Preachers Kid a forced choice.

[Aractus]

:Welcome:

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I joined here for an area to expand my thinking and viewpoints. I had been a Christian nearly all my life. I am now almost 25 and de-converted last year around the same time. This de-conversion was reluctant but necessary to uphold intellectual honesty.

The stimulus that caused this was a series of events and evidence that required me to face my world view. First reason being was the overall life full of setbacks and constant hardship. Being a preachers kid and seeing my family suffer constantly due to profiteering, short handedness and financial squandering by the church. You would think God would take care of his "shepherds" more at least to some degree. This has been a constant thorn in my walk of faith and was part of the catalyst. Second was horrors of human nature and inconsistency of "God's good deeds" War, famine, torture, and various other evils bore heavy consequences to my vision of a loving God. Then the final and inevitable debate with a knowledgeable free thinker. While I won the philosophical debate I could not refute the archeological debate he presented.

Once he presented an archeological fact that there is little evidence for the warring campaign of Joshua into the holy land it was a slippery slope. As I researched deeper and deeper, I found Hebrew religion borrow a lot from Sumerian and Akkadian religions. This and recent evidence regarding human evolution and evolution in general. I was forced to concede my world view at least the theistic one that indeed that the Abrahamic religions are just "another" religion. So far being in the bible belt it has been tough finding groups to discuss my religious de-conversion and gain acceptance. Fortunately my Christian brethren are accepting to some degree. I am still on my Journey for truth and reason. Minus the small empty hole religion has left, I rather feel liberated.

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With a total lack of archaeological evidence, we believed the Egyptian Pyramids were built by slaves for well over 2,000 years. There are many types of archaeological evidence, but inasmuch as they relate to written works, such evidence may be: a. incidental, b. influential (either positive or negative), c. absent.