I grew up nominally Methodist, and got very religious when I was 15 years old. I got involved with Campus Crusade for Christ. I then spent 5 years involved with them, and at the same time moved to a Southern Baptist Church. This occupied most of my high school and college years. When I was a senior in college, I attended a Calvinist Presbyterian Church. Then I spent 2 years in seminary working on a Master of Divinity degree, with the goal of becoming a Minister of the Calvinist Presbyterian (very conservative) variety.

It was at seminary that I really examined the claims of Christianity and found them to be false, so I entered seminary as a very staunch fundamentalist and left as a more-or-less agnostic. My Christian faith was based on several tenets being true and intellectually defendable:

1. Jesus was uniquely God's son, and gave us teachings that would lead us to God.
2. The Bible was the Word of God, literally true (with allowances for poetry, metaphors, etc), not only theologically but scientifically and historically.
3. God answers prayer.
4. Christianity had the power to positively change lives for the better. This would be true for individuals, families, communities and whole societies.

In seminary, each of these crumbled in spite of, in fact specifically because of, the seminary teachers' feeble efforts to substantiate and defend them.

1. Whether Jesus is God's son is a matter of faith which cannot be intellectually defended. In fact, the Bible praises faith the most when it goes against evidence, for example Jesus' statement to Thomas "You see and believe? Blessed are those who do not see, and still believe". All of the teachings on Christianity are just warmed-over versions of what had been taught by Buddha, Zoroaster, Mithra, and various other pagan religions, so if Jesus was speaking God's word, how come all those nasty old pagans said it first?
2. The Bible contains a whole lot of stuff that is just not scientifically true, such as the creation story, the Genesis flood, the sun standing still for a day so the Jews could win a battle, etc. Historically, a great deal of it does not match with archaeology, and there is a whole lot of genocidal stuff in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, etc., where God commands the jews to slaughter tens of thousands of innocent women, children, etc. I believe genocide is wrong even if you think God ordered you to do it. "For God so loved the world that He murdered thousands of Egyptians (Exodus 11:5 and 12:29), and told Moses and Joshua to murder tens of thousands of Midianites (Numbers 31:1-35), Sihonites (Deuteronomy 2:32-34), Bashanites (Deuteronomy 3:1-6), Hittites Amorites Canaanites Perizzites Hivites and Jebusites (Deuteronomy 20:16-17), etc" That just doesn't make sense to me.
3. In my experience, and the experience of Christians I know well, praying does not change the likelihood of something happening the way you are praying for it to. When I was a Baptist, a number of us youth were having difficulty getting our prayers answered. The minister explained that God always answered prayer, but He could give one of 4 answers: Yes, no, wait or something different from what you asked. This is exactly what is going to happen no matter who you pray to - you will either get what you want, or you won't, or you will get it later, or you will get something different from what you wanted. This is true whether you pray to Jehovah-Jesus, Zeus, Buddha or a rock that you set up in your living room.
4. "You will know them by their fruits". If Christianity is true, then Christians should be better (by their own standards) than those who are not. In 2000 years of Christian history, this is very definitely not the case. On the contrary, Christianity has had an enormously negative impact on many individuals, families, communities and whole societies. "The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire" is one of the best books on this, more so because its scholarship is unquestioned. It is so well accepted that even Christian Fundamentalists accept its historical record. Former Alabama governor Fob James says it is his favorite book (that, of course, assumes he can read). This book records about 1100 years between around 300 and 1450 AD, and its report of the actions of Christianity isn't pretty. Christianity has brought persecution, destruction of knowledge, fear, poverty and ignorance to huge numbers of people. This continues to the present day, for example the persecution of a Jewish man named Greg Thomas, recently reported in the Birmingham News (6/17/2000, Page 12A), who was boycotted, fired from his job and run out of his home town of Hamilton, AL.

Details