The problem with prayer.

[drfuzzy]

I love how so many Christians assume that atheists were never Christian. That's true for some, but too many people grow up with Christianity for that to be widely true.

I was a Christian until I was 25 and I deeply believed in all of it. I regularly went to church, prayed, and studied the bible in depth. I did everything I was supposed to do and I wanted it. The problem is that the more I looked into it, the more I started to realize how much it resembled a massive pile of horse shit. So don't come here and tell us that we haven't done exactly what you're prescribing. Many of us have been there and we got nothing out of it.

Here's an idea of how, so ironically, I would've responded as a former Evangelical Christian:

One becomes a Christian not by passively believing in its doctrines but by accepting Jesus Christ into one's own life and receiving Him as Lord and Saviour after acknowledging one's limitations and inability to ever please God with our so-called "righteousness". When that happens, you receive the Holy Spirit, and you start to learn to live and walk in God rather than in the flesh. If you never experienced any of that, then you never truly believed.

I'm assuming, Irrational, that this is what you ONCE would have said and you no longer believe, correct?  Yes, I have heard that line ad nauseum from many theists.  Some can't believe that people would actually have lived decades as a xtian and then see the bullshit for what it is.  They can't believe that someone would spend 40 years begging to "receive the holy spirit", and never feel a thing.  Some will tell me "you were doing it wrong" or "you were taught wrong".  Others simply say that some people are just rejected by god from birth.  They'll say anything that reinforces "I'm special and you're not" and "you can't prove my imaginary friend isn't real".