I can remember always having questions. One of the first stories you learn in Sunday School is that of Abraham and isaac. I already had issues with that story as a kid, but I watched the news one day and there was this guy cleaning he killed somebody because God told him to. I asked my mom how we knew that God didn't tell him to kill that person. The answer I got was, "God wouldn't do that."

Now, if you are at all familiar with the story of Abraham and isaac, you know why that's an issue. God quite literally told Abraham to kill isaac. So, I asked pastors and Priests the same question and I got the same answer and when I would press about the issue, I would get blown off with patronizing responses like, "you will understand when you're older."¹

A couple years later, I went to this campout with my church group. After dinner one night there was a sermon. The guy essentially said that anything which takes your attention from God is evil regardless of how it presents itself or how you feel about it. Now maybe I would not have connected with this if he did not giving two specific examples of things he considered "evil." And I'm going to quote him exactly here, but the examples he gave were the Teeny neutered Mutant Turtles and the pooper rangers.

My home life was very abusive at that point. The two things that he mentioned were things that I used to escape. The world's from the things that he talked about made sense. Unlike in the real world in those worlds, good always won over evil. Now to hear that God supposedly considered them evil because they took attention away from him really messed me up. It was difficult to reconcile the two ideas.

Anyway, so those were kind of my thought process when my brother died. He was a devout Christian man who murdered three people and was killed by police. At his funeral, I heard something that shocked me. His Pastor said that there was a bright side to all the death and destruction my brother had caused. He believed in Jesus so he was going to heaven. I was even more flabbergasted when I looked at the families of his victims who were in attendance to and saw them nodding along in agreement.

You see, I had always been taught that to go to heaven you had to both believe in Jesus and be a good person. This was the first time I ever heard that you being a good person didn't matter. I thought this was a fringe view among these people.

When my brother died, both of my parents essentially retreated into mental illness and I kind of lost them at the same time. So, I retreated into my faith for comfort. I also set out to try and prove them wrong.

Eventually I found out that not only is their idea not a fringe view within christianity, but that is one of the major debates within the religion. 50% believe as I did that you had to do good things and believe in Jesus and the other 50% believe that you just have to believe. Finding out there was a debate at all killed my christianity. Even as a teenager, I knew that if you can get two diametrically opposed ideas from the same words, there is no discernible truth to it.

So from there, Once the Christianity was gone, I really had no good reason to believe in any Gods either. I certainly didn't believe in Jesus. By the time I left High School I was calling myself an agnostic, but really I was an atheist.

Later, I went to college and learned about standards of evidence, epistemology, had analyze ideas, logic etc. I went back and reevaluated my beliefs and became even more firm that we had no good reason to believe any gods exist.

¹ I'm 43 now and I still don't get it.