A Question for Thesists

[Kingpin]

To the theists who frequent this board, I have a question for you.  I haven't been around here long, so apologies if it's already been asked.  My question is simply this.  Why do you believe in god?  Is it a simple matter of continuing the tradition of the way you were raised?  Is it the result of scientific research in which you determined that religion answered your questions about life and the world more accurately than science?  Something else?  I have a difficult time establishing what specifically causes most people to believe.  As a follow-up question, had you been raised atheist, what do you suppose the chances are that you would have found your god and converted to your religion in adulthood?

Good question AA and I actually agree with a lot of people on here that if MOST theists are honest it will be because they were "raised that way".  As a theist, I will answer your question.

I was not raised as a Christian and did not attend any church growing up.  No one in my family had.  My first encounter with the word "God" outside of citing the pledge of allegiance in grade school was by my ill mother.  She told me that God was calling her home.  I was 8.  She died a week later.  She had been diagnosed with M.S. at 24 and died at 27.  I was then raised by my grandparents.  My grandmother grew up Catholic but denounced that when she was 17.  My grandfather was an angry drunk who hated religion because his sisters were Southern Baptist Bible thumpers.  I was angry at this "God" until I was 17.  I struggled through my teen years and left home to be on my own at 17.  I ran in to a friend I hadn't seen in a few years who was drastically different then I remember him being.  He talked to me about Jesus, the Bible, etc and well I didn't want to hear any of it, I could not get over how drastically different he was and toiled with a lot of internal thoughts and feelings of something missing in my life.  During the next four years I considered myself an agnostic atheist, but also could not stop thinking of how my friend has changed and kept going back to my mother's words about God calling her home.  I felt it worth looking in to.  In college I studied a lot of religions and philosophy and the one that really pointed me to a Christian was C.S. Lewis.  His argument from Morality I found to be logically consistent and coherent and honestly irrefutable.  To me it certainly pointed to a deity.  At the age of 21 I became a Christian and found profound change and peace in my own life.  I continue to pursue intelligent reasoning and do not shy away from opposing viewpoints.  I enjoy reading the works of Dawkins, Hitchings, Hawking, and Nietzsche (among others).  So one might say that my reson for believing is purely emotional but I continue to test it intellectually.

I would be curious of the answers if it was posed to the opposing view.  Most atheists I have conversed with indeed started out in religion and walked away from it because of religion itself (hurt by church, find church people fake) or evil and suffering in the world, or find religious atrocities both current historical etc.  These are also emotion based reasons not to believe.  Not saying that is why anyone here does not believe, just that in my personal experiences that is why I find most people claim to be atheist.