Okay first post here. Y’all want to know how I ended up as an atheist? It was because of my high confidence in Christianity. (Prepare for a LONG novel of a thread.)

I thought if the Bible had all the answers and God was who I thought he was, then nothing that criticized the Bible or my faith would be a problem. The Bible would be able to withstand scrutiny.

I believed in a loving God who was no trickster. However, I was also being taught to bury my nose in the Bible and only trust Christian resources on all topics because “Satan prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”

Which meant if I wasn’t constantly doing all I could to withstand Satan and his threats, he could whisk me away from God.

So… you’re saying all it takes to unravel the life-saving work of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God, is… me making a mistake? Yeah, no. My God would never abandon me for an honest mistake. I thought more highly of him than that.

And plus, I was already saved! Satan could have no hold on what God already had dominion over.

This mindset got me to not be afraid to look outside Christian resources. It no longer made sense to me that God didn’t want us to use our brain to develop tools to understand the world he created.

If he created it, then it makes sense it would work by the laws of nature that he put into place.
And if I was going in the wrong direction knowledge-wise, I had full confidence that God would redirect me.

On top of that, I was already at a point where I was aware that Christian leaders I respected contradicted other Christian leaders I respected. So I knew being a well respected, Bible-believing Christian wasn’t the solution to my questions either.

They all used the Bible to justify their viewpoints. So, if the Bible is also my measure of truth, which ones of them were right in their Bible analysis?

With that in mind, I went on a search to verify what was true about the Bible, and what wasn’t. That way I could identify ill-informed Christian leadership. I was at the point where I didn’t care who was right or if I was wrong (although I didn’t think I was wrong at all).

Well to my surprise, I found out a lot of what I was taught about the Bible was wrong.

The first issue I uncovered was the impossibility that the Noah’s ark story could literally be true the way it was written. It can’t be an accurate account with what we know about physics, archaeology, geology, and ancient architecture and shipbuilding.

That discovery completely unraveled my biblical literalist interpretation of the Bible.

And I thought to myself “Well crap, if I believed this story and was completely wrong, what ELSE about the Bible am I completely wrong about? Which parts do I trust and which parts do I not trust?” And things continued to unravel from there.

I started questioning all aspects of my faith and looked for independent sources to support Bible claims. I was highly disappointed by what I was finding. I was pissed that I had been so naive and that I had been lied to by people I trusted, even if they did it unintentionally.

As I tried to reframe the situation I thought, “Maybe God isn’t intending the Bible to be LITERAL, maybe it’s all about the MEANING.” I decided to go back and start reading the Bible from the beginning with this mindset.

I asked myself, “How would the Bible read if a random person handed it to me for the first time in my life and no one was there to interpret it?” I opened it up to the first page and began reading.

Upon reading the first few chapters of Genesis, I was appalled like I had never been before. I saw a very selfish, insecure, tantrum-throwing, baby of a god. A god who rewarded lying and deceiving, as long as it was his chosen favorites. How had I missed this before??

This is not the good character of the God I had learned to mirror! Where is THAT God?

I think I made it through Genesis before I put the Bible down and walked away in anger. I just couldn’t believe how different the Bible looked when there was no interpretation guide making excuses for the main character.

It made me physically ill. I was so angry that I had supported such an undesirable character and called this “loving”. I wanted nothing to do with such evil.

I valued quality character and truth too much to ignore all these problems with the Bible. When all the issues combined were staring me right in the face, I couldn’t force myself to even pretend to believe in the Christian god anymore.

And all you people who say “But it’s about JESUS in the New Testament” Yeah. Problem is, the Jesus story becomes unnecessary without the Old Testament angry man and the concept of “original sin”. And according to Christianity, Jesus and the Old Testament God are one and the same.

Anyway. That’s how having high confidence in the goodness and accuracy of the Bible led me to discover that my faith in the Bible, and furthermore, the Christian God, had been misplaced. So I did the most honest thing I could do: I admitted I had been wrong and walked away.