What you don't understand is that in almost every religion there are two sides of the coin. If you are an atheist then you get only the bad side.
I disagree with your presumption that an atheist doesn't understand that religion has 2 sides. That's very inaccurate. What the atheist does, that the theist does not, is actually take into consideration the bad side, whereas the theist tends to explain it away as if its all excusable.
The atheist says, "There are good things in the world and bad things in the world. What sort of God is
most likely to exist if this is the case?" The answer is either a completely neutral god, or no god at all. Do you see that as unreasonable?
To you, God is the pissed-off guy in heaven judging every wrong thing you have ever done. When you die this God is going to torture you in your guilty agony for all eternity.
This is also inaccurate. To us, God isn't real. But if we were to step into the God belief system and hypothetically approach the question as if God actually existed, what we see from the evidence everywhere in the world is that God doesn't care at all for the plight of humans. And we find that abhorrent, given his hypothetical capabilities for rectifying problems. And I, for one, have a huge problem with the idea of anyone worshiping such a being that allows the awful things to happen in this world.
On the other hand to a believer, God is the warm father figure smiling down and lending a helping hand to encourage them do good. When they die God is going to give them their long desired approval and reward all their sufferings with an eternal bliss in heaven. When you ask someone to give up God this is what you are really asking them to surrender. You can't expect to get more than a futile argument. It is because the God you feel and the God they feel is not the same God.
This is true, but ask yourself why... It is because people who believe in God are taught that 'God is good' and anything that comes up against that is wrong. They are taught to suspend their own judgement regarding the actions of this supposed being in order to maintain the premise that 'God is good'. So all the atrocities, horrors, and terrors of this world are explained in multitudes of ways, with the most common one being 'we don't always understand God'. In essence, they become a lot like the German people during WWII who firmly believed that the Jews were evil and that Hitler was good, and thus his extermination of the Jews was 'good' because there's no way Hitler could have been evil and no Jews could be good.
Suffering, death and mourning are unavoidable parts of human life. Death and misery will occur whether God puts a hand in it or not.
This is also true whether God exists or not.
But when one calls out to Him, surrenders and becomes His child then suddenly all those promises in the Bible kick in. God becomes the desperately protective Father, the mother bird seethingly jealous of her eggs and the estranged lover willing to go to any lengths (even death) for the sake of his spouse.
How does the Christian explain, then, why so many times when people call out to God, he still lets them suffer and die? Oh, that's right. By holding onto the notion that 'God is good' despite the massive, overwhelming evidence that He's not. Again, this is what I think so many of us have a hard time with. Why can't believers look at things like childhood cancer and see the blatantly obvious fact that if childhood cancer exists, God put it there? God isn't out there protecting people. He's not there at all.
The greatest problem that a person has with worshiping God is their own guilt. I am not suggesting that there are no other reasons or that every atheistic person is such way because of guilt. All i am saying is that most people that are born into Christian homes but do not enjoy church, prayer or someone walking into the room with a salvation message have this discomfort because of guilt. I am yet to meet a person who has never experienced this. It is the exact same feeling you get when you face a person you have wronged.
What discomfort are you talking about? Are you saying that the discomfort atheists feel when faced with Christians has to do with us feeling guilty about not worshiping their God? That's rather presumptuous don't you think? Why don't you actually ask us what the 'discomfort' is all about before you jump the gun and put your foot in your mouth?
I have zero guilt. None. That 'discomfort' you might sense from atheists (at least in my own experience) stems from the fact that I feel sorry for Christians, and I don't really want to be mean to them, but at the same time, I think they're embarrassing themselves. Have you ever asked an atheist if he feels guilty for not worshiping someone elses God? I'd bet you haven't.
I was born into a Christian home, did not enjoy church, and people who come up to me with a salvation message are assuming that I require something that I don't. Don't you see that Christianity basically says you have a disease and that Christianity itself is the cure for it? It's like selling someone poison, telling them to drink it, and then selling them the antidote and acting as if you 'saved' them, when it was you that poisoned them in the first place.
I'm an atheist because there is no evidence for God that I find credible.
Once a person begins to feel themselves an object of gods wrath rather than His love it becomes better to them that he does not exist.
That's absolutely wrong. If someone believed that God existed, and felt themselves becoming an object of God's wrath, it would be better to do what it takes to get back in line and not be the object of God's wrath anymore, but that ONLY works if you believe in God. Don't you see that? If you find yourself the object of your parent's wrath, it's not a reasonable position to take to say they don't exist anymore.
An atheist doesn't believe in God because there is no good evidence that God exists. Period. Let me give you one tiny example. I can't see God. Now I'm sure Christians will jump all over that and talk about things like 'just because you can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist', and rightfully so, because taken on it's own, it's not good enough. But when you take this one tiny little fact that, and you add it to a million other tiny little facts that are similar to that ( I.E. you can't test God, can't hear, taste, measure, demonstrate, or otherwise detect God, the history of the bible, no historians record Jesus, thousands of other religions, etc, etc, multiplied by a million) that make it reasonable to conclude that God doesn't exist.
They shut their eyes to any higher morality so that they can pass a benign verdict on themselves.
“If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That’s the difference between me and your God.” Tracie Harris. Her morality is better than Gods. So is mine.
They begin to sympathize with the unloved thinking "maybe God shouldn't be so harsh."
What you call 'sympathizing with the unloved thinking' (I have no idea what it means) is what I call thinking and judging actions for myself. What would be so bad with God (if you hypothetically assume he's real) being less harsh? Do you really think child rape is good for the universe?
