I was raised Pentecostal, United Pentecostal on my dad's side and Assembly of God on my mother's (they divorced when I was five). I bought the whole thing hook, line, and sinker. I feel on the UPC side because I found their arguments on doctrinal differences with the Assembly more persuasive. In my mid-teens I decided if I was going to be a good Pentecostal, I had ought to read the Bible. So I did, cover-to-cover, the KJV. It did not match what I had been taught. I read a modern English version to make sure the King's English hadn't confused me. It wasn't all the magic that threw me, to an extent it was contradictions in a book I was taught was perfect because it was authored by God. Mostly it was the barbarity. A God that ordered genocide, that ordered babies killed, that plagued Egypt after hardening pharoah's heart...I believed in a tri-omni God and after reading the Bible, I couldn't believe the people who wrote it had any special connection to an omniscient, good being.
For about ten years after that I was what you might call an agnostic theist. I thought there was a God who created the universe, but I didn't think you could know much about it. I became an atheist after years of getting more skeptical about other things I believed in: ghosts, Bigfoot, alien abductions, ancient astronauts, Nessie, ESP, and so forth. I wasn't raised to be skeptical, I had to learn it on these streets.
For about ten years after that I was what you might call an agnostic theist. I thought there was a God who created the universe, but I didn't think you could know much about it. I became an atheist after years of getting more skeptical about other things I believed in: ghosts, Bigfoot, alien abductions, ancient astronauts, Nessie, ESP, and so forth. I wasn't raised to be skeptical, I had to learn it on these streets.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.
