Age of Deconversion

[GrandizerII]

When I was a kid (around 12) I read the whole KJV Bible cover to cover. Actually I had stolen it from my aunt, lol. I was rather disturbed by the cruelty displayed by God in the Bible and remember feeling betrayed at the time. I was taught that God was love and yet here I was reading accounts of God ordering the execution of children. Reading Achan's story in Joshua was really traumatizing as a kid.

Did thinking that God was cruel become a catalyst for no longer believing in him? Or did your perspective on him change while you continued to believe?

Not immediately, no. In terms of what I believed, I remained a mild Christian around that time, then became a deist throughout most of my teenage years, then joined an Evangelical group in my early twenties, then left the faith and became a deist again in my late twenties, then two to three years later became the atheist that I am now.

As for your second question, my perspective probably didn't change that much about him. Thanks to how I coped with the cognitive dissonance.