Born into a fundamentalist family, I spent much of my 1970s youth as a member of an early megachurch, one of the first in our area to televise services. At 8, I invited Jesus into my heart to be my Lord and savior.
I dutifully read the Bible cover-to-cover several times (not including the Devil's Apocrypha, of course). Southern Baptists are very effective at making you feel guilty for attempting to think for yourself... Proverbs 3:5 got a lot of airplay: "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding." Yet somehow we also claimed "the Priesthood of the Believer" that set us above those awful Catholics. Most of us ignored the contradiction and just deferred to the preacher and other teachers in the church. We were taught that the Bible is largely literal and also not to be questioned, lest we allow Satan a foothold that could land us in Hell.
For my undergraduate years, I attended the world's largest Baptist university. Ironically, that's where the cracks in my belief foundation really manifested. One of the required religion classes discussed the two creation stories of Genesis. I'm embarrassed to say that this totally blew me away... Despite having read the entire Bible several times, I had just glossed over the contradictions between the stories, to the point of not even noticing them. I began to feel betrayed that nobody had seriously made any attempt to discuss this in all those years of Bible Study, and that I had been subtly guided to ignore such issues.
I realized that if THIS part of the Bible was contradictory and merely reflected different cultural interpretations (pretty much killing off literal truth), then the whole damn thing was subject to the same problem. OK, sure, I was a little slow, but I got there.
It's not that I wanted to stop believing... Belief was comfortable! It was part of my identity, and I thought I needed that. Unfortunately, I no longer COULD believe. It simply wasn't possible. This was not a conscious choice, but rather a painful realization.
The loss was bitter for me. I had to let myself down slowly, going down the deist path at first. I spent years getting the bitterness out by arguing on various internet religious forums, even becoming an administrator on one of the larger religious forums for a time. This allowed me to hang on to a god belief but simultaneously let go of dogma. Eventually, I understood that deism was just theistic baggage I could safely release.
I am now an agnostic and atheist at the same time (those are NOT two points on the same continuum) and finally comfortable in my own skin. I can now truthfully offer blessings to you on whatever path you see fit to follow, so long as you don’t impose it on others.
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