This essay is one I stumbled across a while back, and I feel like it really captures a lot of my feelings about my atheism very well. I'll copy it here in case the link is ever deleted.

There Is No God 

by Penn Jillette

I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.

But, this "This I Believe" thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life's big picture, some rules to live by. So, I'm saying, "This I believe: I believe there is no God."

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, "I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith." That's just a long-winded religious way to say, "shut up," or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, "How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do." So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that's always fun. It means I'm learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

My first doubts

"If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."   -Isaac Asimov

My first doubts as to the legitimacy of Christianity were tied to where salvation supposedly comes from. "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast." Ephesians 2:8-9  I always accepted that, thought it made sense. It was all I had ever known. But one day it occurred to me (and to the best of my recollection I really did think of it on my own, though I now know it's been said many times) that it didn't seem quite fair. From what I'd been taught, someone could be a horrible mass murderer, be guilty of the most heinous of crimes, and yet if, just moments before they died, they genuinely repented and asked Christ into their heart, they would go to Heaven. Yet if someone devoted their whole life to helping others, forgoing any chance at a normal life with a spouse and children, was totally self-sacrificing, and yet did not ask Christ into their heart, they would spend an eternity  in Hell. I believe the specific examples I had in mind were Hitler and my little sister, since they were ones I could emotionally relate to. To quote David Mills, author of Atheist Universe, one of my all time favorite books on the subject, it is "a system that admittedly promises heavenly rewards for faith and proper religious beliefs, rather than for real-world ethical treatment of others." I just couldn't see how this was a moral basis for determining who would go to eternal bliss and who to eternal torture. It certainly didn't seem to be the sort of rationale one would expect from a just deity.

I've been told this has to do with the fact that God is perfect, and our sin creates a chasm between us and him that we can never cross on our own. That Jesus's death on the cross was the only way for us to be purified, if we choose to accept it. I'll go into the subject in more detail at a later time, but it seems to me that IF God is omnipotent, as we've been given to believe, there's no such thing as the "only way" anything can be done. If he is all powerful, then the way things supposedly are is the way he chose for them to be. And again, I don't see how this is just.

I've still yet to hear an explanation that seems even remotely morally acceptable to me.This certainly wasn't the only argument that led me to embrace atheism, nor even the most compelling, but it still seems a serious endictment of Christianity, and any other religion that embraces words over deeds.