Why do I believe?

I am finding, the more I locate the people who shared the same world as I did when I was young, that many of them have discovered religion to be a caustic form of collective ignorance, destructive attitudes, and a smug sense of superiority that supersedes rational thought.  As a fairly "religious person" I painfully have to agree with them on all of these markers.  Then I have to answer them at every turn "Why I still believe?"  The answer is simple, yet gets me flak from my religiously inclined acquaintances, elders, and fellow believers:  solipsism, and probability.  Notice the order I have indicated these, and do not think that is unintentional that solipsism begins this list.  No one can sympathize with my situation, my life, my world, my existence, so no one can truly understand the world that I perceive.  In my world, because of what I have seen, experienced, been blessed with, and struggled through, the probability of God existing is higher than his chances of not being there.  My world just has the edges filled in with a creator who guides my path, and expects me to make choices based on what I understand about being faithful in everything and being kind to others, and what I can empirically understand about my world.  It has nothing to do with science, nature, evolution, politics, economics, or society.  It has everything to do with the observation that either entropy or Love has gotten me to this point in my life, and for those things that are not certain, I have a vocabulary and a system to categorize that which is unknown or imperceptible.  Christianity, or being Christ-like, for me then is not about having the truth and being right, but about being a good father, a forgetter of debts, a person willing to do labor and sleep on the ground, though I have been blessed with divinity, to be alone in hard times, to as Paul put it, work out my faith with fear and trembling, as beads of blood run down my brow in the garden ready to die for the very person killing me, to prevent the stones be thrown on the marginalized, to prepare my intellect for conflict instead of shying away with smug superiority, to recognize sacrifice before generosity, to be a peace maker, a gracious guest, to be one who re-purposes tradition to no longer be a form of discrimination, but a method of inclusion, to subvert power from those who oppress, to pay taxes to Caesar because his face is on the coin, but remember that I am made in the image of God himself, and to contemplate what I must give of myself with that face on me.  To rationally dissect the world and appreciate it's elegance, whether or not a creator made it at all, and to challenge my brothers and sisters in faith when their actions do not align with the doctrine they prescribe to others, to point out the white washed tombs and the dens of vipers.  My job is not to make followers of our tract of beliefs, but to teach the disciplines of what I know to people willing to hear, not to "prove" empirical evidence wrong with fallacious reasoning, but to acknowledge that God is a crafty fellow who designed a complex world that runs on its own.  Perhaps in another mind, not like my own, what I have attributed to God is actually nothing but cosmic coincidence, a happenstance of a spontaneous generation from a single point in space, expanding without uniformed dispersion until we gained the ability to think up God, and Heaven, and Hell, and all of these things to explain the unknown.  That's perfectly fine with me, to the utter frustration of many of my less tolerant brothers.  I don't expect everyone's brains to create the thoughts I do.  I expect that they understand what they believe, not because church screwed them up when they were younger, or they still want that smug sense of superiority without the moral contract of being sent to Hell.  I simply expect people to exist, persist, and end, where that takes us, I am not so concerned.  I live for those now, who need me, as Christ did, and that is simply how I live.  The short answer is simply "because I do."