This thread is for those who were once a professing Christian and have left the Christian Faith. Let's discuss what you have discovered. I'm open to discuss and debate anything that seems to be your reason for leaving Christianity. I am also curious in what you have replaced the Christian Faith with, whatever you're new religion or world view has become.
That's asking a lot for a forum. I'll try to be concise (but I know how I am).
Parents: Hard-core Protestant Christians who, in their early married life, might have considered Bob Jones University to be too liberal. Well, at first anyways. The years have softened them considerably.
Father: Aspired to be a pastor from when I was born until age 12, part time singles-minister at a Baptist church in San Diego (regular Sunday attendance was between 2,500-3,000 people) until I was 18, full time pastor under John Maxwell in Spring Valley CA (again, a large church) until I was 20. I moved out at the age of 20 at this point and he went on to become a full time pastor at a small church in Ojai, Ca, full time pastor at a small church in Moreno Valley, Ca, missionary to Russia, later ordained as a priest in the Episcopal church and now retired and attending an Eastern Orthodox church.
Me: Attended church no less than 4 times per week for the first 19 years of my life. Attended "Christian" (Protestant) schools until high-school. Spent many years from the age of 25-33 actively involved in non-denominational Christian Churches, spent 8 years in the Charismatic Episcopal Church, and then abandoned Christianity altogether.
The reason for this last fact is partly that throughout my life I had always had the "inside scoop" to how the various churches we attended actually operated, I had seen the stupidest and most abusive practices within most of them, and in the last instance underwent a tremendous trauma when a host of evils that had been hidden not only from our parish and diocese but across the denomination. Most of my friends immediately went to Eastern Orthodox churches after the big split and I probably would have as well (we had all been rather leaning in that direction anyways as we were very heavy into the Church Fathers) but I was reeling from the injuries that we had sustained and so I stopped going to church completely. This was rather like an alcoholic going cold-turkey.
It was a year after going to church on a regular basis that I was finally in a state where I ready to move forward. It had become clear by that time (it had been clear all along but I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated and constantly reinforced by perpetual exposure) that the whole business about Christians being a "new creature" or being in any way different from other people was pure drivel. I wanted to know if the faith itself was true. So I started at square 1.
The creation story was never a problem for me as I figured that a "day" could be pretty much any amount of time (considering that it could not be taken literally). I itemized the details and realized that the Bible claims that the Earth, land and vegetation were created before the sun, moon and stars. It was clear to me that Genesis 1-2 could not have been based on divine revelation of any sort whatsoever which left the only option being that whoever wrote it was simply guessing. Not a very good beginning.
The Garden story and the "Fall of man" (Genesis 3) are vital to the Judeo-Christian faith; so much so that if one was to remove that story, none of the rest of the faith makes any sense. The critical question to me then became, "Is this story true?" When I say "true" I don't mean it in the same way that the morals of a fairy tale are, essentially, true. What I meant was, "Is it possible that there ever was a time when man was innocent, that he willfully disobeyed God, and that as a consequence mankind was genetically altered so as to have this ghastly thing called a 'sin nature'?"
It became clear that in order for this to be true in any sense, one has to make some pretty large assumptions. It also became clear that the physical universe has revealed things about our natural past that had to be taken into consideration. I did a lot of reading and learned that with the exception of some very fringe-group "scientists," virtually no one disagrees that evolution as a process has and does occurred. Not all agree that it was Darwinian in nature. Even creationists agree about the data regarding the age of the Earth etc. And this is where the trouble came for me.
No one disagrees that Homo sapiens have been around for 160,000 to 195,000 years and there is little disagreement that human cultures have been around for 50,000 to 60,000 years. Therefore, in order for the "Adam and Eve" story to be true, it must have occurred at least 160,000 years ago because by the time there were human cultures, there were presumably lots of humans around and the actions of two could not account for the remainder. So, in order to believe the biblical account which includes specific ages (e.g. Adam was 130 when Seth was born) one would have to say that everything in Genesis that was pre-Abraham happened some 150,000 years before Abraham thus leaving a very wide expanse of time in which, basically, nothing noteworthy occurred.
That seems quite unlikely in and of itself but the couple that with the fact that the creation story is dead wrong and one is left with plenty of room for reasonable doubt. In fact, there is so much room for reasonable doubt that anyone who operated based on the verifiable evidence would never have come up with a cockamamie story about Adam and Eve.
It seems far more likely to me that since evolution has and does occur and that since every other animal on this planet has tendencies that we as rational beings would find reprehensible in humans that the biggest problem we have is the fact that we are able to reason and yet we are indeed biological entities with natural tendencies that we inherited from our ancestral past.
To further emphasize this point, there are a host of illnesses that through the ages have been attributed to spiritual forces (he has a demon) but which today are treatable with medication. This indicates quite clearly that those behaviors and diseases that mankind has always been aware of are in fact biological issues that are treatable using physical means. This in turn underscores that there is nothing "spiritually" wrong with people. If the past is any indicator, it seems quite clear that every problem with humanity will one day be identified in the human brain and that perhaps one day we will find a way to treat ourselves accordingly and drastically reduce or eliminate all of our worst vices by means of scientific discoveries.
Some people freak out over such a notion and start thinking up all the fabled stories that people have concocted. But if one looks at reality, there is no need for this nonsense and fear. Take nuclear power for instance. We used it to end a way and found the power so incredible that we as a race have patrolled ourselves and used that power to generate electricity without blowing each other to smithereens. This is, I think, the natural result of all powerful scientific discovery. Once we realize that something is potentially fatal (which we tend to do by killing people first), we patrol ourselves and use that power for good purposes (even though the threat of using it for fatal purposes is not entirely beneficial).
At any rate, it became clear to me that the whole Adam & Eve bit was entirely fabricated. There was simply no way to mesh the details of the physical world with that story either as actual events or as allegory in any form (allegory being the weaker of the two arguments anyways since the "cure" for man's sin nature is the real, physical, bloody human sacrifice of Christ) and therefore all the rest of the Judeo-Christian faith fell apart. I have no problem using the lives of Jesus and Gandhi as examples of excellent moral behavior but savior of the world? I think not. Indeed, if history has taught us anything about Christianity as an institution, it is not a force of good in the world. As a concept, it is excellent in helping people through life - but so is Buddhism, Taoism, and just about every other religion where people take that religion to be a guideline for good behavior and nothing more. Christianity hold no special place in this regard.
Today, I don't "believe" in anything that is not obviously real. I believe that polio vaccines have eradicated polio as a threat to our population. I believe that the space program has resulted in many very practical advances for modern medical sciences as well as daily living for most people in the free world. And I believe that professional religious persons, politicians, and used car salesmen all ought to come with a warning label and that only a great fool will take anything they say at face value.
In the end, thinking is better than believing.
