Reasons Why Many Skeptics Like To Study And Discuss Religions

 

Now, I don't happen to think the God-issues really matter in-and-of-themselves.

I used to be a believer.
I've also had a lot of long conversations with believers.
So I have a fair understand why it matters to many. 

Meanwhile, ..

 I realize that by diving into these issues with believers,
skeptics are often 'giving the impression' that the issues of a God's existence, nature, involvement, and will ... matter to us too, on a personal level.

Ironically, that just fuels the common theistic assumption that we're acting upon a common urge or 'intuition',
 to seek out the truths of a "God", or otherwise "rebel" (further inferring there is someone to rebel against).

Somehow, many theists manage to totally misunderstand the real motivators for various skeptics.

We don't all have the same motivators.
However, 
it seems (to me) that the most common motivators (for skeptics) are purely academic.
The second most common reason seem (to me) to be:
 wanting to help make this world a better place. 

Usually, it seems (to me) like skeptics are trying to study the way various beliefs evolved,
and
how those have influenced humanity's developments (social, societal, cultural, cognitive, and perhaps even epigenetically).

Meanwhile, some atheists "love the bible", in a romanticized notion of it being a rich and colorful tapestry of ideas .... which have been deeply woven into the development of modern societies.

And yet, others hate bibles, and biblically-themed religions,
because of how much suffering, injustice, and death they attribute to those religious texts and those religions (or "faiths"). 

There probably are some non-believing skeptics out there 
who are angry at a ghost called "God" which haunts their mind;

- while they rail against that mentally-implanted figure, and against whichever insidious religion implanted him there;

- while part of their mind regards him as autonomously "real",

 while more rational centers of their mind know him as a a figure which only has "life" as a mental construct. 

 In that sense, they could be said to "hate a God".

There are also probably some skeptics out there 
who will ~eventually~ believe in a "God", and may not realize they're reacting to some internal 'draw' to 'seek' such a thing. 
 Perhaps they will become (or re-become) theists,
after they find some version of "God" which doesn't have the rational and ethical problems inherent to the versions they reject.
 But they would be the minority, among non-theist/atheist skeptics. 

And yet, ...
 Most atheistic rational skeptics 
will always (truly) be a non-believer.
- But not as a "rebellion".
- Not as a "rejection" of a God they have intuitively secretly believed in. 

No; not that at all.

 For many,
they just really don't believe.
And the more they examine the issues, the more rationally certain they become that the entire proposition of a literal personal "God"
 is either:
unknowable, 
or 
unimportant,
or
unhealthy (an unhealthy pursuit, to even care about) 
or 
simply untrue. 
 
It just depends on the individual.

Everyone's unique.

There isn't 'one single reason' why everyone who does a thing ... does that thing.