Deconversion stories from The Skeptical Review
Anon
How to Make the World a Better Place...
I am 24 years old, and I was born and raised as a Georgia Baptist. Until last year, I had never heard of anyone who questioned the Bible's inspiration. I thought everybody accepted the Bible as God's Word, but some people just chose to ignore it. However, like most Bible believers, I had never actually read the Bible for myself. The bulk of my Bible knowledge came from stories that were told to me as I was growing up, but a little over a year ago, I went through some pretty hard times, and I made the mistake of deciding to read the Bible from cover to cover. I was hoping to find out what I was doing wrong to bring on my hardships. I had barely made it through the first few chapters of Genesis when I realized that something was terribly wrong. Eventually, I turned to the internet to see if I could make sense of it all, and as I was searching for "Bible," I ran across a little site called "The Secular Web." It was then that I began to read some of your articles, which in turn led me to my free one-year subscription to TSR. The Skeptical Review and your other writings have really helped me to break free of the control that the Bible had over me. I considered myself to be a very "good Christian," but I feel that I am a much better person now that "the Good Book" is out of my life for good! I believe that the whole world would be a better place if all Bible believers would just sit down and read the Bible and see it for what it is. Thanks for all that you do to promote reason in our sometimes unreasonable world. I have enclosed a check for another year of TSR.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Ever since my own deconversion, I have thought the same thing that Anon just said. People don't believe the Bible because they have seriously studied it, critically examined it, and concluded that it is the "inspired word of God." They believe the Bible only because they grow up in societies in which almost everyone accepts that the Bible is a divine revelation, and those that don't believe this just keep quiet about it because they don't want to experience the displeasure of those who will be outraged if anyone should dare question the foundation of their religious beliefs. Like Anon, when I was growing up, I didn't know a single person who questioned that the Bible was "God's Word." I knew that some people didn't go to church and certainly didn't live according to basic biblical teachings, but I thought that this was just because they wanted to enjoy the pleasures of "sinning."
My journey to skepticism began when I embarked on a plan to study the Bible from end to end so that I could be a knowledgeable, effective preacher. The result was that I read myself into rejection of the Bible, because I encountered too much nonsense and inconsistency in it to go on believing what I had been taught as a child, i. e., the Bible is God's inspired word. Like Anon, I too believe that if everyone who professes Christianity would actually sit down and study the Bible, this would do more damage to the Christian religion than all of the articles posted on internet sites like the Secular Web. I have had too many people tell me that reading the Bible destroyed their faith to believe otherwise.
Anon noted that he was helped in his rejection of the Bible by materials that he read on the internet. As I have said in this forum many times, the internet will prove to be the most formidable foe that Christianity has ever confronted. In the past, people like Anon and me could grow up and be totally unaware that there were some who rejected the popular view of the Bible, because preachers and Sunday School teachers would never mention them and libraries would not stock books and articles that questioned the inspiration of the Bible, but that time is long gone. Today, anyone with a computer can go to the internet and with a search engine access articles like those published in TSR and read debates between Christians and biblical skeptics. The information monopoly that Christianity enjoyed for so long is gone, probably forever. That's bad news for traditional Christianity.
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