we can't disprove; there are fairies; there are unicorns; hobgoblins - we can't disprove any of those, but we don't believe in them any more than nowadays we believe in Thor, Amun-Ra or Aphrodite. We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." Richard Dawkins.