I've only read half the thread and I came a little late, but here's another perspective FWIW.

My parents were always christian (congregationalists) and they dragged me to church more sundays than they let me sleep in, but I was never that interested. It was during high school when I started asking questions about the world myself that I started to begin to develop personal beliefs.

Two main factors lead me to begin calling myself a christian, one is hearing a version of christianity that is actually somewhat reasonable, and the second is having what i can only describe as an experience of God.

The reasonable version of christianity is not very smiliar to the one that it seems most people rejected when they decided to become athiests. Babies dying of SIDS doesn't have to mean there is no God nor does it have to mean it is God's will that those babies die. When I learned that some people read The Bible as a history of a people's evolving understanding of their relationship with God, rather than as the divine, infallible word of God, I started to see that there is a lot of wisdom in the book. I started to see the punishments that were foretold not as God's wrath, but rather as the real consequences of living inconsistently with God's wisdom.

The experience of God happend when I was visiting Israel with my church youth group in the summer after my junior year of high schoool. I went on the trip reluctantly, because my parents wanted me to and because my sort of girlfriend was also going, but it ended up being quite a spiritual experience.

The moment that stands out is when I was baptized in the Jordan river (I would call this the moment I became a christian, I was baptized as I child but that had nothing to do with my personl motives so I don't think it meant much). Anyway, as I was fully submerged in the Jordan I felt this overwhelming feeling of connectedness. It felt like the water, the trees, all the people around me were just flowing through me. This connectedness is what I call God - this is what I would be referring to if I were to say that God is everywhere.

I agree with the athiests that is very hard to believe in the white beard big man up stairs image of God.