Big step in my deconversion
Offline I was just remembering one of the big steps in my becoming an atheist:
I was in college - at the time considered myself agnostic, but may have been kind of a deist. I was talking to a guy in my class who was a definite atheist - we were making fun of Christians and their beliefs. I said I definitely didn't believe that shit but something had to create the universe - he answered simply "Why?" I didn't have an answer to it and that helped me move to atheism - though I didn't use the big bad "A" word until about 3 years ago - I still thought it meant you were certain there was no god - but I got stronger in my disbelief and finally realized it. Earlier steps would be realizing I disagreed with the established Christian churches on virtually everything, the utter absurdity of Bible stories, etc. I can remember even when I was like 3 or 4 and my mom was reading Bible stories I had a lot of questions - especially about the 10 commandments - like the sabbath one , coveting , etc - I asked "why would God care about that? How does that matter?" She answered "Well, you'll just have to ask God that." Up until my teens I figured the Bible was basically true but the people that wrote it just got a bunch of things wrong. Now, of course, I know they got virtually everything wrong they put in there.
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That's pretty neat. I had something similar to that. I was with a friend talking about how I thought the whole demonology was pretty cool in catholicism (my friend was catholic, I was starting to wane as a believer, but i was still a theist) and I made a remark about "christian mythology" to which my friend replied "don't call my beliefs mythology...." i didn't say it at the time, but my immediate thought was "well why is greek mythology mythology and not what you believe?"
Ah yes, ah ha moments...
I was in a Lit class at one time, and the young pretty professor had us reading some Native American stories, which she kept refering to as 'myths'. I asked her why she considered these to be myths, but not the biblical stories we had read a week or so before...
To her credit, she said I don't know, and later told me privately that she would never make that distinction again...
LC >;-}>
Christianity: A disgusting middle eastern blood cult, based in human sacrifice, with sacraments of cannibalism and vampirism, whose highest icon is of a near naked man hanging in torment from a device of torture.
I wasn't a hardcore atheist until I actually read the Old and New Testaments front to back, and now I believe that they are the most ridiculous nonsense ever written. I have yet to read the Koran or the Talmud or Torah or any Hindu texts, it was a struggle for me just going through the OT and NT and annotating my thoughts the whole way, I think my BS tolerance has exceeded its limits.
I had a very similar experience in my high school Greek and Roman Mythology class. I asked the teacher the same thing. Unfortunately, he was not so nice about it and just yelled back at me, "Because the Bible is true!"
Actually, maybe that wasn't so unfortunate because it got me really thinking about how he could make that claim with such certainty when there really was no more reason for the validation for one over the other.
"The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs" - Bill Maher