Bottle wrote:I have posed this very question several times over the years, and been quite sincere about it. I've sat down with believers and told them that if they can honestly explain to me why I should worship their God then I'll give it all the fair consideration I can.
I've yet to be given any convincing reason to believe in any God. The best most people can come up with is something about the afterlife, but I don't particularly want an afterlife so that's not really a good bargaining chip with me. They sometimes try to threaten me with Hell or something, but that tends to backfire because I'm not willing to worship a being who would torture otherwise-innocent people for all eternity simply because they didn't worship correctly.
I've never liked religions that beat people over the head with threats of a bad afterlife. It was actually what drove me away from Christianity, not the implausibility of that particular god existing. I didn't find him worthy of worship. To me, a being that would punish us for not guessing correctly on something with so little to go on, is an asshole, not somebody to idolize.
However, I became a pagan, not an atheist. I'm a spiritual person, and it's a lot more fun and meaningful to me. I can't blame others for not believing the same as I do, though. What people actually DO is more important, to me, than what they believe. Besides, it would be boring if everyone thought the same thing as I do.