I became a christian when I was six. My parents were christians and so were my grandparents. So, it felt only natural that I become one too. I was the oldest of six kids. When I was five my mother started homeschooling us. I was home-schooled until I turned sixteen and then I started going to college. When I started attending college it was a small christian community college. Basically my entire formative years before becoming an adult were immersed in fundamentalist evangelical calvinist christian teachings. In short - I was brain washed.
In 2016 I voted for Trump. Why? Because I believed Hillary was going to take away my religious freedoms. That if she became President Russia would start WWIII. Providing healthcare for the poor and needy was going to bankrupt our nation. That the Paris Climate Accord was just a sneaky way of building a global socialist society by distributing wealth. And that Obama had increased our national debt by so much that our nation's financial institutions were on the verge of collapse. In other words I was parroting what I heard family, friends, and church members saying. Sadly these people were all victims of the same way of thinking that I had considered gospel truth, air tight, black and white. It was fundamentalist evangelical calvinist christian white supremacist ways of thinking on full display.
Then Covid happened - and then my mother committed suicide.
Sadly that is what it took for me to take a step back and wonder what exactly I had been believing for so long. It was a painful process - deconstructing and disentangling myself from my long held faith tradition. I started out by throwing out EVERYTHING I believed. Nothing was taken as truth anymore until I considered alternate view points.
One thing that I have been struggling with for many months now is whether I should become an atheist.
On one hand I am faced with such an amazing world. One filled with so much complexity and beauty that believing it was created by accident just seems crazy. Believing that it was created by a god seems more likely.
Then on the other hand I am faced with the reality that according to the bible G_d has killed millions of people. Noah's flood. Liberating the Israelites from Egypt. Killing Job's whole family (minus his wife). Ananias and Sapphira in the early church. The genocide of ethnic people groups carried out by Joshua. Sodom and Gomorrah. The list goes on and on. But that is not the half of it. If humans were to follow G_d's example and kill people because they were angry, an off the cuff bet to test their devotion, or they were "bad" those humans would be considered worse than Hitler, Genghis Khan, Stalin combined! To follow the logic fully that would mean that as humans we are held to a higher morality than G_d.
Now I know that just because I find the truth of who G_d is to be repugnant does not mean that is a good enough reason to deny he exists. However, I have spent thirty years in the church that says that G_d is a loving father. When I prayed to him I referred to him as father. I was told that he was loving and only wanted the best for me. But is that really true? If you think logically about the bible and the stories in it he seems less and less loving, less and less like a father, less and less interested in what is best for me.
The dichotomy between who G_d is in the bible and what Jesus taught and lived are so diametrically opposite of each other it is almost unbelievable. How could Jesus be God? How could something who embodies so much love and acceptance be from G_d?