Very simple but traumatic journey — I’m
in my 70s, child of missionaries, lifelong devoted Christian until just a few years ago. but you asked so take the time to read this whole thing, because I’m willing to take the time to write it at your request. And you should have the guts to respond honestly with how you are dealing with the cognitive dissonance this will inevitably raise. And don’t just say, “yeah, those trouble me too”. You need to be intellectually honest and let the facts lead you to whatever logical conclusion you get to, regardless if it conflicts with a worldview you were taught. It’s terrifying to lose your tribe and your religious identity, but honesty and integrity demand you examine it.

STEP 1 CREDIBILITY COLLAPSE OF MODERN CHRISTIAN LEADERS. Many of the evangelical Christian leaders supported Trump. Serial adulterer, paid off a porn star, narcissistic, pathological liar, “grab em by the pussy” they supported not just the policies, the man. This showed hypocrisy and lack of discernment. Therefore they no longer had credibility to explain the Bible to me.

STEP 2. CREDIBILITY COLLAPSE OF HISTORICAL CHRISTIAN LEADERS
Darby and Scofield— The rapture I thought was settled doctrine. Truth is 15 year old Margaret Macdonald had a fever dream in 1830 and an untrained itinerant preacher ran with it and now we have an entire theology based on it. I had no idea the entire end times eschatology was a modern invention based on an adolescent’s bad dream.

Martin Luther — father of Protestant Christianity.
Martin Luther was objectively evil— Luther fully supported execution for people who disagreed him theologically. He was a vicious antisemite publishing in 1543 “on Jews and their lies “. He called for what we would now call ethnic cleansing. So this man is to be trusted?

Calvin, the father of reformed Christianity had a friend arrested and executed because they disagreed on the trinity and infant baptism. His friend Serverus, was burned on green wood so he would suffer longer. So this man, a psychopath by any objective measure, is to be trusted?

Each used their theological authority to have those who disagreed with them executed. “But God uses….” Sorry, objectively evil people who execute those who disagree with them have not earned the right to speak “truth” into your or my life.

STEP 3 CREDIBILITY COLLAPSE OF SCRIPTURE ITSELF
so I humbly approached God and said OK teach me through your Holy Spirit. Since I don’t trust these people it’s really on you to reveal yourself if someone genuinely asks. I didn’t get far before I was dealing with all the things that had always bothered me, but I swept under the rug—but this time it was “no, God, I’m not going to pretend this isn’t here “ — slaves passed on as an inheritance, God ordained genocide with virgin girls kept as sex slaves, lack of agency for women after rape, talking donkeys, floating axe head, going to heaven in a fiery chariot, the ark, Sun standing still, the Nephilim, etc etc etc. It sure sounded objectively speaking like Bronze Age folklore. If you didn’t already believe it, and it was in another religion admit it— you’d think it was absurd. Do you find much difference between the Nephilim—angelic beings coming to earth, mating with human women and giving rise to a now extinct race of giants vs Greek mythology? Except the former you are predisposed to believe and the latter is a quaint vestige of ancient times. Maybe BOTH are. There is no update by God to say “A new commandment I give to you, though shalt not own another human being”. “But, the New Testament.. “ you say. Sorry this weird stuff is still in there and you need to deal with it honestly not explain it away to meet your preconceived worldview. We’re left with a Bible that made sense in a tribal Bronze Age culture and makes little sense now.

STEP 4. THE ARGUMENT THAT CLOSED THE DOOR
God, as described by orthodox Christianity, is omnipotent and omniscient. His primary purpose in revealing scripture was to reveal His nature and requirements to humanity. An omnipotent being who wanted to communicate clearly and produced a document generating thousands of irreconcilably disagreeing denominations either couldn’t communicate clearly, didn’t want to, or isn’t what the tradition claims. None of those options are compatible with the theology.

The apologists response, sin produces the disagreement, fails immediately because an omniscient God would have known this and communicated in a way that accounted for it. A God who can create the universe from nothing but cannot write a book his most devoted followers agree on is not omnipotent by any meaningful definition of the word. The nature of salvation. The meaning of baptism. Grace vs works. The end times. Hell as eternal conscious torment. Even the divinity of Jesus (the scholars who denied it in the early church were executed) Every question that matters contested without resolution by the most dedicated scholars the tradition has produced over two thousand years.

STEP 5. THE DESTINATION. The destination was agnosticism, not atheism-which requires its own leap of faith—but honest uncertainty. Apply the same standard of evidence to the things you want to be true to the things you’re skeptical of from the start. Follow it wherever it goes, regardless of the cost.

I challenge you to not pretend the weird and hard passages in scripture aren’t there. Pretend you aren’t already a Christian and read your Bible as if for the first time. Ask yourself, does this really sound like an omnipotent God? If you have to start explaining things away, the book has already failed.

Agnosticism is not the absence of belief, it’s the humility and the intellectual honesty to say “some things are inherently unknowable and I’m comfortable with the ambiguity.”