A visitor to my blog asked me "what didn't make sense" about Christianity/theism that caused me to walk away from it. The answer is... nothing.
During my time as a Christian, I grew more and more bothered and perplexed by the problem of evil, but it wasn't the problem of suffering and evil that made me step away from faith. Yes, there were aspects of the Bible that really bothered me: the character of god (especially as depicted in the Old Testament), apparent contradictions, the ridiculousness of the story of Noah's flood, but none of those things pushed me away from faith. I became more frustrated with how science-illiterate so many believers are. The more I learned about science, the more I learned about evolution, the more I resented the egregiously anti-science stance that seems inherent to the orthopraxy of so many believers. Still, this didn't cause me to discard faith either.
The historian in me read about the atrocities committed in the name of religion, and how a religious mindset - religious zeal equalled only by dogmatic blindness - comes with the high risk of prejudice, hatred, violence and death. Some argue that religion has been a force for good in the world, and inspires people to be kind and giving. Maybe this is true for some people, but I can't help but think of a popular quote floating around the Internet that has been attributed to Jon Stewart (though many say the quote finds its true origin in Charlie Chaplin:
In spite of these concerns, this didn't make me unchain myself from faith either. Religion's terrible treatment of women through the centuries, religion's justification of slavery, religion's prejudice and hatred against homosexuals, religion's "my way or the highway" attitude: all of this made my skin crawl, and all of this broke my heart for everyone who has been hurt and scarred in the name of religion... but none of this served as the final straw that broke my faith's proverbial back.
The one thing that finally made me realize that I needed to walk away from faith... was faith.
It was faith that made me step away from faith: the fact that faith is required at all. During my time as an online Christian apologist, I searched for arguments and evidence to use to support and defend my faith rationally. Such evidence and argumentation simply wasn't there to be found. I walked away from Christianity, and ultimately from theism, because of a lack of evidence. I had no reason to stay except for comfort based on preconditioning to accept it as true. When I came to the realization that my faith lacked a rational foundation - and then realized that "faith" by definition requires a lack of a rational foundation - that's when I began to understand all those other issues that bothered me so much. Without a rational base, anything can be justified. Cast aside logic and reason, and now the moon can be comprised entirely of Spam, I can build a house made out of dance, and 2 + 2 can equal Portuguese and any freaking atrocity you can think of can be justified simply by calling it "God's Will."
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit."
- The Tick
And that, my friends, is why I gave up on faith.
Dead-Logic.com
