I became a devout United Pentecostal when I was very young, did the whole speaking in tongues thing, and got baptized at 14. In a fit of devotion I resolved to read the Bible cover-to-cover. First I read the KJV, and then I read the Living Bible to make sure the King's English hadn't confused me. It had not, and the moral issues the Bible raised made me stop being a Christian. I basically had too high an opinion of God to believe the Bible was written by him or was inspired by him. So I was an agnostic theist for about 20-ish years, I believed there had to be some sort of God to at least get things rolling.
Of course, until I was well in my 20s I also believed in alien visitations, cryptids, ESP, spirits, and telekinesis. When a couple of teenagers broke the Duke Universtiy ESP protocols, which I thought had scientifically proven the existence of ESP, I started to become more skeptical. Gradually over the years I stopped taking that stuff seriously, but though I grew more skeptical towards God as well, I still didn't have the imagination to conceive of a godless universe.
Then I finally finished college in my mid-30s and learned some cosmology and logic. When I finally had the tools to rationally evaluate arguments and evidence, my belief in any version of God fell away. I took some religon courses too and found none of the arguments that were supposed to persuade me God is real stood up to scrutiny. At this point I think I've heard all of them. At first I used to be very interested in finding a new argument that would change my mind, but was always disappointed and can't summon much hope that someone will ever present such an argument, and I've come to think you can't prove the existence of something that way, anyway. If anything, all the flawed apologetics I've encountered have only convinced me that my position is the most reasonable one to take.
There may be 500 arguments for the existence of God, but you only need one that actually works. The moral issue is one of the things that makes the Abrahamic God have contradictory proposed attributes; but no god I've ever heard proposed meets a reasonable burden of proof. The very best anyone seems to manage for a captial C Creator is the God of deism; who has no contradictory attributes and only suffers from a lack of a good reason to think it's really real.
Of course, until I was well in my 20s I also believed in alien visitations, cryptids, ESP, spirits, and telekinesis. When a couple of teenagers broke the Duke Universtiy ESP protocols, which I thought had scientifically proven the existence of ESP, I started to become more skeptical. Gradually over the years I stopped taking that stuff seriously, but though I grew more skeptical towards God as well, I still didn't have the imagination to conceive of a godless universe.
Then I finally finished college in my mid-30s and learned some cosmology and logic. When I finally had the tools to rationally evaluate arguments and evidence, my belief in any version of God fell away. I took some religon courses too and found none of the arguments that were supposed to persuade me God is real stood up to scrutiny. At this point I think I've heard all of them. At first I used to be very interested in finding a new argument that would change my mind, but was always disappointed and can't summon much hope that someone will ever present such an argument, and I've come to think you can't prove the existence of something that way, anyway. If anything, all the flawed apologetics I've encountered have only convinced me that my position is the most reasonable one to take.
There may be 500 arguments for the existence of God, but you only need one that actually works. The moral issue is one of the things that makes the Abrahamic God have contradictory proposed attributes; but no god I've ever heard proposed meets a reasonable burden of proof. The very best anyone seems to manage for a captial C Creator is the God of deism; who has no contradictory attributes and only suffers from a lack of a good reason to think it's really real.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.
