http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaithAboutI’m Daniel Florien. I was an
evangelical Christian for over a decade, completely convinced that God was real and Jesus was alive today. I attended Bible college and worked at a Christian organization for many years. I have “led people to Christ.” I have left tracts in bathrooms. I have knocked on hundreds of doors asking people to repent and believe in Jesus.
I was wrong.
Now I don’t believe in a personal God or that Jesus was born of a virgin, worked miracles, and rose from the dead. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, angels or demons, holy books or prophecy. I don’t believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago, or that God intelligently designed every species.
I now consider myself an atheist and a skeptic.
Here’s an interview about my former beliefs.
What changed your mind?It took many years for me to realize I was wrong. Here are a few reasons I changed my mind:
1. I
read widely outside of evangelical Christianity with an open mind. Just reading isn’t good enough — without an open mind, everything confirms your own beliefs. I decided truth was more important than my current beliefs. I was warned this was dangerous. It was indeed.
2. I studied
science with an open mind. I came to believe in an old earth, then finally evolution. This was a long process of removing layer after layer of propaganda.
3. I looked for
evidence for many of the claims I believed and realized that there was no reputable evidence at all. I could believe Jesus was resurrected, or that Moses parted the Red Sea, but there was no evidence outside oral stories recorded by unknown biased authors many decades (or, as with Moses, many centuries) after the fact.
4. I researched the
history and authorship of the Bible from a secular perspective. After I realized the messy history of the Bible, and saw all the contradictions and absurdities, I could not believe in inspiration much less infallibility, and any faith I still had crashed down.
5. I learned to
think critically and, with much trepidation, finally applied it to my own religion. After years of struggling, I finally accepted I was in a
cult called evangelical Christianity.
6. I asked hard
questions and got tired of the final answers being “it’s a mystery,” which really meant, “it doesn’t make any sense to me either, but that’s what the Bible says.”
7. I learned about
probability. Things I thought could not happen without divine intervention ended up being within the laws of probability. Coincidence really exists.
Locked
