I called a friend who is a believer...

[Old Baby]

I'm going to ignore your assumptions about my Christian life, because you simply don't know what you're talking about.  If there's something about my deconversion story that you find confusing or need more information about, I'm happy to explain.

I gave you some things to explain and you ignored them, you just said you stopped believing. No one stops anything with out making some decisions along the way and those choices are part of the choice for disbelief. By the way you didn't have a Christian life you were living a lie, a lie you concocted. When a Christian (one who knows Christ) tells me they have deconverted but know God exists then I believe them, they knew yet decided to leave the faith, read scripture this is there. 

Here's what I'd like to know from you, a true Christian, who will never be swayed from your relationship with God:

You're correct nothing could change what I believe. Now I believe I asked you to provide evidence for your disbelief before you asked these questions, I believe first things first, what ever you have to say wouldn't necessarily change my response to your questions. I would like for this to be a friendly conversation and hope you do. I'm finished answering the post of others because they are being hostile and I want let a gang butt into this conversation.

GC

I don't think you know what friendly conversation is.  You just told me that I've been living a lie that I, myself, concocted.  This is true, but not in the sense that you're implying.  I'm sure that I did live a lie, but I'm convinced that you are also, though you are likely too stubborn to ever let yourself see it.  None the less, I'm going to be patient with you because I'm interested in seeing where this goes.

What do you want me to explain that I haven't?  I went back through the thread and can't really find any specific questions, only assumptions and accusations.  Are you wanting me to re-explain why I'm no longer a believer?  Fine, for all the good it will do.

First let me say that I fully appreciate your position, having been there myself.  Christians can't accept that someone left the faith because they stopped believing in God.  In order for their world to make sense, the person exiting has got to have an ulterior motive.  Either they become atheists because they can't reconcile their wild appetite for sin with the reality of eternal damnation or otherwise they are just people who never had a legit experience with God in the first place and were just pretending all along.  I get all that.  

What brought me to the realization that I didn't believe? 

Doubt.  Doubts caused me to question.  Questions caused me to research.  Research brought me to knowledge.  Knowledge turned a few nagging questions into a dozen or more nagging questions.  Still, I rationalized it all away for a while.  I told myself that God is Truth and Truth is God, so there's no need to hide from reality.  I said that contradictions only seemingly existed because of things that we didn't understand yet.  But, I began to question my subjective experience too.  What was there to lose?  I had no desire to lie to myself.   Again, God is Truth and Truth is God, right?  All I wanted was to find out what was really True, and my conscience would not allow me to stop that search just because I might find something inconvenient.  I began to reason out my beliefs and found more and more things that just didn't make sense to me.  It was like trying to fit the square peg in the round hole.  

I stopped believing because I no longer believed.  It just dawned on me.  There was no "choice".  It was like waking up from one of those dreams where you immediately want to go back to sleep and pick up where you left off, but the longer you lay there trying to get back to sleep, the more reality creeps in and reminds you how ridiculous your imagination can be.

It was like when Captain Kirk destroys the Nomad probe by repeating "Everything I say is a lie" and Nomad starts sparking and smoking and saying "Cannot compute.  Cannot compute.  Cannot compute.  Systems overloading."  Then, Nomad suddenly realizes how vulnerable he actually was right before he explodes.

Willing myself to continue believing what I didn't believe was simply impossible.  At that moment, it made as much sense to feign believing in God as it made sense to suddenly start believing in Poseidon.  I realized that my entire basis for belief was indoctrination from childhood, not on evidence or rationale or even choice.  Even in a subjective sense, there was nothing that I ever experienced as a believer that couldn't be explained naturally, and I witnessed nothing in 30+ years of Christianity to make me believe that anyone's subjective experience was anything more than a delusion brought on by hope, superstition and fear of the unknown.  I realized that religious belief demanded faith for a reason - because it's outrageous mythology.  I realized that religious denominations were all in disagreement over the message of the bible for a reason - because it has no cohesive message.  I realized that the bible was wrong about cosmology and biology for a very good reason - because it was written by "inspired" men.  It's no more inerrant than an inspired sermon or an inspired hymn or an inspired novel. 

I didn't immediately stop praying or doing religious things.  In fact, I prayed more seriously than I've prayed in a long time, because I didn't really want to believe that I had been deluded all that time, or that all of my family and friends are deluded.  But, I heard only silence.  I kept going to church with an open mind, leaving myself open to the possibility that something could be said that would bring me back.  Instead, everything I heard just seemed ridiculously absurd.  It's like I became a new person overnight.