I used to count myself an atheist during a certain span of youthful years. My RL parents pushed me in that direction, and American science-geek culture was waiting to receive me. The science nerds I knew from 1980s and 1990s schooling tended to be atheists, often obnoxiously so, and I did my best to keep up with them. Then occurred certain soul-shattering incidents at Caltech, after which I experienced a curious upswelling of interest in spirituality and religion. I did also read a little Richard Dawkins during this time, however...to be honest, I remember little of it. He compared so unfavorably to Stephen Jay Gould, as a science writer, that I was willing to toss Dawkins aside after a small sample of him.
I have to be a little delicate in writing about atheism because our system does have an atheist—Alyx Woodward, whose father is a god. (Sort of. Does Loki really count?) The situation is terminally annoying to Alyx and in the past she's declared that she'll somehow prove her own father doesn't exist, but then she realized the implications of that and now she's feeling a bit despondent about the tenuous nature of her own existence. And I want to respect that but on the other hand—! I find myself thinking that believing in gods (and believing they have the power to kick us around) is somehow the simpler option.
cw: more strident talk about atheism and the fruitlessness of merely writing off religious belief as delusion