I was raised in a Christian home and, apart from my high school years, was a serious Christian until I was about thirty-four. I graduated from a small Bible college, was a youth pastor, and taught many Bible studies and classes at churches I attended. I was always interested in Christian apologetics and sharing my faith with people who were not Christians.
On one occasion, a friend challenged me about how it was I could really be sure that the Bible was the Word of God. I shared with him why I believed this and gave him the standard arguments of how we can know this to be true, but for some reason I found myself feeling uncomfortable with my answers. They did not seem to be as strong as I once thought they were. He pointed out that I was making some big assumptions about how the Bible had come together that I had not proven, for which I should have a better answer since I was so dogmatic about the Bible being the Word of God. So I decided to study these things more thoroughly to find better answers. I read many books and talked to my pastor and to any other Christian leader I could find who would talk to me. I studied as much as I could about the origins of the New Testament and how the Bible was formed and of the history of the early Christian church.
The more I read the more questions I had. It seemed like the history of how the Bible came together was very "messy," and there were many assumptions piled upon more assumptions that were far from being proven. This was a major problem for me, and I remember thinking, "If we can't be sure about which books are inspired by God, how can we be sure about anything regarding our faith?" So I read more and more books by Christian scholars to try to understand why we trusted the Bible. It seemed there was significant confusion about who wrote many of the books of the Bible and where they got their information. Even the Gospels are anonymous! Now that I was examining the Bible more closely, there also seemed to be many errors in the Bible that were not explained very well by Christian apologists. If I was going to be honest about the problems I was seeing, I had to deal with this. Surely God would want me to be honest. The more I read, and the more I talked to pastors and heard their answers, the more disillusioned I became. It seemed that either nobody was asking these questions or those who were familiar with these problems didn't think they were a big deal. Many people I talked to just thought I was being contentious and that I should simply have faith and stop trying to analyze things so much.
I decided to take a year off from studying these things to focus on my faith and to try to strengthen my relationship with God. I tried not to question the Bible and to accept God's grace toward me and to meditate on the Scriptures. I focused more on prayer and read more "devotional" literature to try to ignite the spiritual flame inside me that I felt was dying out. In time I realized, however, that if I was going to be honest with God and with myself, I couldn't pretend any longer. I couldn't get around the historical inaccuracies, the doctrinal contradictions, or the haphazard way the Bible came together. I felt I wasn't being logically consistent with the way I looked at my own faith compared to other faith claims. I found other faiths to be false because of problems I found in them, but these seemed to be the same problems I was seeing in Christianity. It seemed that Christianity held together only if you already assumed it to be true. If you looked at it from the outside, it looked like any other natural religion.
Over time I gradually moved further away from my strict view of the Bible. I started visiting other churches that were not as strict about the Bible and doctrine. Eventually I made a decision to stop going to church all together. The community aspect was nice, but I just couldn't bring myself to go through the motions of faith any longer. Today I live a happy, meaningful life as an atheist/agnostic. I am still open to searching out the truth of this world and will hopefully follow that truth wherever it may lead me.
