I was a strong Christian until I was 18. I never questioned it I'm ashamed to say and took a lot of flak for it at school because most of the others were atheists. Nothing they could say could shake my belief and I think I just kind of dug in.
So as much as I'd like to be able to say it was critical thinking that brought me out of it, I can't. Instead it was the raging battle between that and my homosexuality. The Bible I had back then has all the passages relating to homosexuality written out in the back. I couldn't reconcile my own personal feelings and experiences with the way it was described... misrepresented... in the Bible and I couldn't understand the 'why' of it all. So again, I'm ashamed to admit, if I hadn't had to face that sort of struggle I wonder if I would have ever questioned my Christianity, because with most of the other sins in the Bible it was self-evident why they were wrong. So if I'd 'had it easy' as it were... been straight... where all of my sins would come down to real choice rather than nature, then I think I would probably have been a Christian to this day and maybe been 'batting for the other side' in a different sense on this site
In the end, with all that cognitive dissonance, it just clicked one day when I was eighteen that "there is no god". I remember exactly where I was when that happened... it's imprinted because it was such a momentous realisation. Everything fell into place after that and made sense. And I think the mere fact of having such cognitive dissonance in the first place - the clash between two very strong belief systems - made it inevitable that it would 'click' one way or the other... that it couldn't go on like that forever just because if the brain is forced to deal with contradictory information and it can't ignore it or usurp it into an existing understanding then it will find the answer... the intuition... that brings it all together... and allows, in neural network terms, the network to 'settle' into a stable state... in this case "there is no god". I certainly couldn't ignore my homosexuality... my actual nature... and all my attempts to reconcile it were to no avail... from both sides of the fence really. From the Christian side there were the books my parents bought me when I came out to them at 15... books that tried to minimise it I suppose by saying things to the effect that 'it's not that bad, you just have to abstain just like any other unmarried person' or worse, that you could essentially force yourself to have a straight relationship of some kind and that it would be good on some platonic-ish level and that would/should, in the author's minds, be enough. And then from the other side, with the gay books I bought like Terry Sanderson's 'A Stranger In The Family' which was a book that was meant to help parents come to terms with having gay kids, and addressed among other things, their religious concerns. But the arguments it put forward never convinced my parents or me really. Anything other than taking what the Bible said at face value... things like saying it wasn't talking about loving relationships etc... just seemed like clutching at straws... which at the time I did, but it never really took hold because it had no support and didn't hold water... and just fuelled the cognitive dissonance rather than resolved it. So in the end I think it was just inevitable that the cognitive dissonance would resolve itself as it did.
And after that, as an atheist, I soaked up knowledge like a sponge, seeing the flaws in my previous belief system for what they were. Finally being able to see the Bible without emotional investment... see its contradictions and not make excuses for them or ignore them etc. And seeing all the science and psychology that led to and maintained the erroneous beliefs in the first place.
So as much as I'd like to be able to say it was critical thinking that brought me out of it, I can't. Instead it was the raging battle between that and my homosexuality. The Bible I had back then has all the passages relating to homosexuality written out in the back. I couldn't reconcile my own personal feelings and experiences with the way it was described... misrepresented... in the Bible and I couldn't understand the 'why' of it all. So again, I'm ashamed to admit, if I hadn't had to face that sort of struggle I wonder if I would have ever questioned my Christianity, because with most of the other sins in the Bible it was self-evident why they were wrong. So if I'd 'had it easy' as it were... been straight... where all of my sins would come down to real choice rather than nature, then I think I would probably have been a Christian to this day and maybe been 'batting for the other side' in a different sense on this site
In the end, with all that cognitive dissonance, it just clicked one day when I was eighteen that "there is no god". I remember exactly where I was when that happened... it's imprinted because it was such a momentous realisation. Everything fell into place after that and made sense. And I think the mere fact of having such cognitive dissonance in the first place - the clash between two very strong belief systems - made it inevitable that it would 'click' one way or the other... that it couldn't go on like that forever just because if the brain is forced to deal with contradictory information and it can't ignore it or usurp it into an existing understanding then it will find the answer... the intuition... that brings it all together... and allows, in neural network terms, the network to 'settle' into a stable state... in this case "there is no god". I certainly couldn't ignore my homosexuality... my actual nature... and all my attempts to reconcile it were to no avail... from both sides of the fence really. From the Christian side there were the books my parents bought me when I came out to them at 15... books that tried to minimise it I suppose by saying things to the effect that 'it's not that bad, you just have to abstain just like any other unmarried person' or worse, that you could essentially force yourself to have a straight relationship of some kind and that it would be good on some platonic-ish level and that would/should, in the author's minds, be enough. And then from the other side, with the gay books I bought like Terry Sanderson's 'A Stranger In The Family' which was a book that was meant to help parents come to terms with having gay kids, and addressed among other things, their religious concerns. But the arguments it put forward never convinced my parents or me really. Anything other than taking what the Bible said at face value... things like saying it wasn't talking about loving relationships etc... just seemed like clutching at straws... which at the time I did, but it never really took hold because it had no support and didn't hold water... and just fuelled the cognitive dissonance rather than resolved it. So in the end I think it was just inevitable that the cognitive dissonance would resolve itself as it did.
And after that, as an atheist, I soaked up knowledge like a sponge, seeing the flaws in my previous belief system for what they were. Finally being able to see the Bible without emotional investment... see its contradictions and not make excuses for them or ignore them etc. And seeing all the science and psychology that led to and maintained the erroneous beliefs in the first place.
