'Not real' religions/beliefs

Being remote does make it much harder for cultural contact and exchanges of ideas to flourish. Still, tread with extreme care. Prevalent attitudes about such cultures have left many marks on our history, many of them painful.

Flanderso said:

I am not saying "primitive" people cannot be sketics. But to give ypu some context, my story is set in a very remote village, with very limited interaction with the larger communities. So I was trying to make sure that there was no enlightenment without due cause. The people's belief in spirits ingrained in them. They have different interpretations of how the spirits and disagree on many things.

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Rather than outspoken skeptics, you could take the approach of a character (or characters) who just have private doubts, or confide those doubts to only their closest friends.

Just my opinion, but I suspect there have been atheists and skeptics in every society throughout history, even remote, isolated, pre-industrial ones. Folks who lived in small communities where religious belief was a major component of daily life would probably keep their doubts to themselves, recognizing how disruptive it would be to show their real thoughts, but I'd wager that ever since the cave-dweller days there have been a subset of people who listened to the elders telling tales of gods and spirits around the campfire and thought to themselves, "Oh, come on. Really?"

A main character's mother in one of my books is a cynic, a skeptic, and an atheist. In a pre-fire, very primitive hunter gatherer culture. The gods are real. This woman has met them. She doesn't trust them and won't worship them, since her life proves they aren't worthy of her faith. For their part, the gods rather admire her for her resolve.

Filigree said:

A main character's mother in one of my books is a cynic, a skeptic, and an atheist. In a pre-fire, very primitive hunter gatherer culture. The gods are real. This woman has met them. She doesn't trust them and won't worship them, since her life proves they aren't worthy of her faith. For their part, the gods rather admire her for her resolve.

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The core and really only principle of Atheism is that there is/are no God/s. If she meets them, knows them for deities, and refuses to worship regardless, she doesn't belong in that category. I don't know what word would fit though; perhaps heretic from a perspective of others.

Minor quibbles aside, I like the idea from @The Otter.

A character conscious of what disrupting the perceived world order with heretical/skeptical thought would do to her tribe/village, might well harbor thoughts of that kind but not speak them.

Eilyfe said:

The core and really only principle of Atheism is that there is/are no God/s. If she meets them, knows them for deities, and refuses to worship regardless, she doesn't belong in that category. I don't know what word would fit though; perhaps heretic from a perspective of others.

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If she doesn't see them as true gods, but just powerful beings who are pretending to be gods, the term could still fit (though that also brings up the question of what defines a "god" in the first place). But yeah, in general someone who believes in gods but doesn't see them as trustworthy would still be considered a theist.

Eilyfe said:

The core and really only principle of Atheism is that there is/are no God/s. If she meets them, knows them for deities, and refuses to worship regardless, she doesn't belong in that category. I don't know what word would fit though; perhaps heretic from a perspective of others.

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The TVTropes page for this, Nay-Thiest, says it's "alatrism" (gods exist but there's no point in praying to them since they don't care) or "misothiesim" (the gods suck and I refuse to worship them). There's also antitheism which best I can gather is the belief that religion in general is harmful.

...nay-thiest is easier to remember.

Misothieism would fit that skeptic old lady then. Though it's probably easier to say dem gods be fools! and be done with it.

What you are attempting is rather complex

I get the sense you want to portray a "belief in spirits" in that exists in your world, without expressly compelling the reader to believe in their existence as veridical; but without, on the other hand, pushing some form of 'atheism' onto the reader by implying that all metaphysical concepts should be unquestioningly dismissed as a matter of human reflex?

I think the answer to this lies in Aldous Huxley's non-fiction works, the doors of perception and heaven and hell.

In these he describes a kind of "spiritual world" that perpetually exists within side one's brain, as a function of the unconscious mind. He then goes on to describe the theism/atheism split, largely in terms of a failure of one party to perceive this world in of itself (and hence the use of psychedelic drugs to open it up) but then also as a difference of category: The Theist would view it as a world that transcends and supersedes our own; while the Atheist who manages to see it, would then use science to categorise it as something that exists purely as a subset of the Physical.

If you want to layer the metaphor for "spirit" in such a way that you don't twist the readers arm... I suspect the answer will be in describing it at a level of complexity, somewhere along these lines. The reader could each take their own view of the situation without feeling pressured to see the world at large from a philosophical perspective that challenges them: you are essentially describing both truths at once, nested within the one higher meta-truth.

As I said, very difficult. Huxley did it, but he took a hell of a lot of drugs to get there.

I like to keep the reader guessing! In one book I'm working on, my main character, who inherits her mother's position as head of the nation's religion, is quickly shocked when the ritual that is supposed to allow her to hear the voice of God instead leads to an encounter with an entity who explains that her religion is all nonsense and gives her the power to read people's surface thoughts. But, as the story progresses, it's revealed that the being my MC was supposed to communicate with might be talking to someone else instead. Then the guessing game begins!

Filigree said:

A main character's mother in one of my books is a cynic, a skeptic, and an atheist. In a pre-fire, very primitive hunter gatherer culture. The gods are real. This woman has met them. She doesn't trust them and won't worship them, since her life proves they aren't worthy of her faith. For their part, the gods rather admire her for her resolve.

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Ah, it sounds like she's a Pratchett-ite.

“Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised universe, but they wouldn't see the point of believing, of going around saying "O great table, without whom we are as naught." Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe in them or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.” - Terry Pratchett, from Reaper Man

In my WIP, I keep the reality of the religions intentionally vague for the most part, though there are a couple of instances of what are basically prehistoric sorcerer kings inserting themselves into religions that have grown and changed since that time.

Flanderso said:

Funny you should say that, I do have a shaman going into a trance, but again, as he has inhaled a lot of toxic fumes from the fire, this should suggest that any visions he sees is merely chemically induced.

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This is certainly an example of a way to keep the reader guessing. Note that there are many real-world faiths that rely on chemicals to enter trance states or to have visions, but this doesn't necessarily mean that what the person experiences while in that trance isn't also divinely guided.

I agree with lizmonster that if it's important for the falseness of the religious beliefs to drive some part of the story, it might work better to drop these hints and have the reader come to realize this as things unfold.

But some of that might depend on the tone and style of the story. A story like Hitchhiker's guide had long narrative asides about world building, but it was done in a very tongue-in-cheek way because the book was having fun with many of the tropes and cliches in space-opera SF. The long explanations about things like Babel Fish and white mice probably would be intrusive in a more serious work, but they were part of the hilarious "voice" of that novel.