sure enough this church was very liberal and open minded, but something strange started happening, when the pastor started talking about different verses and people asking questions i just started laughing at how all crazy some of this sounds, how illogical it was. But these feelings of silliness dissipated and i convinced myself that god is beyond human understanding or human logic blah blah blah..i showed up a few more times and just started getting sick of it, i started thinking that these people are not being true to the bible by claiming some verses were meant to be metaphorical and such and that they were polluting the teachings of the bible. So i decided to fucking finally read the bible front to back. In my journey in reading the bible at first i felt like i was doing something pure and i was on a path of truly understanding what god is saying and what god has planned for me, i felt this sense of self-rightousness that i would know more than most christians by reading the bible front to back and i wouldn't pollute its teachings. Over the course of a year i read the bible every night until i fell asleep, i would read it front to back over and over again, but in that time i was in a desperate place and i was mostly just reading for some sort of guidance, those earlier feelings of silliness and illogic of some verses never arose . I eventually started reading about islam, mind you i was reading about it not from its sources but from jihadwatch and such,man that guy over there rubbed of on me in the wrong way, i started sharing alot of his views(all muslims practicing taqiyyah all the time blah blah blah) and such, but what i liked about his site was that he used islamic sources with alot of stuff he posted on his blog. Eventually i started engaging in debates and reading debates of christianity and islam, which one is religion of peace, true, all of the sort of debates you expect to hear from christianity and islam i read them and debated them. Eventually i got burned out of jihad watch and i started reading the quran and hadiths myself alittle bit and at that point i decided to make my own arguments against islam, mind you islam wasn't what i expected it to be i noticed alot of the similiarities between christianity judaism and islam, and i was impressed by some muslim theologians, i didn't read much of the quran at first, i read just to see what it was about, while i was reading it i felt like the book was boring and it copied much of the old testament,unoriginal, (could be my ex-christian bias lol
, but nevertheless i continued reading about chrisitanity islam and judaism, until one day i just started thinking, asking questions, and reading, and reflecting on my life, i started thinking more about morality and thinking about the role logic and reason should play in my life, all this time i was trying to implement the bible in small steps into my everyday life, the bible is harsh towards homosexuals and i started thinking about how i should treat them, but i started thinking about all the gay people i knew in my life, i mean goddam i was adopted by a gay man at the age of 16, i had gay friends, and i saw how god treated them in his own words, well lets just say i avoided that issue altogether.
The next thing i started thinking about is what happens to people who dont believe in god and jesus etc, the bible says they will be thrown in hell, and they will gnash their teeth, but something clicked in me i just shut down thinking along the lines of that, i started saying to myself "if anyone on earth is good and does good things god will let them into heaven", again this reasoning comes from my earlier experiences at church, eventhough they very cleary contradicted what the bible says towards unbelievers. After all this self examination of morality,ethics,logic,reason i started reading about philosophy,logic, those things have always fascinated me and they still do, but these subjects started coming into conflict with my newfound sense of faith and religion, it reached a point where i questioned alot of stuff about religion and god. It reached a boiling point when i was reading a comprehensive book about world history, i was already doubting the bible and god and heaven and hell, i read about the epic of gilgamesh and how when he was searching for the garden of immortality his friend died and he cried and pounded the ground around his friend wishing for his friend would come back to life, instead he didnt and his friends corpse started having maggots crawl over him(brief summary of the whole scene lol), this story for some reason had a enormous impact on me, i got red hot all over and all my doubts came to fruition,i had a enormous sense of fear and aloneness i've never felt before,i started crying and saying to myself that i was living a lie, i had this sense of losing something like gilgamesh lost his friend, but that "losing" feeling was me beginning to lose my faith in god and religion,i remember calling up some people i was close to and telling them i had fear of death, but not like before because this time i feel death is permanent,and i remember them trying to console me and such(even though they weren't religious themselves) but to no avail. The next couple of days i kinda sleepwalked.
Topic: ex-christian ex-theist...