Why we believe

[strawdawg]

I grew up southern baptist. My father was a minister, I was saved, baptized and involved at all levels of our church. I was surrounded in its glory, saw the ins and outs...as a young married man both of my daughters were diagnosed with infantile tay sachs disease, a horrible terminal disease with no cure...slow death came to them, my family surrounded us, we prayed, we rocked, I cried, I dont think there is a human on earth that prayed harder than I during that year of sorrow..I beseeched heaven and earth to take me instead....guess what happened? they died in my arms three months apart...this was 1998. My wife committed suicide 2 months later..couldnt take the pain. I wanted to die, but unfortunately it appears I am extremely mentally resilient..never saw a shrink, never popped a pill, I cried, I moved on, one foot in front of the other. Now I know you are thinking Ah, that is why he hates god, no, I started researching, thinking, asking questions, starting with the obvious why...the ministers and leaders told me things like "we dont know god's plan", "It is not of us to question god", "god allowed this to happen to bring you closer to him" etc etc..i remember one night we had the church to ourselves, they opened it up, and a dozen preachers were there, we anointed the girls, prayed, and then the senior guy put his hands on my children and prayed, and shook and then looked at me and said, the power of jesus christ has healed them...you have only to turn your life to jesus, and believe and they are healed....yeah, no...they died. What kind of sick man tells a grieving heart broken couple that?

Anyway, I went through the stages of grief, and onto my trail of why...why did this happen, why would a god allow this to happen, then that started other questions...why was the 14 million jews allowed to be mass murdered...why this and that...what is this religion, what is it based on, I read the bible cover to cover, I started comparing it, learning the back stories, I started going to college and taking every theology class i could get my hands on, books, I own hundreds of them now, from all sides of the debate.....needless to say, the more I learned, the less I believed...all total nonsense. I expanded my search to other religions, the more I looked and read and investigated, the more ridiculous the story was....i didnt "turn from god" because my family died, but that experience gave me the drive to think, to learn, to read, to research, to discover that it is a clever, subjugative corrosive made up thing that the majority of the human race has embraced. When you learn that the gospels were not written by whom you think, that the bible is riddled with lies, parables, pseueipigrapha and interpolations...when you learn that moses, adam, eve etc were all complete fabrications, when you learn that the alleged miracles of jesus never happened, when you learn the most important lesson, that NO ONE who wrote of jesus knew him...it makes it all fall apart.

interesting side note, my parents later divorced, and remarried others, my mother is now a pentecostal preacher and my father converted to mormonism.

What a touching story. I have no answers.

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It's not smart to trust someone who wishes to slay you. It will end up getting you murdered.

Your story was touching.

I've had all kinds of things go wrong too but I've never turned my back on God.

Like Abraham Lincoln......I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go. My own wisdom and of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.