I grew up in church. My Dad is a deacon, I was in church every Sunday morning, every Sunday night and every Wednesday night. Even had to take Sunday afternoon teen classes for a while. Went to church camps, the whole bit. All I can say is, it never felt right, never seemed right, and never seemed logical to me.
Even as an 8 or 9 year old, I remember listening to the preacher and reading the Bible, and thinking that this stuff didn't really make sense. If the world was created in 6 days, and Adam was created that same week, then how do we explain dinosaurs, which everybody knew and acknowledged existed, but did not exist during the same period of time as man? A few years later, stories like Jonah and the Whale, and Noah and The Ark, began to bug me.
There was also the problem of a loving God, who loved each of us more than we loved each other, but that would be willing to send so many of us to a firey Hell to burn and be tormented for all of eternity. Even to a child, that seemed illogical. I guess I was burdened with a mind that requires things to make sense, and so much of what I was hearing in church just did not add up.
I also was pretty convinced that if there was a Hell, then I had almost no chance of escaping it. Our church taught that the Babtists were wrong in their concept of "once saved always saved" and there was lots of talk about backsliding. "If you are the greatest Christian in the world, but die with an unconfessed sin on your heart, then you are doomed to spend eternity in Hellfire" was something I heard so many times I memorized it.
So here I sit. I am about 13 or 14 years old, when an epiphany hit me. I could go to church 3 times a week, pray every single day, give 10% of everything I earn to the church, for my whole life, then one day, I step off a curb in front of a bus, and just before it hits me, say "oh sh!t!" and get to spend all of eternity in Hell because I died with a sin (cursing) on my heart, without having had the chance to confess it, and ask for forgiveness. Bear in mind, I had come very close to meeting my demise already, and I know, because I can remember, that there were a lot of "Oh Sh!t's" going through my head during the time of that close call.
It was at that time, that I came to the conclusion that I had no reasonable chance anyways, so why bother. I still went to church, because there was no choice in the matter, and I stuffed a Louis L'Amour western novel into my shirt, and tucked it away inside my bible, and read that every Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night. I still heard all the stories from the Bible, and many of them still did not make any sense, but I quit getting real worried about praying quite so often, tho I still did on occasion.
Then when I got into college, in an effort to make Christian Religion make sense, I became a History major, and started studying, with intensity the history of the Western World. Which if anyone has taken any college level history classes, you may remember, is written in blood. A study of history is the study of religion, politics and war, and the the 3 are often intertwined. It was then that I had yet another epiphany.
When studying the Greeks, the Romans, and especially the Egyptians, all great civilizations of the ancient Western world, I realized that there were massive civilizations that grew up, lived, died out and were replaced, all without ever having heard of what I had always been told was the one true God. Literally millions of people in Egypt for thousands of years were worshipping the Sun God Ra, and worshipped the Pharoa as a living God. Same with the pantheon of Greek and Roman gods. These society's were the dominant cultures on the planet Earth at the time of their power, and not a single one of them were worshipping Jehovah. I recall sitting in class one day and asking myself the question that has plagued me ever since. . .
Why is it any more, or less likely, that Jehovah (who everybody knows exists) to exist, than for Ra, Zeuss, Athena, etc. etc. etc. (who everybody knows do not exist) to exist?
This blasphemous thought burdened me greatly, and I began delving deeper and deeper, into both history and theology, hoping I might find some nugget, some evidence to bring me back to the faith I was brought up in. Because, after all, the reward promised to a faithful Christian is a pretty nice reward, and the punishment for the unfaithful is dire indeed. However, sadly, and this continues on to the present time, the deeper I researched, the more I read, the more I learned, the more clear it becomes that there really is no more reason for beleiving in Jehovah than there is to beleive in Ra, or Zeuss.
So that is how I turned, in a long winded answer to the OP.
B.
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