I must also say that your answer was more agnostic than atheistic; the atheistic answer should be 'because they were fools'.
She responded and told me there was an abandoned church where she grew up. She liked to hang out in the building because it was a convenient place to read.
I have the letter stowed in a box somewhere in my parents' attic.
Your conscious reasoning is often a mere rationalization of some underlying subconscious drive whose object or direction may be obscure until later in life, if at all. When you hear people talk of 'literary novels' they're often speaking of work which addresses such questions. In such stories the stakes often seem low, and the disinterested reader easily gets bored because nothing much is happening besides the characters reacting dramatically to ordinary or even dull events, compared to genre fiction where the stakes are frequently life and death, and the characters are forced into rapid and highly consequential decision-making.
in other words...Richard Dawkins is not the prototype of all atheists.