I've been curious what books might've planted the first seeds to your disbelief, or made you an atheist altogether?
For me it was Finding Darwin's God. It's a evolutionary biologist/Christian authored book that explains how evolution is actually falsifiable and can fit in nicely with the Bible. I was a young Earth creationist, and was totally shaken that I'd gotten evolution so wrong. I had assumed, like everyone around me, that evolution was peddled by snake oil salesmen to destroy Christian faiths. It led me to wonder what else I was wrong about. Reading Lawrence Krause, Christopher Hitchens, Oscar Wilde, Oliver Sachs, and Carl Sagan got me the rest of the way.
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The book that figured in my rejection of the god concept and other things supernatural was the bible. My mind could not reconcile its stories with my reality and I found its inconsistencies unacceptable. Also the questions I had came largely from the bible and the answers I got sealed the almighty's coffin. Meanwhile, when I was seven years of age, my mother got a set of the Encyclopedia Americana which quickly cast the bastard's coffin out to make room for real knowledge.
evidentialist
Level 8
Nov 30, 2019
3
Me too, the fundamental juxtaposition between the Old Testament and the new, the confusion over; no we can eat that food now, those rules were just for the olden days. The pain of the Easter story. The fact that an all knowing god created Lucifer/ the devil/ evil himself and then we had to deal with fall out of that.
All of this and more made me seriously suspect the wisdom of the god I was supposed to bow to. Blasphemous I know, but there you go.
I definitely get this. Reading the Bible after having significant doubts made it a totally different book!
@girlwithsmiles It's like the supposedly omnipotent God has a personality change from Old to New, like he stopped being a teenage bully after growing out of puberty
@Bostonred yes.
I was a lapsed Catholic of the diasporaed Irish variety at age 5 and a half, and the road to heathenism came very naturally very quickly. To turn the question around, what was it about "Finding Darwin's God" that related evolution comfortably with a creation date of 4004 BC, & all the other dogma? Or does it relate evolution to a much more "liberal" interpretation of the Bible that Christians have been forced to fall back on by increments over the past two centuries?
Garbonza
Level 6
Nov 30, 2019
1
Maybe not a liberalized Christianity, but one of the many that says you should pray and read the Bible and use god to sort of.. feel it out. In hindsight that's obviously my own reasoning, but then it made sense to recognize the faults of the writers and understand them in context. I was able to mash science and god together by rationalizing their lack of knowledge as just plain ignorance. That they wouldn't have been able to understand the science, and instead made use of a few paragraphs to try and put Genesis together in a metaphorical sense. 7 days could've been a billion years, creating us from dust could mean an evolutionary process starting from single cell organisms, ect. It was just an extension of understanding god from the science we have now.
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