An Explanation of My Religious Views

I've been ask to explain how I arrived at my current religious outlook.

Interestingly enough I always considered myself a Christian. When my parents passed away I felt that I didn't really understand the faith into which I had been born and began to learn more about the Bible and the History of Christianity.

I read the New Testament for the first time and found myself confused by both the similarities and differences. If these men were writing about their own experiences, as I had been taught, then why were large portions of the text identical in different gospels? Why were there small but significant differences in many of the Jesus quotes? Why were the passion stories so radically different and why was the Gospel of John so different from the Synoptic Gospels? Then I began reading the Hebrew Bible and was horrified by some of the things I found in there such as Deuteronomy 22:13-21.

I branched out and starting reading books by recognized biblical scholars including John Dominic Crossan, Richard Friedman, Israel Finkelstein and, especially, Bart Ehrmann. I then began to realize that my ignorance ran deeper than I had originally imagined. Even things I thought I knew, were probably wrong.

These things shook my faith but the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak was Christianity's rejection of the Theory of Evolution and the constant attempts to force Creationist crap into the public square.

Yes, I realize that not ALL Christians are guilty of this but there were enough to finally push me over the edge. As an Engineer I had to assume that a philosophy that could be several orders of magnitude wrong about biology was probably wrong about everything else as well.

So I left Christianity. I then called myself a Deist until I realized that this was a form of wishful thinking. I then labeled myself an Agnostic mistakenly believing this was a middle ground between a Theist and an Atheist. Then I realized that an Agnostic was simply a type of Atheist so now I'm an Agnostic Atheist which is also sometimes called a Weak Atheist.

I don't believe in a God simply because I no longer believe that the evidence supports such a belief. As an Engineer I can only go where the evidence leads me.

I would be very, very happy to be shown that there is in fact a loving God but I can accept the idea that there isn't and this life is probably all I'll have.