Me and My walk with God

So, a lot of people have wondered why I am an Athiest, mostly because of my post about glenn beck, so I thought I would share the story here. It was written to a friend awhile ago and I figured I would keep it and share it every once in awhile, so there you go. Also big thanks to everyone supporting me.

I was raised Lutheran, brought up in the church, and I moved when I was 12 and attended a Southern Baptist church, which I honestly enjoyed. I had a good time, made some good friends did charity work and eventually was baptized at the age of 16.

Although I never really had thought of my "Faith" at that point I considered my self a Theist and fit into the category as much as anyone else, not extremely casual, but not fundamental either. It remained this was for awhile until I decided to get serious about what I believed in and started researching my faith along with other religions, viewpoints ext. What I found was some similarity, but most glaring of all is that (In the bibles case) we have no original copy's, no authorship and no way to subjectively determine the validity of any of the books, along with no contemporary accounts to back up storys in the bible from art, writings and literature of the time it reduced the entire book to legal hearsay. Adding that to the number of censored books of the bible that are considered to be either to violent, dark or generally insane.

This was the case with all of the religions I researched. So I was curious as to why that was. I had to consider why I had believed in the first place in something that I had never read to begin with so I decided to read the bible to see what was in it. Reading from an Objective standpoint (that is to say any point in the book that is worded in the Literal meaning I read literally, and points that were meant to be metaphor I read as such as well. I did no cherry picking talk to any True Fundamentalist who agrees with the literal interpretation that's how I read it.).

In my modern moralistic viewpoint (That is to say the views most of us are brought up to believe are wrong, Slavery/Murder/Rape Lying ext ext ext) I was amazed how bigoted, vindictive and utterly silly the bible actually was (Not just the whole noah in a boat or the other story about being swallowed by a fish, but the gruesome stuff like god sending a pack of bears to kill children, eliminating the entire world twice, sending armys to slaughter/rape millions, and of course new testament dooming everyone to hell who does not take an arbitrary action such as belief, with slave killing, fig cursing, and rambling Revelation story. Not to mention how utterly useless god is in all of this he is portrayed as a complete failure unable to fix anything. He Creates Adam and eve = Fail banishes them and has to destroy the world with the Noah story Fail 2, then he has to send army's to kill everyone who doesn't believe in him reducing the effect that "free will" would have. Fail 3. then he has to send himself to be sacrificed to himself so that through blood sacrifice everyone who takes an arbitrary action will be okay = Fail 4. but thats not enough since we have to count revelation now the world has gone to crap yet again! and god has to wipe out the world AGAIN! Fail 5.,sure there are more but seriously if this god is real he deserves no worship.)

Once I realized I was no longer a Christian I began to think about if there was any actual supernatural entity out there, and after studying cognitive science a bit I began to gain a bit of understanding as to why people might be inclined to believe in these things. Currently Im trying to approach it from a cultural stand point after all in another culture you might try and convince me of Allah/Zeus or Thor. From this understand the root need for religion/belief in an entity. My goal is not to abolish but to understand, which is why i am more curious in What you believe and why as well as how long so we can learn from another and come away with a better understanding of our world views rather than one ignoring the other.

Now of course everyone's life is different we all have different levels of evidence we accept to be true and I wouldn't expect you to drop what you believe based on what im writing or even that you feel secure enough in your own beliefs to have them challenged. Everyone has their own comfort level, im perfectly content with people challenging my beliefs and I continue to rework my viewpoints based on information I get. Maybe one day we will discover proof of a supernatural entity, maybe it will be the God of the bible, or some other entity we would have never thought of, but until that day arrives I see no point.