My introduction here seemed to incite some interest, and surprisingly, some doubt about my having been an atheist and after picking up a Bible, becoming a believer. It doesn't seem so remarkable to me, perhaps since it has been 21 years since I became a believer.
I came from the Bible belt. We were surrounded by self righteous religious hypocrites and I despised them. They spouted silly superstitious nonsense, judged anyone outside their mini culture as beneath them, competed with each other in a selfish and mean spirited jealousy, and put on a phony show to impress with their shallow archaic tradition.
My dad had been raised an atheist, his side of the family didn't believe, didn't pretend, didn't participate in any religious nonsense. My mom's side of the family had been somewhat religious in the sense of my above impression of what it was like to be religious; angry, bitter, mean, hateful, jealous, ignorant hypocrites and she had rejected it. She had told them all, in her inimitable fashion that she wasn't going to be a part of it and she wasn't. She more or less cut all ties to her family.
I think that when I was a kid I saw a lot of the attributes in my parents that I was told the religious nuts around us possessed and I saw a flicker of redemptive quality in a message of love and hope that lied buried deep beneath the human imperfections of the religious that I didn't see in the former, but as I grew into my teens that would change, primarily due to the hypocrisy of the religious kids I grew up with. This was especially true when I discovered that all of their parents warned against them having too much to do with me, an outsider. Though their parents didn't like the way I dressed, didn't like the music I blared, didn't like my individuality and the fact that their nonsense didn't frighten me into submission the alarming fact was that the children of the religious were doing all of the things that their parents claimed my irreligious lifestyle involved. This especially bothered me because I wasn't the one drinking, stealing, doing drugs and having sex, the religious kids were.
In my late teens it got to the point where I was so disgusted with their fake morality and self-righteousness that I was contemplating some acts of protest that, today I'm somewhat embarrassed by, one of which was leaving pornographic material from magazines on their windshield wipers at local church gatherings, and attending their meetings to disrupt them.
I started to think that this was unhealthy and perhaps I should take a more constructive approach, so in by my mid twenties I decided to pick up a Bible and debunk their beliefs through their alleged holy book. The Internet was getting very popular at this time and I went on line and began to discover the truth of the Bible and how it had been so terribly misrepresented by these people. I became a believer, not in the religious traditions of man, but of the Bible itself. Over time I studied briefly all of the other primary religions of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism and Taoism. Also the history of Christianity and the influence Greek philosophy and mythology in mainstream traditional Christianity.
21 years later and I've learned a great deal about the real Bible, as opposed to religious tradition, and the more I learn the more I am confident of my belief in it.
I came from the Bible belt. We were surrounded by self righteous religious hypocrites and I despised them. They spouted silly superstitious nonsense, judged anyone outside their mini culture as beneath them, competed with each other in a selfish and mean spirited jealousy, and put on a phony show to impress with their shallow archaic tradition.
My dad had been raised an atheist, his side of the family didn't believe, didn't pretend, didn't participate in any religious nonsense. My mom's side of the family had been somewhat religious in the sense of my above impression of what it was like to be religious; angry, bitter, mean, hateful, jealous, ignorant hypocrites and she had rejected it. She had told them all, in her inimitable fashion that she wasn't going to be a part of it and she wasn't. She more or less cut all ties to her family.
I think that when I was a kid I saw a lot of the attributes in my parents that I was told the religious nuts around us possessed and I saw a flicker of redemptive quality in a message of love and hope that lied buried deep beneath the human imperfections of the religious that I didn't see in the former, but as I grew into my teens that would change, primarily due to the hypocrisy of the religious kids I grew up with. This was especially true when I discovered that all of their parents warned against them having too much to do with me, an outsider. Though their parents didn't like the way I dressed, didn't like the music I blared, didn't like my individuality and the fact that their nonsense didn't frighten me into submission the alarming fact was that the children of the religious were doing all of the things that their parents claimed my irreligious lifestyle involved. This especially bothered me because I wasn't the one drinking, stealing, doing drugs and having sex, the religious kids were.
In my late teens it got to the point where I was so disgusted with their fake morality and self-righteousness that I was contemplating some acts of protest that, today I'm somewhat embarrassed by, one of which was leaving pornographic material from magazines on their windshield wipers at local church gatherings, and attending their meetings to disrupt them.
I started to think that this was unhealthy and perhaps I should take a more constructive approach, so in by my mid twenties I decided to pick up a Bible and debunk their beliefs through their alleged holy book. The Internet was getting very popular at this time and I went on line and began to discover the truth of the Bible and how it had been so terribly misrepresented by these people. I became a believer, not in the religious traditions of man, but of the Bible itself. Over time I studied briefly all of the other primary religions of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism and Taoism. Also the history of Christianity and the influence Greek philosophy and mythology in mainstream traditional Christianity.
21 years later and I've learned a great deal about the real Bible, as opposed to religious tradition, and the more I learn the more I am confident of my belief in it.
