Okay, it is certainly possible there is no God and no one hears my prayer, but it's hard for me to push aside prior answered prayers. There are a LOT of them.
So, I'm curious about your ten-year journey, because I believe there are religious people and true™ born again™ Christians™ who really have a relationship™ with Jesus Christ™ if you follow me.
I won't attack or question your journey if you understand I have a definition of Christian you think is an NTS.
PLEASE tell me about your journey.
Sure. Gladly.
I arrived at university too young and fell flat on my face due to lack of discipline. I saw my dreams of medical school fading away, and chose to drop out and, with my parents' permission, enlist in the army to bring some structure and discipline into my life. This was a good move, but being so far from home and in a world that was alien and very unpleasant to me only magnified my angst. It was in that state of mind that I turned to religion for the first time in my life - Christianity, Pentecostal style.
I was already into critical thinking, so this move required that I suspend disbelief and, as I described it to you earlier, test drive this new way of viewing reality.
It didn't make sense initially - and never really did - but I thought that if this god were real, being obedient to its commands would eventually cause me to see that it did make sense and that the god was present.
Amazingly, I did feel filled with the Spirit. I looked forward to church (went three times a week), and considered going into the ministry. The other members of the congregation also seemed spirit-filled - to have the victory as was often said. I married a girl in the congregation on faith alone. I really didn't know her too well, but one day, while sitting outdoors with her as the sun was setting and creating a crepuscular ray scene, I heard the spirit tell me to marry this girl. We were married by our pastor. That turned out to be ill-advised.
Eventually, my enlistment ended, and I returned to my home state to go back to school, older, wiser, more mature, and more disciplined, and did well.
We found a new congregation there, and it was dead. The Spirit was nowhere to be found among those people, so we tried another. And another. And another. There was no victory there, not in any of them.
I continued to pray, but my religious fervor was fading away, year after year. Eventually, I stopped going to these empty churches, and eventually I came to realize that I had stumbled onto a great church run by a gifted pastor on my first try. It was his gifted style of ministering the man was so full of life and joy that it was infectious - that created the blissful congregation and what I was calling the presence of the Spirit. It was him I was experiencing as the Spirit of God.
By this time, I could see that the promises made in the Bible weren't being kept. Faith couldn't move mountains. No matter how hard I prayed and studied scripture, there was no presence of the Lord to be felt.
I did get accepted into medical school, which took almost all of my time and attention for a few years, during which time my marriage began to suffer, leading eventually to divorce and a bitter ex-wife who poisoned our children toward me after moving them to another state. By this time, religion was pretty much gone from my life.
I met somebody else - a non-Christian - and have been happily married for 27 years living as an atheist and secular humanist.
Life has been good, and was never better than now. To me, that is evidence that I made the right choices. No more marrying by faith or deciding anything without applying reason to evidence. Fortunately, I never lost the ability to do that even after putting reason in storage for all those years and subordinating it to faith.
I'm frequently told that I must have gotten mad at God. I was never mad at God. I loved God for as long as I believed in him, and then was indifferent. I was not angry at the church, and have always been grateful for having had that experience.
I'm also told that my faith wasn't good enough, or that I didn't pray or believe well enough. All I can say is that if this god exists, it gave up on me first, after which I gave up on it.
Hope that gives you some insight.
