I Am Free

I grew up in a very religious area of the US. Everyone I knew was a believer and went to church every Sunday. It was considered horrible to miss church or question God’s existence. The Christians I was around were very much doing whatever they wanted and repent on Sunday type of believers.
I joined the military out of high school. Lots of Christians to form klicks in the military. Every unit has a chaplain and 90% of them are Christians. I got injured and had to leave the military. I used the G.I. Bill to get a masters degree and ended up in a company with a group that were all believers, but attended different churches.
This is where my questions began. I met young-Earth believers, flat-Earthers, Christians who rejected the Book of Revelation and even Christians who rejected the Old Testament. It was the first time I was exposed to sects of Christians who had radically different views of the Bible, compared to my own.
So, I started to look into the historicity of the events and the different translations and interpretations of the Bible. I found that there are about 33,000 versions of Christians, more sects than there are sentences in the Bible. As I read and studied, I would talk to other believers. One thing became very clear: almost all Christians have not read their Bible. Many beliefs and traditions I found were not in the Bible, or in direct conflict with it. People want to ignore the parts in the Old and the New Testament that promote and condone slavery. No believing female actually holds to the way women should act and be treated per the Bible. There were a lot of things the Bible commanded and forbid that seemed terrible to me.
At this point, I started to do mental gymnastics to hold to my faith: God is real, but the Bible has been corrupted. So many people believe! How can it not be real?
I basically created my own version of Christianity, which I found is what most believers do. The parts of the Bible I liked were correct. The parts I didn’t, we’re corrupt. I still had faith, could “feel” the Lord and couldn’t shake how wrong and twisted everything was. I kept reading and talking about the Bible.
What pushed me to Atheism was reading about Gilgamesh. One of the epic tales was how Gilgamesh built a boat and put two of every animal on the boat to save them from a great flood. Obviously, that is the same story as Noah’s, but Gilgamesh was written well before him. This could only mean that the Noah’s Arc story was plagiarised. OK, maybe that’s just another corrupt piece. Then I found out that Christian scholars agree that the Four Gospels are not eye witnesses, but unknown authors who wrote the stories decades after the described events. There is no proof of a man named Jesus, or Yeshua, who came from Nazareth and performed miracles. The Romans were meticulous record keepers. Not one scrap of paper has ever been found to suggest Pontius arrested and condemned Jesus. The mass killing of babies was not documented in any journal. Neither was any of the miracle claims. The only place to document these events are the Gospels, and those are unquestionably written 40-60 years after the supposed events.
I had no faith left. Everything I had been told about God and the Bible turned out to be a lie. I didn’t give up, though. I still wanted to believe. I searched for something that could make it true.
The problem was I now questioned everything. Every claim, I asked “How do you know it’s true?”, and every time there was no evidence. It was faith. Always faith, never proof.
So, three years ago, at the age of 33, I realized I don’t believe and can’t believe. I had become an atheist.
I started to view content from well-known atheists on YouTube: Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Matt Dillahunty, Aron Ra. I learned about critical thinking, logical fallacies, what I should and shouldn’t consider evidence and how it is on the claimant to prove their belief, or claim.
I can confidently say I am an agnostic atheist now. I do not believe in a god or gods, but I do not make the claim that they don’t exist. The best part is I have a lot of peace that came with throwing off my God-belief. No longer do I have to fight with dogma, to conform to modern society. I don’t have to believe in the unseen and worry about some thug sending me to Hell because I didn’t follow some ancient rulebook.