RE: What made you change your views?
May 1, 2017 at 12:16 pm
(This post was last modified: May 1, 2017 at 12:16 pm by Mister Agenda.)
When I was a devout Pentecostal, I undertook to read the Bible (KJV) cover-to-cover. Then I read it again in a modern English version hoping that the King's English had somehow confused me. No such luck. That didn't cure me of being a theist, but it cured me of being a Christian. I had too high an opinion of God to think the Bible was an accurate representation.
But I had no real defense mechanism against woo. I believed everything: ghosts, ESP, the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, alien abductions, ancient astronauts, all of it. Then a couple of kids spoofed the Duke University ESP research department, which I had thought 'proved' ESP, at least statistically. Turned out that they were just easy to fool, and tightening their protocols also made those significant results disappear. After that I got a little more skeptical.
So I was an agnostic theist for about 15 years, gradually dropping exotic beliefs with highly questionable substantiation along the way. I still thought 'someone' must have started it all. I got my college education late, and learned about natural explanations for the cosmos, which was an eye-opener. Also took a lot of biology and it turned out that biological evolution is not a hoax. But I still kept a spot in my brain for God, because I thought it would be close-minded not to, since I couldn't prove some sort of God does not exist.
The tipping point was a semester where I took Intro to Religion taught by an apologist and Logic 201 on the same days; so I would hear an argument for God first thing in the morning; and an explanation of why it's a bad argument probably in the same week, maybe in the next hour. I had been leaning toward skepticism in general for years; but held back from applying it to religious claims, however seeing the flaws in those claims exposed so clearly and especially learning about burden of proof sealed the deal. And the religion professor's claim that he wasn't going to cover atheism because it's illogical led me to read The Case Against God by George Smith, and I realized that 'negative atheism' was where I was at.
I'm still there today, about 22 years later, though I'm a positive atheist about certain versions of God: the God of theodicy (contradictions), the Abrahamic God that performed the feats of the Bible (no flood, no sun stopping, therefore no God that did those things). The God of deism...maybe, no good reason to think that one is true, but at least it's not a married bachelor.
But I had no real defense mechanism against woo. I believed everything: ghosts, ESP, the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, alien abductions, ancient astronauts, all of it. Then a couple of kids spoofed the Duke University ESP research department, which I had thought 'proved' ESP, at least statistically. Turned out that they were just easy to fool, and tightening their protocols also made those significant results disappear. After that I got a little more skeptical.
So I was an agnostic theist for about 15 years, gradually dropping exotic beliefs with highly questionable substantiation along the way. I still thought 'someone' must have started it all. I got my college education late, and learned about natural explanations for the cosmos, which was an eye-opener. Also took a lot of biology and it turned out that biological evolution is not a hoax. But I still kept a spot in my brain for God, because I thought it would be close-minded not to, since I couldn't prove some sort of God does not exist.
The tipping point was a semester where I took Intro to Religion taught by an apologist and Logic 201 on the same days; so I would hear an argument for God first thing in the morning; and an explanation of why it's a bad argument probably in the same week, maybe in the next hour. I had been leaning toward skepticism in general for years; but held back from applying it to religious claims, however seeing the flaws in those claims exposed so clearly and especially learning about burden of proof sealed the deal. And the religion professor's claim that he wasn't going to cover atheism because it's illogical led me to read The Case Against God by George Smith, and I realized that 'negative atheism' was where I was at.
I'm still there today, about 22 years later, though I'm a positive atheist about certain versions of God: the God of theodicy (contradictions), the Abrahamic God that performed the feats of the Bible (no flood, no sun stopping, therefore no God that did those things). The God of deism...maybe, no good reason to think that one is true, but at least it's not a married bachelor.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.
