I have found that in many cases it is not intellectual hurdles that keep someone from believing in God rather it is more spiritual than that. People just don’t want to give up their sinful ways, because they love being in sin so much, they are enjoying themselves to the fullest and the thought of having to give up all of these pleasures just isn’t thinkable for them. My opening post deals with the problem of sin. Sin is enjoyable but it has a huge downside, and that is death, spiritual death that condemns the doer to hell.
And yet, none of my atheist friends are any more sinful than my christian friends.
This personal observation is backed by this
study which finds a POSITIVE correlation between belief in and worship of a creator and rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies (i.e. Western Europe, the US, and Japan)
So who's really "enjoying" all that sin? I think you'll find the real way to stop "sin" is with proper education and promoting social responsibility, not threatening people with damnation.
We have many intuitions in our life and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions?
-Dan Ariely