I was raised by loving and somewhat overprotective parents in a southern, suburban, middle-class neighborhood.  The best, if not hokiest description that I can give- is that it was a scene somewhere between "Leave it to Beaver" and "The Brady Bunch".  It was a generally happy time, despite my being awkwardly shy.  My parents were Catholic, like their parents before them, and like their parents before them, and theirs before them, and so on... and so they raised me and my brother and sisters to be Catholic.  As a child I was taught that there is a God, who has a son Jesus, who died on the cross for us, and that there is a heaven for the good people, and a hell for the bad (or at least that was the jest of it).  So I believed it, all of it, and never once did I doubt it even for a second.  In my child-mind I knew that there were atheists, bad people who didn't believe in God, though I didn't personally know any. I had heard of Madelyn Murray O-Hair, a very nasty woman who wanted to stop people from believing in, or praying to God.  But good children like me went to church and believed in God.  I was more religious than most children my age, I suppose.  I went to church every Sunday, and prayed to God every night before bed.

As I got older, I began to slip away from religion somewhat, and by my mid twenties I had stopped going to church most Sundays.  But still, I felt it was only a temporary lapse, and some day the time would be right and I would start going again.  Also about this time I began to question some of the positions and doctrine of the Catholic Church.  So for awhile I just considered myself a non-denominational Christian.  I saw the Catholic Church and other religious denominations as man-made institutions, subject to error, but God and Jesus, heaven and hell, were to me beyond question, as was the Bible, which I saw as divine and the final authority and word of God, no question about it.  So deep down, the beliefs were still there.  I remember one time on spring break in Florida, here I was on the beach, with my buddies, drinking some beer, enjoying the bikinis, pretty much just having a good time, when it suddenly hit me that it was Good Friday, and here I was having a good time partying on the day that Jesus suffered and died for us.  I remember feeling a pang of guilt thinking about it all, and saying a little prayer in my head, "Jesus, I'm sorry, please forgive me".  So through it all, I still believed it, never even for an instant doubted it, and still thoughout my 20s and into my 30s I prayed every single night before sleep. One thing I was sure of was that I would NEVER stop believing in God!  I had FAITH!  I didn't need any proof!  I had this image of God as some kind of father-figure, who was always with me everywhere I went.  I prayed for his guidance and protection.  I didn't believe in praying for anything selfish, I only prayed for others or just for health and safety of loved ones.

So later, after I got married and had children, at some point I thought that I should try to get back closer to God, try to make myself right with God, I thought I should become more religious.  Like most Americans, I thought that good people go to church.  I considered myself good, and I wanted to be good.  So I thought a good start would be to read the Bible.  Like most, I believed that the Bible is the word of God, and here I had never really read any of it at all.  Oh sure, I had read the parts they spoon-feed you at church, but I had never really just sat down and read it on my own.  So it was a few years ago that I  started trying to read the Bible.  Sometimes it would be at my wife's Methodists church, since they have Bibles there in the pews which they don't at Catholic church, and since I found the service boring I would mostly just read the Bible during the service.  Also, when I was on travel for work I would sometimes read the Gideon's Bible they always have in the hotel room.  I would just open it at random and just read until I got tired.

As I was reading, I remember being struck by how awfully archaic and primitive it all seemed.  The detailed laws for animal sacrifice, the detailed instructions from Leviticus for making the priest's garments, or what-not, I thought, "why does God want us to know THIS stuff?"  I remember seeing the command for men not to trim the edges of their beard and thinking, "why would God care about THAT, and if God said for us not to trim the edges of our beards, right there in black and white, no ifs, ands, or buts, then WHY does everybody today ignore it except for the orthodox Jews? (back then I didn't know about the Christian position that Jesus had superceded the Old Testament law).  It just seemed to me that the God of the universe would be WAY above all that.

It was about this time that I took my family on a ski vacation to Utah.  Well, in Utah hotel rooms, they also have a Book of Mormon along with the Gideon's Bible.  I just kind of opened it and glanced at it.  "Hmm", I thought, "the writing looks a lot like Bible writing",  but didn't give it much more thought at the time (had to hit those slopes!).  But some time later, I started thinking about it, how here there are millions of devout Mormons in the world sincerely and honestly believing a book to be the word of God, a book that most of the Christian denominations consider to be lies.  Also about this time, my wife had gone on a school-trip with our daughter, and she told me about how at the hotel there was a Book of Mormon along with the Bible, and how one of the other parents- a devout Baptist, was quite appalled about it and said (half-jokingly?) how he wanted to burn it! "Huh? How dare he!", I thought, "how'd he like it if someone burned the Bible?", "How does he- and how do we, know whether the Book of Mormon is, or isn't the word of God?"  Also about this time, I saw the interview on VH1 with Cat Stevens, who now calls himself "Yusuf Islam".  Cat... uh, I mean Yusuf, was talking about his conversion to Islam, and how upon reading the Book of Yusuf from the Qu'ran he broke down and wept, that it was so profound and moving that he just KNEW that it had to have been written by God!  This gnawed at me.  Cat Stevens, who himself had written such incredibly profound, beautiful, moving, and inspiring songs; what could this book possibly say for HIM to be so moved by it?  So I decided to pull up the Book of Yusuf from an online Qu'ran just to see for myself.  With anticipation I pulled up the words on the screen.  But then, when I began to read, all I could say was, huh?  I just don't get it!  This is moving? Cat's songs to me are FAR more moving, and seem far more inspired, then any of that....uh, stuff. C'mon Cat, snap out of it man.... SNAP OUT OF IT!!

But anyway, those kind of thoughts led me to begin to question the divine inspiration of the Bible.  I began to ask myself, "How do we really KNOW that the Bible is the word of God?".  "Its not like God is printing these books up in heaven on some divine printing press, and if you want a Bible all you have to do is say a prayer for one and it will appear under your pillow by next morning like some kind of tooth fairy present.  No, this is a book printed my men.  But where did these men get these words?  From other men before them, of course.  And where did THOSE men get them?  From still others before them."  This was a thought that had never occurred to me before, it had never even entered my mind.  I didn't act on that thought for quite awhile, I just sort of put it in the back of my mind, sort of on the back-burner.  But it stayed there, simmering. So I became very curious as to the origins of the Bible, and decided to research it.

So one day, on the internet, I typed "Bible origins" into a search engine.  I was quickly brought to skeptic and deist web sites detailing all the problems with the Bible.  I was dumfounded at what these people said was in the Bible!  They pointed out all of the atrocities, the killings, the claims that God commanded the slaughter and plunder of entire nations, the killing of suckling infants, the injustices, the blatant condoning of slavery, the degradation of women.  My first reaction was disbelief.  I knew that, while I didn't know much about what is in the Bible, there are lots and lots of Christians that DO! They seem to know parts of it by heart!  They carry the darned things around with them every Sunday! "Surely the skeptics are misrepresenting what is in there" I thought.  But it was pretty easy to check it out, and I saw that basically, they weren't misrepresenting it.  That stuff is really in there. It began to sink in that this God didn't seem to be the same one that I believed in, the loving and merciful father-figure that I had been praying to.  That's not to say that I had an image of God as ALL love and mercy.  Oh sure, I knew there was some wrathful stuff in there.  I knew there were some times when he really had to come down and kick some butt!  But in my mind, those times were always called for, when the people were REALLY disobedient, and it was always with justice.  It was kind of like your father, when sometimes you pushed him too far and he'd blow his stack and give you a good one, but you had it coming!  But this God of the Bible seemed to be so primitive and arbitrary, and seemed to discriminate between the Israelites and the other people.  Vast groups of people seemed to be dispensable to this god, and women nothing but plunder, part of the spoils of war!  I was really astounded by the command from Deuteronomy 23, that illegitimate children and their offspring for 10 generations, cannot be part of the "congregation of the Lord"!  "How could God hold it against someone for the circumstances of their birth, something we have absolutely no control over?", I thought.  This one really struck me because my wife, who is a believing, church-going Christian, is of illegitimate birth since her natural father left her mother before my wife was born and they were never married.  So if her church REALLY believed the Bible then they shouldn't accept her OR my daughters.  That certainly didn't sound like something Jesus would agree with.  But yet, here it was in black and white, and this was supposed to be the word of God himself!

"Surely there must be good answers for all these issues", I thought.  I remember talking to a Christian friend of mine about it, someone who regularly attends church Bible study.  I thought he would know all about these issues, and I thought he must have all the answers.  But he seemed to be only vaguely aware of that stuff, and was totally unconcerned about any of it.  His attitude was basically "I'm sure there are good answers to those issues, even if we don't know them", and "it may be beyond our understanding".  So for awhile I thought, "maybe most people really DON'T know that stuff is in there"?  I decided to devote whatever time it took to research the issues, and find the answers.  I did not yet know what "apologetics" was, but I was sure about to find out!

So I surfed and surfed the internet, looking for the answers to the questions.  I found the apologetics web sites that defend the Bible from the critics.  Sometimes, when I would read an apologists' defense, it would sound pretty convincing.  They are very good at what they do, and can come up with answers that can sound very convincing. And for someone that just wants to assuage their doubts and then move on, it can work for them.  But I can't just leave well enough alone.  I would have to analyze their claims and see if they really checked out.  Sometimes they would, but often I could see that they were misrepresenting things.  And then, when I would read and compare essays from the skeptics on the same subject, the apologists' arguments often didn't seem so good.  Its kind of like a jury trying to decide whether the defendant is guilty or not.  If the jury ONLY listened to the defense's arguments, then they would vote for acquittal every time.  And if the jury only heard the prosecution's arguments, then they would vote for conviction every time.  But to REALLY determine the truth, the jury has to consider BOTH sides.  So that's what I was trying to do, all I wanted was the truth.  I wasn't afraid of anybodies view, I wasn't afraid of what anybody had to say.  I was on a quest for truth, wherever it might lead.  A big part of me wanted it to still be true.  I wanted for there to be someone up there, who loves us and takes care of us, someone who will give me guidance if I sincerely ask for it- its a comforting thought.  I wanted there to be some kind of final justice that no one will escape, so that the likes of Hitler and Stalin would some day get what they really deserve, instead of getting off easy with a simple and quick death.  I wanted it to be true that when my aging parents leave this world I would get to someday see them again.  But if it wasn't true, I wanted to KNOW!  I prayed "God, if you are REALLY real, then please guide me to the truth.  Somehow let me know that you're real!"  But the more I sought, the more it seemed like things just didn't add up.  The way that the good and wise King Solomon had his very own brother assassinated to gain the throne, the way that it was bragged how King David, one of the heroes of the Bible and one of God's favorites, had slain tens of thousands, the fact that this book, which so many people today claim to live their lives by, prescribes stoning to death as the penalty for a host of minor infractions, that it commands the killing of people who follow other religions.- it was getting harder and harder to reconcile a belief that God was the inspiration of this book.   What I had was a case of cognitive dissonance.

It was really the Old Testament (OT) stuff that I had a problem accepting as the word of God, all the violence, injustice, and revenge, all the parts they never really talk about in church.  So for awhile I thought I could reject the OT, but still keep a belief in Jesus, and still keep a belief in MY god, the loving father-figure God, who was much more like the God of the NT.  This god was a much kinder and gentler god then the one of the OT- he hardly killed anyone.  And Jesus did seem to challenge much of what the OT said.  Where the OT says to stone to death adulterers, Jesus said only those without sin could cast the first stone, in effect canceling it.  Where the OT said "an eye for eye" and "tooth for tooth", Jesus said to "turn the other cheek".  Where the OT said to smite your enemies, Jesus said to forgive them.  So I thought that maybe the OT had been heavily corrupted, maybe the writers were mistaken about God, maybe the writers were trying to justify their own reprehensible actions by claiming that God told them to kill their enemies, and take their land and possessions as plunder.  And that was partly why Jesus came, to clear things up. 

But gradually, I began to realize that the NT has the OT as its very foundation, and cannot stand on its own without it.   It is like the house that's built on sand, to use Jesus' own parable. Jesus seemed to accept the OT's authority in many instances, and Jesus' own validity was suppose to rest on the  authority of the OT, since Jesus was supposed to be a fulfillment of its prophesies.  And I had always believed what I was told, that Jesus really was prophesied throughout the OT.  But in my studies I learned that those claims don't stand up to scrutiny very well.  When you compare the NT verse where it claims to be a fulfillment of prophesy, and then look at the OT verse in context that is supposed to be the actual prophesy, you can easily see that its not the case at all.  And when you begin to think skeptically about something, as you begin to free yourself from prior indoctrination and preconceptions that color your view, and you being to look at something more objectively, you can begin to see things in new ways. Such as the atonement- it began to not make sense any more.  I had always thought that Jesus made this huge sacrifice by dying for us so that our sins could be forgiven.  But was it really that much of a sacrifice, when he was only dead for 3 days, actually a day and a half, and as an omniscient god he knew all along he would be coming back?  Instead of giving up his life, it was more like giving up a weekend, and what's that when you've got eternity anyway? What about all the people that have died in the wars?  Now THEY made a sacrifice, they wouldn't be coming back.  And what exactly did dying on a cross accomplish?  God couldn't forgive us without that happening?   If I can forgive someone who does me wrong but then apologizes and repents, why can't God?  Its like saying, "I can't forgive you unless I hit you with this hammer, no wait, I love you so much I'll hit myself instead".  So the God of the universe, in order to appease himself, had to come down to earth and have himself killed so that he could forgive us?  Does that make any sense at all? 

And then there were more things about Christianity that just didn't add up.  There was the realization that Christianity doesn't just believe Jesus is the Jewish messiah, Christianity believes Jesus to be God himself! (or 1/3 of him)  If there is ANY consistency of theme to the OT, it is that God is ONE!  How could the OT say over and over and over, "God is one, there is no other, don't worship any gods your fathers didn't know", but then suddenly with Christianity a man is God?  But the final straw had to be that Jesus and the NT writers seemed to very plainly say that Jesus' return would be very soon, within the lifetime of those living at the time.  How could Jesus be God if he were wrong about that?

So I searched out the apologists answers, and analyzed them myself.  It just seemed to me like they were bending over backwards to explain away the problems.  Instead of a rational investigation, for them it was strictly a rationalization.  To go back to the jury example, yes the jury would have to hear both the defense's and prosecution's case in order to really determine the truth.  But above all the jury has to be IMPARTIAL.  But if the jury had its mind made up already that the defendant was innocent, say if the jury was made up of the defendant's family, then no amount of evidence could convince them otherwise, they would buy any explanation the defense attorney might come up with, no matter how outlandish.  And that, it seems to me, is how the believers are with the apologist's arguments.  They will bend over backwards to accept an explanation, ANY explanation, that will make the problem go away.  To them, "keeping the faith" is the objective, and not finding the truth.   But what really made the difference was seeing how Muslim and Mormon apologists use the exact same tactics of the Christian apologists in order to rationalize away the problems of THEIR holy books.  The (moderate) Muslims excuse the more barbarous parts of the Quran that say to kill the unbelievers in exactly the same way that Christians and Jews excuse the more barbarous parts of the Bible.  The Muslim apologists say "that stuff only applied to Mohammed and the early Muslims because they were vastly outnumbered by those evil pagans who were out to get them, God allowed them to blah, blah, blah, but that doesn't apply today" and point instead to the good parts of the Quran, while the Christian apologists say "that stuff only applied to the ancient Israelites because the evil pagans were out to get them blah, blah, blah, and that doesn't apply today" and point instead to the good parts of the Bible. It was almost funny to see debates between Christian and Muslim apologists, to see how each side could could be perfectly rational when it came to problems with the others holy book, but would bend over backwards when it came to problems with their own.  To use Jesus' own parable, they would point out the speck of wood in the other's eye while failing to see the plank in their own eye. 

It was a long, difficult, and arduous process to come to these realizations and reject my beliefs.  For so long I've agonized over these issues.  And religion wasn't even that much a part of my life.  I can only imagine how difficult it must be for someone who's entire life is based on it.  And its much, much  harder to go from belief to unbelief than the reverse.  When someone "finds religion" it nearly always entails joining a church and being welcomed, cajoled, and cuddled by a congregation of warm and friendly people, not to mention having a full-time, paid staff, there to offer support and encouragement.  And when a member confesses any doubts and starts to go astray, the same people and staff are there to counsel that person and bring him back into the fold.  But when you're moving towards disbelief, you're pretty much on your own.  I didn't even know any unbelievers.  There are no atheist churches you can go to where they stand around and hold hands and encourage each other in un-faith.  They don't tithe their incomes so they can have a well-paid, full-time atheist minister to encourage them and others in disbelief.  But then there is the internet!  I really think that the internet is now letting the genie out of the bottle, and there will be no getting it back in. Right there at everyone's fingertips is a wealth of skeptical information, information that can no longer be suppressed. (if you don't think its suppressed then just go to your local big-name bookstore where you'll see aisles and aisles of various Bibles including study Bibles, women's promise Bibles, etc., lots and lots of inspirational books, "Left Behind" books, "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books, "Prayer of Jabez" books, etc, etc, but just see how many skeptical books you find.)

For awhile, I thought I would be a deist, keeping a belief in God, keeping a belief in MY God, but rejecting the Bible and revealed religion.  But gradually, I've come to doubt whether any supreme being exists at all.  I'm certainly open to the possibility, but can't make an assertion one way or the other.  I once had faith, and in my ignorance didn't need any proof.  But as I became aware of these issues, as I became enlightened, faith was no longer enough.  For awhile, I thought that if I only searched long and hard enough, that I could eventually find the truth.  And not only did I seek the truth, but I wanted surety that I indeed had the truth.  I wanted the surety and contentment that I had long ago, in my faith and ignorance.  It seemed to me to be like a highway- its comfortable being on either side, but not in the middle dodging cars!  But the more I searched, the more it seemed there was room for doubt in either position.  No matter which side I would eventually settle on, it seemed like the compelling arguments of the contrary position would always be there to haunt me.

So for awhile I thought that if I couldn't find fulfillment in finding the truth, I could at least find fulfillment in the search itself.  And to some extent I have, as I find these issues extremely interesting. This is odd because when I was a believer I had zero interest in religion. I thought that maybe if I just accepted the fact that no matter how much I searched I would never get a definitive answer, then I should be content with that.  But for so long I just couldn't seem to accept that the answer to the biggest, most important question of the universe really is unknowable!  

If there is a God, then I think that maybe all religions could be leading to the same place? But one amazing thing, at least to me, is that once I became an unbeliever, my morals and values didn't change one bit.  I'm still the same person as before.  I have no desire to go out and rape, steal, and kill, or even to cheat on my wife!  When I was a believer, I genuinely thought that atheists had no reason not to do those things, except maybe the fear of getting caught.  That seems so absurd now.  I don't think that religion makes people better so much as that people that make religion better.  And THAT!- it seems to me, is why the Bible has those stories in it about God commanding people to kill babies.  It was before people made the religion better.  If there is a God out there, I think that he would be far, far above the Bible, or anyone else's holy book.   To me it seems pretty clear that all the scriptures of the world's religions are the words of mere men.  I now see Yahweh and Jesus as two of many gods invented by man.  To me it now all seems to be just a comforting delusion- Santa Claus for grownups. 

But one thing is for sure.  Even though its called "losing faith", it doesn't feel like some unfortunate loss or defeat, it isn't this dismal descent into hopelessness and despair that people like to think that it is.  Though I've lost surety, I feel like I've gained freedom and enlightenment- a triumph of reason over cultural indoctrination and group-think!  If  this life is all there is, then it makes it seem that much more precious.  And very slowly and gradually, I have come to find contentment in the knowledge that the answer truly is unknowable. I guess there must be a nice median in the middle of that highway after all!  But hey, that's just my take on it- what do I know?     

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