Reading the bible carefully, can't help but say: what a load of crap this is!

I know the moment I stopped believing in god. I was going through a difficult time in my life and had become very depressed. I had turned to god to ask for help and felt nothing in response. It felt like no one was listening (which was correct). I forced myself to ask if I really and truly believed in a god and the answer was no. I immediately felt a weight lifted from me.

I did remain somewhat agnostic for a short time but eventually settled into atheism. That was about 15 years ago.

After I left my parents home at 19, I didn’t think much about the religion I was raised in. I’d discovered alcohol, drugs and sex, and church didn’t fit into that mix. In 1990 I went through a tough divorce, and I lost my son in a car wreck. I couldn’t cope and turned to the religion I was raised in. I’ll try to give the short version. My prayers weren’t answered, so I blamed myself thinking I wasn’t good enough. Read the Bible cover to cover so I could be more godly. It was a different book than I thought from what I’d been taught. I dropped Christianity and described myself as “spiritual not religious”. That didn’t last. I finally realized that I believed in some made up god, and let it all go. I’m now a happy atheist.

At an earlier time I studied to be a Pentecostal p[reacher. The day finally came when I realized I had studied too much.

The nail in the coffin for me was, reading the bible cover to cover at the age of 15. I stopped believing in christianity. Then I became a pagan for 23 + years. I was an agnostic for a few years, before becoming an atheist. Now an agnostic atheist.

That's a tough call. It was either the consistent hypocrisy and phoniness of so many believers accompanied at the same time by getting to know so many non-believers that I admired and that said things making way more sense than the churches on so many issues....