I am saying now that I am a non-believer.

I've come to dread our nightly prayers everyday. I begin to feel a pressing annoyance and fear as 9:30 looms close. Half an hour a day taken up by meaningless recitations. It is infuriating not because it takes so long or because it's boring (which it is), but because it fills that time with something absolutely meaningless and inconsequential, and because it forces upon me the guilt of being the sole non-believer, and because I must listen to my family members offer all their fears and discontents up, in full sincerity, to a God that I believe does not exist.

I want to believe in God, if only so I can please my father. But I feel nothing I know can be, or needs to be, explained by the existence of a higher power. In fact I much prefer the world without a higher power because it's so much more elegant.

Really, has it never struck anyone that all these rituals are extremely arbitrary? I don't see which benign, benevolent God would demand this of His creation. I don't see why God should value love when "love" (as described in the Bible) never existed till Homo sapiens grew wise enough to understand it as a concept and name it.

And if we're only being sent to earth to be trialed, why even send us here, why not test our souls where they were made, or leave our spirits here after death? Why even create us, if all God can think to do with us is send us to earth where we are to prove our faith to Him, only to--what--reward us for doing as told? There are so many specific, arbitrary laws governing a universe that includes God. 

I have heard more than once that God will only work His power on me if I "believe" and "have an open heart". Isn't having an open heart a requirement for effective psychotherapy? Nothing can dissuade me from my belief that religion is a form of psychotherapy. It works on people because they convince themselves they are working towards an end, and they excuse the lack of a tangible proof by telling themselves that is an inherent quality of a higher power. Why does He choose not to be detectable to humanity at all? Because "He doesn't have to be tangible for us to know He is there"? It's kind of an easy to claim that a nonexistent entity sustained by belief alone "doesn't have to be tangible to be felt", isn't it?

I think God is a fiction. It's only that religion has endowed this character with such an affecting concept/philosophy that people have come to want Him to exist. Religion was designed to propagate belief in this character. 

Sure, you'll tell me reasoning is counterproductive to religious enlightenment--but am I being stubornly unreceptive, or am I merely embracing a truth you reject so you can feel slightly more secure?