(Um, this started as a reply to your comment but quickly became its own "idea I'm not ready to post" on deconversions and how we could accomplish them quickly.)

Upvoted. It took me months of reading to finally decide I was wrong. If we could put that "aha" moment in one document... well, we could do a lot of good.

Deconversions are tricky though. Did anyone here ever read Kissing Hank's Ass? It's a scathing moral indictment of mainline Christianity. I read it when I was 15 and couldn't sleep for most of a night.

And the next day, I pretty much decided to ignore it. I deconverted seven years later.

I believe the truth matters, and I believe you do a person a favor by deconverting them. But if you've been in for a while, if you've grown dependent on, for example, believing in an eternal life... there's a lot of pain in deconversion, and your mind's going to work hard to avoid it. We need to be prepared for that.

If I were to distill the reason I became an atheist into a few words, it would look something like:

Ontologically fundamental mental things don't make sense, but the human mind is wired to expect them. Fish swim in a sea of water, humans swim in a sea of minds. But mental things are complicated. In order to understand them you have to break them down into parts, something we're still working hard to do. If you say "the universe exists because someone created it," it feels like you've explained something, because agents are part of the most fundamental building blocks from which you build your world. But agency, intelligence, desire, and all the rest, are complicated properties which have a specific history here on earth. Sort of like cheesecake. Or the foxtrot. Or socialism.

If somebody started talking about the earth starting because of cheesecake, you'd wonder where the cheesecake came from. You'd look in a history book or a cook book and discover that the cheesecake has its origins in the roman empire, as a result of, well, people being hungry, and as a result of cows existing, and on and on, and you'd wonder how all those complex causes could produce a cheesecake predating the universe, and what sense it would make cut off from the rich causal net in which we find cheesecakes embedded today. Intelligence should not be any different. Agency trips up Occam's rasor, because humans are wired to expect there to always be agents about. But an explanation of the universe which contains an agent is an incredibly complicated theory, which only presents itself to us for consideration because of our biases.

A complicated theory that you never would have thought of in the first place had you been less biased is not a theory that might still be right -- it's just plain wrong. In the same sense that, if you're looking for a murderer in New York city, and you bring a suspect in on the advice of one of your lieutenants, and then it turns out the lieutenant picked the suspect by reading a horoscope, you have the wrong guy. You don't keep him there because he might be the murderer after all, and you may as well make sure. With all of New York to canvas, you let him go, and you start over. So too with agency-based explanations of the universe's beginning.

I've rambled terribly, and were that a top-level post, or a "master argument" it would have to be cleaned up considerably, but what I have just said is why I am an atheist, and not a clever argument I invented to support it.