I'd grown up Christian, and tried to feel Christian things (I imagined my heart melting like a candle when I 'asked Jesus into my heart' as a 4 or 5 year old) but, it just wasn't all that real. I guess I was intense about it; as a teen I felt "Wow, if everyone really is going to hell forever if they're not saved, why aren't all Christians burning themselves out everyday, trying to save people?". So I had a phase where I went around witnessing to people on the street. I met a Jehovah's witness that way (and some others); they were a pain to argue with :).

Anyway, at some point I believed that I'd blasphemed the Holy Spirit, and so the question of salvation and apostasy were intensely real, plus I was a teen, trying to make sense of it all, and I just couldn't get a straight story out of the Bible; besides the major doctrinal lines, there were weird things like 'Wisdom' personified in Proverbs, why God allows evil to happen (isn't it a human, legal principle that if you allow something to happen, you're responsible for it?), just a million things. Then the question of evolution; our bodies have these little flaws (knee joints, blood vessels in front of the eyes) - then, I don't know why but, I read that Aborigines also have a myth about God sending his son for something, and I decided to 'trial not believe' and see if I got pushed back as I'd heard stories of. Nothing did, and in fact Christianity makes even less sense from the outside than from the inside.

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