Growing up I remember that we weren't a super religious family but the ideals and beliefs were thrown around. When the situation arose we talked of heaven and angels, the devil and hell. I believe we had some religious pictures and crosses on the walls but not much and nothing major. I remember one night, the inescapable and conscience thought of death crossed my mind. I didn't want to die, no elementary school kid does. I didn't want anyone I loved to die. I didn't want things to end. What I remember was going to my parents room sobbing about death and how scared it made me feel. My mom comforted me and calmed me down, then she gave me the bible to read and consoled me that it wasn't the end. That we would go to heaven and everyone would be happy. So I started reading the bible and I accepted it.
Shortly after that I remember we went to a couple of churches and when we settled on one I started attending a Sunday school program .. or maybe it was a Saturday school, I'm not quite sure. We did average church school stuff and I never questioned any of it. At this time I also REALLY started expressing my love of science and especially dinosaurs.
Fast forward to high school. We had stopped going to church many many years before for some reason or another. I was happy with it because it meant I had my weekends back. Remember, we weren't a very religious family so going in the first place may have been an attempt to promote that kind of lifestyle and it just fell by the way side I'm not sure. Regardless, by this time in my life I had move into the realm of agnosticism. I wasn't quite sure there was a "God" but I wasn't so sure there wasn't. This was also a time when I started paying attention to the bigger world around me and how insignificant I truly was in the grand scheme of things. That's when the questioning started.
I was a smart kid growing up, I just got lazy in middle and high school (as my report cards will show) but my capacity for critical thinking was still ever prevalent. Remember I was absolutely enamored with dinosaurs.. to this day even. I think that was my first "hrmm" moment. The dinosaurs, great beasts that roamed the planet eons before man was even a twinkle in the evolutionary eye, weren't in the bible. Apologists will say they are and will quote passages like (Job 40:15-24) which describes Behemoth. The only questionable description about behemoth is that its tail sways like cedar, this could be metaphorical as the rest of the description fits other beasts like an elephant or hippo. Leviathan ( Job 41:1-34) Seems to describe a sea monster or dragon though this could also be an over exaggerated description of a large shark or a whale. The evidence just isn't there to prove either and on top of that they only describe one kind of animal. You would think with all the species of dinosaurs there would be more accounts and more descriptions. Hell the book even says Adam and Eve named all the animals in an afternoon. It just didn't add up.
After jumping on that issue it made me think what else doesn't make sense in the bible. If Adam and Eve were the first and only people on the planet, and they had two sons... where'd everyone else come from? Oh then it says they had some daughters and sure, Cain married his sister, but still that's not enough people to populate the planet. If Mary had a virgin birth... could it be in the realm of possibility that maybe she was raped and didn't want to get stoned to death (as was customary at the time) so she made up the story? Or was the virgin birth the first written account of two people getting black out drunk, sleeping together and not remembering it? There were too many questions that didn't have answers. The list of inconsistencies goes on and on so I wont go into too much detail here. Maybe another blog.
After high school I entered my "I'm on my own I'm gonna do whatever the fuck i want phase" Partying, drinking, drugs.. they were my past times. I was basically working to pay for my next adventure in debauchery. My views on anything else were basically non existent for many years but then I slowed down and came back to the real world (and subsequently smacked my self for being so stupid). I then started looking at the world around me again and the suffering and pain some people go through. That's when by chance I found Epicurus. One quote in particular really struck a chord with me and most likely was the proverbial nail in the coffin of my religious beliefs.
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
Once I completely stopped believing in blind faith and started questioning things the flood gates were open. So here I am, I'm an Atheist and I'm free. Being an Atheist doesn't come without its own issues though of course. I now see a whole new side of discrimination throughout the world and its opened my eyes to the breadth and depth of deplorable religious actions taking place on a daily basis. That's not to say there isn't religious good in the world so don't misunderstand me. Those topics though are for another time.
