my reasons

Why would anyone want to become an agnostic/atheist?

It's an interesting question. With religion comes a lot of good things:

1. A community of people that you meet with once a week (or more). This can be a way of making friends that share your common beliefs. There is also a support system. If you just like to sing, they have that in church as well.

2. There are a lot of things you don't have to worry about. For example, death, purpose of life, man destroying itself. When you put your trust in God, you can expect that He will tell you everything you need to know after you die, and humans can't possibly destroy themselves since it was written that God will bring about the end of the world, not humans. A lot of people that convert feel a great weight lifted off their shoulders.

3. One of my main reasons for believing in God was that if you don't and the bible is true, well, you die and suffer for eternity. If God doesn't exist, then believe or not, you still end up in the same place. It just seems safer to go ahead and believe in God. It made sense to me that if you don't know where you're going, you might as well believe it's someplace good, so the time here is more enjoyable, less worrisome.

Now, I don't believe in God. Or rather, I'm one of those agnostics that's totally comfortable with saying, who knows?

I'm not going to sign on the dotted line out of fear. Sure, I might be more comfortable with believing in God and that I'll have eternal happiness after I die for doing so, but in my mind, the truth is the truth. Sometimes it's uncomfortable. There's no point in believing in something just because the belief makes you feel better when it might just be a complete falsification.

When it comes to worrying, sometimes it's good to be aware of the danger ahead of us. Sure, I could feel better by believing invisible unicorns will keep man from destroying ourselves, but that belief will only cause me to allow us to keep harming our planet. If I believe that all the knowledge in the universe will be given to me on death, why should I bother learning things here and now, where I can pass that information on to the next generation? Sure, if I believed in God, I would have a lot of anxiety removed, cause I really have no clue what's going on and I'm bothered by it. It's that lack of knowledge and uncomfortable feeling that drives me to discover more.

I hear that, statistically, more non-religious types further their education.

I really do miss having a large group of people to interact with on a regular basis. Maybe going to school would be a good replacement for church.

It's too bad that church is free and school is not. Maybe somebody should take the same donation based church model and just make free schools.

Lastly, on the topic of heaven. Somewhere at some time, some person was either told by God or simply made up the notion that if we do not have faith in God then we do not get to go to heaven. This idea may have come up long before the Jewish religion ever existed. Since then, people have added or tacked on more beliefs to this idea. For example, Mormonism is a fairly modern religion. Am I to believe that God sent out a new set of instructions for humans to get in to heaven?

If God is all-knowing and if there really is only one true religion then it must have been the first one to come up with this concept and every other one has just tacked on to that original idea. Why would God need to continuously update what he said if he knows all?

Now I know that the reason why so many religions say they are the only one that is real and if you don't believe then horrible things will happen is simply because that's the best way to get people hooked.

I refuse to be threatened to believe anything. I choose to believe the truth, even if death means I do not get to walk on streets of gold.

(why would they be made of gold anyways, material goods still have some value in heaven? And why streets, I thought everyone was given wings on their arrival, lol)