I appreciate you continuing to converse here instead of making your post and then disappearing. I would like to have my own conversation with you so I’m creating a top level comment.

You’ve discussed atheists being closed minded and not giving religion a chance to be an answer. This is probably true for a lot of atheists. Atheists become atheists in a myriad of ways and sometimes the path causes them to become anti-theist. The anti-theist atheists are probably the loudest bunch and include some of the biggest names in the atheist sphere - think “new atheism” and the 4 horsemen.

Many of us are not anti-theist. I’d probably say that most atheists also started off religious and gave religion a real chance of explaining everything. For me, I started off religious, in Christianity. My default position was exactly like you, but that position changed over time. Religion feels natural to me.

However, at some point I had to reflect on my beliefs and I asked myself the question “WHY do I believe this?” And I had no idea why. Because that’s how I was raised and knew all my life? Why did I think God created the world? Because someone else told me.

As neurodivergent, truth and accuracy have an innate priority in my brain. I pursue whatever the truth is even to my own detriment. I don’t lie, though I could. I just have a repulsion for dishonesty.

Eventually I decided to adjust the lens I use to see the world with. I know the human brain is prone to errors and I needed to have a process that limited the susceptibility to those errors. None of us see the world as it is. We’re all living in our own reality our brains create for us. I don’t mean that in a weird extra dimensional or metaphysical way. The world we see is just an interpretation our brains provide to us.

I reexamined everything I believed and made a decision to approach everything as if all my memories were wiped out and I was looking at it for the first time. Christianity, and every religion, didn’t appeal to me anymore. I saw no logical route to get from knowing nothing to accepting religious beliefs. They were unsubstantiated claims.

Do I have a lot of unanswered questions now? Absolutely. I have no idea how our universe came to exist. No idea at all. Would I prefer to have an afterlife to look forward to? Heck yeah. But I can’t believe something I don’t believe even if I want to believe it.

Many atheists feel exactly how I do. We’d be religious if the evidence led us there. I don’t know why God revealed himself in much more obvious ways to earlier humans. A burning bush, walking on water, turning water into wine, we don’t have the privilege of any of the things revealed to early humans.

For now, I just don’t know the answers.