An Atheist "Testimony"

I used to be Christian.  Basically I didn't have any epiphanies or "getting it" or anything, it was a long slow process from belief to atheism. I guess what first made me question faith was the fact that if I was brought up in India I would almost definitely be Hindu and if brought up in Iran I would almost definitely be Muslim, etc. I noticed that all religions are so very very similar in the way they operate. I had always looked at other religions (Islam, Greek, Hinduism) and always thought how silly they sounded talking about these things that obviously never happened, like "all lightning bolts come from Zeus", or Muhammad's horse flying from Mecca to Jerusalem. It was always obvious to me that those things never happened; that it was a product of primitive men either completely fabricating stories or explaining things that they didn't understand.

I really like the example of the Greeks. They were a very intelligent and rational people (for the most part), but they thought that oracles would tell them the future of battles and things. Despite the fact (that we know) that their oracles never really told them anything, they believed in them for so long. And once you accept that, it's easy to make the jump from Greek oracles to Christian prayer. I never doubted prayer at all! I understood that we prayed for things and God would either give them to us or not. But if you compare that to the oracles, it's the same thing. Theres no other possible answer other than yes or no. Either a thing will happen or it won't. And I know many of you believe, just as I used to believe, that you've had prayers answered or had God speak to you through circumstance and all this, but if you look at it for a moment through the eyes of a nonbeliever, isn't it obvious that things happen basically randomly? Sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad things happen. There is no pattern of correspondence between prayer and events. But it's easy for our minds to fabricate them, just like the Greeks.  Since I've quit asking God to "bless" my food, I have found that my rate of illness has stayed exactly the same.  If there were any actual benefit to praying about food, or life, or anything, you would expect Christians, on average, to have better health or easier lives, or to win the lottery more often.  I know that "thou shalt not test the Lord thy God", but if we look at the raw data from Christians actually praying for things, there is no evidence of these prayers coming true more often than the normal rate of occurance.

That's what originally made me question my faith, and I think that once you start to look at everything from the outside and start to question the things you've "known" since you were a child, the curtain falls. From there I found it easy to show myself that there is no greater being, that man is the product of a wonderful and complex evolution from absolutely nothing. And it's in my atheism that I've found a world so much more rich and beautiful than anything the primitive stories can give me. I traded a burning bush for the Cat's Eye Nebula, and I wouldn't trade back for anything.