Religious to Logic (tell me your story)

[Rev. Rye]

I was a Lutheran (Missourah Synod). I noticed something really odd about John 3:16 at an early age; It could be summarised as "God sacrificed himself to himself to change a rule he made himself." It all just made the whole venture seem entirely pointless. Then I read more of the Bible, and God just became less and less likable; even Jesus had moments of being a total prick, like when he condemned a tree for not having any fruit for him, even though it's out of season. You'd think an avatar of an all-knowing being would have known what fruits would be in and out of season. By the end of that, I decided that I would join the side of Satan. But then, the final step occurred: I read Bertrand Russell's "Why I am not a Christian," and totally stopped believing in God and Satan altogether. By this point, my old church turned out to be totally corrupt and my parents treated it as an understandable consequence of that. Even when I went to a Catholic school, my teachers were readily accepting of my non-belief. They never forced their religion on me, and, in my actual religion classes, I argued with my teachers enough that some people seriously told me I should join the debate team. I didn't because I couldn't stand the structure of debate clubs: a very formal structure, and getting assigned topics you don't care about and positions you don't hold because you think they're bullshit (to this day, I cannot see how any reasonable person could argue that any side of the Israel-Palestine debate has any sort of moral high ground.) But I digress. At any rate, it hasn't really had too much of an effect on my life. I mean, there's a lot of nominally Christian people whose religion doesn't really have much of an effect on their lives.