You can be an atheist and not believe in gods. You can be a nihilist and not believe in anything at all. You can be an egocentrist and believe only in yourself. But beware: gods are capable of punishing you even if, in reality, they don’t exist. The punishment will be carried out either by the hands of believers—or by circumstances, because in your arrogant disbelief you won’t be able to correctly understand and calculate people’s motivations, which means you won’t be able to properly predict or interpret their actions. Yet gods can punish in different ways too—for example, by lifting the veil for a moment over what, according to your atheist conviction, simply doesn’t exist…