I realise that my previous post concentrated rather heavily on Christianity. And that's likely to carry on being the case. But why? It certainly wasn't my initial plan. In fact, it disappoints me that so many of my fellow-atheists define themselves against Christianity to the extent that they don't really consider other religions. Some will 'go easy' on non-Christian religions, because they don't feel they know enough about them to criticise. Some even enlist them as part of their arguments against Christianity - praising the scientific advances of early Islam or the peaceful nature of Buddhism. I certainly planned to be different.
But in practice, sadly, it just isn't possible to give all religions full attention, especially when they're from outside one's own culture. I realised pretty early on that I wasn't getting much sense of the true lived faith of Christianity by reading books and websites - you have to talk to the people and take part in the worship. With other religions, it's that much harder to find a broad range of believers to talk to, or to go to religious services without being stared at.
The sheer number of religions is one of the great barriers to exploring religion at all. If you are a believer, it's likely that your own faith seems sufficiently convincing that you don't feel exploring other options is really a pressing need. But if you were generally unsure about the whole 'religion thing', how would you know where to start?
Many religious people would, I think, be happy for such a person to start by believing there's 'something there', god-wise, even if they didn't immediately pick a religion. At least they would be 'a believer'. But there is so little agreement between (and even within) religions on the definition of God/the gods/the Divine that this is harder than you might think. As soon as you start believing in a god - if your belief means anything more than just assent to the words - you're already believing in one person's god rather than another's. Moreover, it seems rather peculiar to decide that there is a deity without this making any difference to your own life. Unless you end up as a strict Enlightenment-style deist (in which case, it was barely worth the effort) any question of god's existence is also a question of your own relationship to that god - in other words, your religion.
When Pascal came up with his famous wager, he only saw two options: atheism or Catholicism. If you had any inkling at all of the existence of a god, become Catholic. And that's what probably happens with most converts - they start getting interested in religion because they encounter one particular religion and start to be attracted to it or convinced by it. Other religions don't get a look in. But if you are being intellectually honest, if you've started to take seriously the possibility of gods, miracles, afterlives and so-on, as proposed by one religion, you have to at least consider the evidence from other religious groups which make similar claims. Any argument that Religion A may advance for the existence of a divine force is also likely to be evidence for Religion B. It's even been used as an argument for atheism: why are you prepared to believe this about your own religion, when you would ignore similar evidence from another?
You can take the pragmatic approach. The main reason for an atheist to take religions with any degree of seriousness is, arguably, the large number of people who profess one, and the persistence of them through time and accross cultures. On those criteria, you can narrow it down to six or seven 'world religions'. However, that assumes that the main criterion for judging a religion's likelihood of being true is its persuasiveness or popularity - something that many religions would themselves deny. It also assumes that each religion has to be taken 'as a package' and that different religions are mutually exclusive. Whilst I'd say that's generally true, many people would argue that there is some truth in all or many religions, and that the real 'answer' is a mixture. To give a fair hearing to every possible combination of religious beliefs would take a lifetime.
So it's more or less chance and practicality that have determined my concentration on Christianity. But to my surprise, Christianity is so far in my personal Top Two of world religions (matched by hinduism, though I know much less about that). I like it because it's complicated - although that may, of course, be just because I know more about it. Buddhism seems to be offering a personal solution: how to avoid suffering and escape rebirth. Islam says this is how it is and this is what you should do. It's pretty simple. But Christianity tells a story - and if there's a moral to the story, it's that you can't expect it to be easy.