The Coming and Going of Faith

I am a stubborn individual. I don't change my mind easily, but when I do, I go with it 100%. As a young child I wasn't very religious. I believed in that Jesus guy that my mom read to me at bedtime, but I also believed in the tooth fairy. I went to a Catholic church, but was too young to really understand it. I stopped going to church at 5 years old, because my mom split up with her then boyfriend(what a devout faith... held together by someone else's attendance, which was in turn held by his mother's insistence). After that, it wasn't really a subject until my cousin's fire and brimstone hell talk, mixed with insistence of an impending rapture scared the shit out of me.

After that, I insisted that we find a church. We did, and I latched to it. As a socially ostracized 14 year old, who could not find acceptance from his peers due to a disability, I would have taken any acceptance. I probably would have agreed to fellatiate a priest if it would have given me a group I could call friends. I began going regularly and loved it. I soaked up all the bible I could, learning all I could about it. To quote the 'good book' itself:

in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. - Philipians 3:5-6

I was like Paul, a religious fanatic. I learned all I could about the bible. I was that annoyingly overt Christian who prosthelytized and preached to anyone who would listen.

It was because of this 'full throttle' faith, I knew a lot about the bible, which enabled me to see it's contradictions. I realized that there is no solid evidence to prove the bible, and, in fact, plenty of evidence against it.

Once my Christianity waned, I became a deist. I realized that science explained our universe's nature, and how humans came about, yet fell for the fallacy that because we don't know the origin of life, or how the universe began, goddidit! I soon realized that such logic was flawed. You can't insert god into any gap you find and call it evidence. It was then that I became an agnostic, based on the view that because we have no evidence either way, we should just leave it as a giant cosmic maybe. The problem I found with this was that it could be applied to anything. I could use that argument to 'prove' the Flying Spaghetti Monster, UFO's, Bigfoot, or, my personal favorite, Russell's Teapot. It is logical and scientific to begin with a null hypothesis, aka 'It doesn't exist until proven otherwise.' It was then that I became an atheist(although, if we are going by the actual meaning of the word, I was an atheist as soon as I didn't ascribe to theism).

Looking back, I am thankful for going to church. It showed me the flaws in religious thinking that I otherwise may have ignored in stubbornness. I feel like there is something I'm forgetting, but if I remember, I will post it later.