Three years ago at the age of thirty I was sitting in church one Sunday listening to a lay reading when a glaring contradiction slapped me in the face. I no longer have the passage, but it was from the old testament and made some reference to Moses "reminding" God of a past promise of leniency to his people after something they had done had angered him. Immediately I thought..."remind God"? Does God forget? An angry God? If he is omnipotent, how can he be angered by something he should have foreseen in the first place? Stunned, I looked around at all the other people in the pews as if to see if any of them looked contemplative, shocked, etc. They were all either staring blankly ahead, looking down at the reading with no expression, or looking off into space. It sounds funny now, but after a whole life time of Christian indoctrination, this one little reading in one two minute span of time caused the light switch to be turned on in my head. Might all of this be BS?

I took the reading home and showed it to my wife. She shrugged and said maybe there's more to it, or it's out of context. I got out the bible and began to read it from start to finish. Suddenly I saw contradictions everywhere. I went on a search for THE truth for months afterward. I found a way out of my role as assistant treasurer of the church and stopped going all together until I could "solve" this matter. Casual viewing of the Discovery Channel turned me on to another world I had missed thanks to my abysmal public school education -evolution.

Searching deeper I discovered the Talk Origins web site which is a must read for anyone who is at all scientifically minded. One line in particular stands out in my mind to this day; "since evolution is a theory in the true sense of the word, i.e., a proposition which makes testable predictions which acurately describe that which is observed, if one is going to assert that evolution is false, then that person must present an alternative theory which better describes that which is observed." Has anyone seen any Christian apologetic arguments that present an alternative theory which IS testable and more accurately describes that which is observed in the real world?

With the pull of scientific reason on one hand, and the push of Biblical contratictions, inconsistancies and circular arguments on the other, I relented to myself and to my wife that my religion was a fantasy and that I no longer believed in God or gods. The admission of this was the most liberating experience of my life. Everything makes sense now. Now THIS is being "born again".

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