For me, however, there was a mental wall between religion and God.  I could walk around inside religion and never, on any sort of emotional level, understand that God was a person, an actual Being with thoughts and feelings and that sort of thing.  To me, God was more of an idea.  It was something like a slot machine, a set of spinning images that dolled out rewards based on behavior and, perhaps, chance.

The slot-machine God provided a relief for the pinging guilt and a sense of hope that my life would get organized toward a purpose.  I was too dumb to test the merit of the slot machine idea.  I simply began to pray for forgiveness, thinking the cherries might line up and the light atop the machine would flash, spilling shiny tokens of good fate.  What I was doing was more in line with superstition than spirituality.  But it worked.  If something nice happened to me, I thought it was God, and if something nice didn't, I went back to the slot machine, knelt down in prayer, and pulled the lever a few more times.  I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back.  But the fun never lasts.