I was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church, and spent the first nine years of my life believing before I started to get too curious and started asking questions about things that were supposed to be accepted without doubt. The meaning of the commandment of having no other god before him; the snake eating dust (sounds like an earthworm to me), that he didn't really seem to create the world, merely reorganized it. The real catch was that I knew what omnipotence means, and that true omnipotence - the kind claimed for the god of Christianity - has no limits. The claim that he can't prevent evil because of free will is a crock; true omnipotence allows for free will and the simultaneous suppression of evil. More, many of the things marked as sinful today are common among followers mentioned in the book - Lot's daughters commit incest, and you can't tell me the story of Noah doesn't include the same sinful behavior. None of it jived, and the cognitive flaws in the text made it clear that someone had taken a butcher's knife to the story - because story it was, rather obviously. So I looked into it... and found out that Mary Magdalene was a minor noble, not a whore; that Lilith, Adam's true first wife, had been cut out for being a woman who chose to make her own way rather than serve faithfully; and so many more. It was too much, and I fell away from the faith simply because I couldn't accept the hypocrisy of the book, and of the people calling themselves Christian and then failing to obey any of their own rules.

The dogma is riddled with flaws and contradictions, many noted by my own mother, the one who had me baptised and raised me as a Catholic. Moreover, there is the biggest of all flaws: if the Christian god is truly omnipotent, then he could certainly allow free will and yet also prevent any form of evil. Omnipotence is omnipotence; anything else is merely an excuse to hide the fact that there is no omnipotence. As a Discordian, free will is the essence of what we were meant to have, to screw up and make our own horrific mistakes and fantastic wonders on our own - rulers of our own fates, not sheep to be herded along.

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