I was raised in the church. I turned away because it's uh...clearly horse shit.
I read the Bible, God comes off like a huge asshole. Job, Abraham and Isaac, Lot's wife, the Flood. I was fucking TERRIFIED of God as a child. I felt like I was crazy, everyone around me was learning these "lessons" and I'm like, "This guy is a total jerk." Like, you make your 12 year odl son think you're going to fucking stab him and then a ram appears at the last second, and your dad murders a ram instead and we're supposed to be all good? I bet that was an awkward walk home.
Then, you know, destroying a man's life over a bet with the devil, but it's all good because "he got new family." Oh neat, I bet his old family sucked anyway. I didn't like God, he seemed like the villain in the story and I felt like I was the only one who thought so.
I had severe anxiety about going to hell. I would pray every night not to get sent to hell. I figured if Lot's wife could get turned into a pillar of salt for looking over her shoulder, at her whole life everything she had ever known, that one moment of weakness was punishable by death, what makes me so good that I wasn't hellbound? I would stay awake at night, I would pray, I would worry. It sucked. I later found out my sister was suffering in silence with the same shit.
Then as I got a little older, I realized that the Bible came down on the wrong side of slavery. How can a book that's supposed to be an infallible moral compass come down on the one issue that we as human beings as come together and said, "People shouldn't own people."
So, finally, I just said that enough is enough. I don't buy into this, it sounds exactly like the Easter Bunny and Santa Clause and Greek mythology and all the other made up shit we hear growing up, except this one was actually real magic. And you have to believe it or bad shit will happen.
As an adult, it just makes me mad. I know there are little kids out there scared shitless the same way I was, over nothing. Over something cave men made up. And the people who say, "I asked God to heal my poor sick wife and he DID!" I just want to scream, "Fuck you." I prayed for so many people, as hard as I could, and they died. I believed with all of my heart, and even when I didn't my family members did, and guess what people still suffered and died. Should I have prayed harder? Did I not say the right prayer? So sorry, your friend is dead.
If you think God saved your special person, on this planet of billions of people, then you also have to think that God chose not to save a starving kid probably within the same 10 minute period.
It's so. clearly. made. up. I don't even talk about it in real life. It's like talking to someone who thinks the earth is flat. Oh facts don't matter, and even if they did no proof anyway? This is going to be a super cool conversation, can't wait.
The best proof I've read in this whole thread is "I talked to myself in my head and then something good happened." Lucky you.
A HUGE part of what's wrong with this world is people loving their made up God more than the people around them. People exclaim it, like it's a good thing! My earthly father sucked, but he doesn'y hold a candle to my heavenly father in terms of NOT being there when I needed him, in the same way Spider-man wasn't.
I'm just so ready for humanity to grow up? The answer to your question, "Atheists who found God, why?" Because they're scared, and they have a hole to fill in their life. Scared of death, scared of being wholly unimportant in the grand scheme of things, scared of the fact that in 50-100 years,unless you are very lucky, chances are nobody will remember you or care you lived. It sucks. But it's real life, and I'd rather be scared and face reality than be scared and behave the same way cave men did when they got scared 2000 years ago.