Cycel. It is obvious how you have set your heart...to not believe in God. Why have have you dug in your heals?
Giving you the complete story would require many typed pages, but perhaps a very short synopsis is possible.
It may look to you as if I have obstinately dug in my heels, but I assure you it took me a number of years to move from a standpoint of faith to reason. As a child I was surrounded by Christian culture and was taught biblical inerrancy in church. This inevitably became a problem and as time went on it became more and more difficult for me to accept this dogmatic claim. I think had I been raised on a more liberal diet I might not have begun questioning, but as it stood I came – perhaps wrongly – to the conclusion that if any part of scripture was in error then it must all be wrong. My atheism might well be a consequence of my strict literal upbringing.
As it stands now both history and science, for me, point the way to a better understanding of reality than what is served up in scripture. Those who interpret scripture literally pass their understanding of reality, first and foremost, through the lens of the Bible, just as Muslims pass their critical thinking through the lens of the Koran, ignoring all other observations that might impart a different understanding.
Does it make your life easier and make more sense.
Does everything make more sense as an atheist? Absolutely. Does non-belief make it easier to get through life’s pitfalls? I don’t know, but that’s not the criteria I use for determining reality.
To what bar do you hold your character too?
I don’t subscribe to the notion that one cannot be good without God. Sam Harris addresses this issue in his book
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.
Was the polishing wheel of God too much for you?
???
Did you lose a loved one?
No. There was no trauma. It is hard for you to understand, I know, believing in the clear visibility of God as you do, but it is possible for some of us simply to have no awareness of God and over time stop believing in those things for which we can find no evidence. For me God is completely invisible, always has been. I no longer believe in those things I can’t see.
You said earlier that you left the fold because God didnt answer you.
I have inadvertently given you the wrong understanding. I stopped believing in God because I saw no evidence of God and because science and history had better answers for everything. Then at sixteen I decided to give God one last chance and threw myself into prayer and the Bible. God never revealed himself during that time and so I came to the conclusion that I must have been correct about his non-existence. Sometime during the months following I had a single epiphany that confirmed in my mind that I had truly lost all belief in God. Clearly, had God existed that was the time for him to reveal himself to me. He did not. I am only saying that had he revealed himself I would now believe