What made you give up on Jesus?

[Bard A Madsen]

I was loosely Christian as a kid. 

I think the thing that made me turn my back on that religion (and religion in general) was the realization of just how big the universe is. 

Like, the universe is huge. So huge that the human mind literally cannot conceive of how fucking ginormous it is. The numbers just don't compute into our understanding. If you were to go outside on a summer night, and stand in a place that gave you a good view of the skies, and if you were to try to count all the stars visible to the naked eye, you'd be there at dawn without a halfway decent estimate. There are just too many. And each one billions of years away from us, some so great in size that millions of earths could fit into them, many with barren planets orbiting them, solar systems of their own. And each planet their own world. Multiple probably with their own moons. 

And then to understand that all those stars are not even a significant portion of all the stars in our galaxy, a galaxy billions of light years across, containing countless stars and countless planets and countless solar systems. You could spend every second of your life traversing this galaxy going hundreds of miles an hour and still not see a quarter of it by the time you are dead. 

And then to understand that scientists estimate that approximately one hundred billion galaxies exist in the known universe. 

One hundred billion. That's 1 followed by 11 fucking zeroes. Each one with hundreds of billions of planets and stars. 

Comparing our planet to a single grain of sand on a beach wouldn't do justice to just how insignificant it is, how insignificant we are, on the grand scale of the universe. 

I contemplated these thoughts, and then I tried to imagine a being complex and vast enough to create all this shit. And I realized, if a being did exist that was complex and vast enough to create all this shit, why in the hell would it take a single second to draw its focus on humanity, to interact with it on a personal level, to speak to it (assuming that a primitive human could even survive having such a vast presence in its head), and then to bother sending a son (???) in human form to "save" us from "sin"? Why would such a being care what I ate, who I fucked, whether I worshiped it, what I did on Sundays.... Trying to join the two schools of thought together made the latter seem like the dream of a naive and ignorant child. It appeared to me little more than Man giving himself an ego blowjob. How arrogant are we to believe ourselves that freaking important, when our planet is no more than a speck of cosmic dust? 

The entire notion of Christianity - and any religion, for that matter - became ridiculous to me. And thus, I became a deist. And from deism sprung agnosticism, and from agnosticism sprung atheism.

And that's basically how I gave up on Jesus.

That was very good, same thing that went through my mind but didn't bother writing down as well as you just have.  I had a conversation with a person that I never did get to see their face because it was so dark while looking at the stars.  He started off asking if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my savior stuff and I tried to steer the conversation to something else, but he kept at it and I told him something of the sort of the above text and the boy was lost and started asking questions cause he never really knew that the stars were galaxies and such.  Great stuff, makes one wonder how the believers can be so arrogant to think that huge posit of a creator would bother talking to us and when he (She) did the communication skills fell vastly short of its other accomplishments!

I just love the line believers say about how non-believers are "so arrogant" that we can think on a higher level than their God.  Please...  Then in conversation they don't even know where the flood story is in the Bible !   Ahhh, in the beginning....  oh and a couple of other places.