Some interesting points made all around.
I guess I'll just add a few of my experiences. When I was younger, I had some experiences with members of various churches and/or ideologies that made me tend to shun or demean the belief sets those people represented. I think that for many, if you end up having a bad experience with a person, then that person sort of takes on the face of that ideal, when most of the time they are acting out against the tenets of whatever belief they are supposed to be practicing.
For example, when I was younger, I went to a church that had the richer folks looking down on me because I grew up poor (clean but poor, lol), and had long hair and didn't fit their image of what a proper "Christian" should look like. The truth is that I let those people take on the face of what I perceived Christianity to be: cold and hateful, judgemental and unaccepting. It's not like that, just as most Muslims aren't suicide bombers, although we often see that extremist element portrayed in the media.
I guess my point is that I personally feel that a person's spiritual side is something that some of us want to explore instead of repress. I don't think it necessarily means that we lack intelligence, or security, or self-confidence (although I've seen that be true, for sure); rather I think a lot of us just have that inner certainty that there must be SOMETHING more to this than just living in a random, chaos-filled life then dying and rotting in the ground. That doesn't mean I think I'm smarter than anyone else or that other people should have to do what I do because I've found "enlightenment". It's just something that I want to pursue.
As for the comments made by Thez, I have to say that they remind me of almost exactly where I was at one point. I didn't want to accept the potential existence of God, because the implications of that are just flat out scary. There is a lot of stuff in the Bible that the honest Christian will tell you that he/she has no good answer for. Predestination, and even the creation itself are a couple of examples of what I mean. Just as htw said, I don't think we have (or ever will have, imo) the proof for some of these things.
The hardest part for any self-reliant, independent person is to trust in something that they can't prove. We do that in small things without thinking about it, but in terms of coming to grips with a divine being, it's the hardest thing of all to concede that maybe we're not the ones behind the wheel.
Anyway, sorry for the novel length posts, but I enjoy these kinds of threads where people can talk about something that almost all of us think about and have opinions on, without it being used to personally beat people down.
Final thought, then I'll shut up. The hardest thing about being a Christian and actually having people know that is that there are so many people that watch you and just wait for the inevitable slip. The bad day; using profanity, having a moment of selfishness, getting angry- the list could go on and on. Then these kinds of people swoop in and use whatever area you've screwed up on to invalidate everything you claim to believe in. If I could change one thing it would be to have people realize that whatever your beliefs, you will occasionally fall short and screw up. It doesn't mean you're not sincere, and it doesn't invalidate your faith, but it does remind you that you're human and that you don't have any chariots of fire on their way to pick you up just yet.
