Why did you accept/reject Christianity?

[otseng]

Why did you accept Christianity or why did you reject it? If you are of another belief system, why did you accept that?

This thread is only to gather individual answers and not to solicit any debate on what others have posted.

[achilles12604]

I am summing up my beliefs in a rolling thread.

http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... php?t=7149

[GrumpyMrGruff]

Why did you accept Christianity or why did you reject it? If you are of another belief system, why did you accept that?

I'm new to the forum. *waves* Hi, forum! This seems as good a place as any to jump in.

As my user groups suggest, I have rejected the tenets of Christianity. Though I think a pre-big bang deistic god is compatible with observations of the natural world (hence my preference for the term "agnostic"), I am effectively atheistic in my beliefs.

Why did I reject Christianity? I was raised in a nominally Catholic household, but for most of my childhood my parents were twice-a-year Catholics, going to church only at Easter and Christmas. I believed that God existed because I trusted my parents and they told me so, but they were woefully unprepared when I asked questions like, "If God made everything, where did God come from?" Thus, I had a very hazy conception of just what God was.

When I was about five years old, I remember trying an experiment: I placed a rectangular rock on my window sill (because clearly God would be able to see it better if it was in view of the sky ). I prayed that He would transform it into a spherical rock while I slept. The next morning I rushed to the window, but of course it was the same old blocky rock. While I still believed in God at that point (my parents said it was so, after all), I came to the conclusion that they were mistaken about God answering prayers/intervening in human events.

I began to examine my beliefs in middle school and high school as I began receiving invitations from the "God squad" - people in my circle of friends who were committing to evangelical Christianity - to attend services and bible studies. By this time I was effectively an atheist, having decided that absence of evidence was actually evidence of absence. I recall reading some silly books (Atheism: The Case Against God comes to mind) and even getting up on my teenage militant atheist soapbox in high school. This was mostly in response to the condescending attitudes ('You're going to burn in Hell!') and hypocrisy (devout teenagers were still hormonally charged teenagers) I saw in my religious friends.

The militant atheist phase was a bit embarrassing, but it did lead me to read lots of material on comparative religion. I probably knew the bible better than most of the apathetic Christians in my high school and I went through religious texts of most of the "big six" religions. By the time I made it to college, I had settled on agnosticism as the most defensible position I could take. (Call me a fence-sitter if you like. ) The militant atheist attitude faded away in college when I found myself surrounded by liberal Christians and atheists/agnostics.

In brief (now that I've rambled about the past 15 years of my life), I don't see anything in nature that contradicts a deistic god, but nothing to support that position, either. I've seen the error in assuming that absence of evidence is actually evidence of absence, and thus I maintain an agnostic stance. My parents started pushing religion too late for me to overlook the contradictions and questionable morality of Christianity. Likewise, my study of other religions in high school and college did not uncover more reasonable revealed religions (although I am sympathetic to the moral stances of some, such as Buddhism). And of course, in my line of work (scientist) it pays to assume naturalistic explanations before defaulting to 'god did it.'

So that's my answer, long and rambling though it may be. Hmm, mayhap I should work on my concision before I start posting regularly.