As I grew older, I began to question my beliefs. I had learned about many other religions (not in great detail, but I had a fair idea of what they were all about) and started to wonder why I believed the things I did. My head was full of all these odd notions that had accumulated over the years and didn't quite seem to match up to the real world. I reviewed what I knew of the world - geology, biology, evolution, cosmology etc. and realised that religion didn't explain things anywhere near as well as science. It was all too vague and fuzzy and implausible. The inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible made me doubt it, if I had a physics book that was as full of glaring holes as the Bible is, I would have thrown it out. I couldn't help but wonder why, if there was a benevolent God looking after us all, did so many people suffer and die all around the world - He didn't seem to be doing His job very well. (The religious answer was that He was doing his job, but He was doing it in a Mysterious Way, incomprehensible to mere mortals, scoring an 8.5 on the Sagan Baloney Detector.)
I also became quite suspicious of organised religion in general. I would often hear preachers asking people to believe things that I knew were simply not true. I noticed that many people appeared to believe because they thought it was expected of them (If you ever watch TV Evangelist shows, you'll see this happen. Nobody ever jumps up and says "Hang on! That doesn't make any sense at all!" - everyone sits there, nodding and Amen-ing at everything the preacher has to say. Don't talk while the vicar is speaking, don't question, just listen and accept it. Peer pressure is a wonderful thing). I noticed the way that religions discouraged people from thinking too deeply about them, or from asking tricky questions. I noticed that Christians were not the only people who deeply and sincerely believed in a deity - these conflicting religions could not all be correct, so why should we believe one and not the other? All the religions claimed a monopoly on Truth, Love, Happiness, Justice, Morality. It slowly dawned on me that maybe they were all wrong...
I began to realise that the world (and indeed the universe) in which I lived was entirely consistent with one that has no God, no Creator, no Guiding Intelligence. There was no valid reason to believe that any sort of a God existed. God became just another supernatural critter that people seriously believed in despite the lack of evidence, like Bigfoot, alien-abductor and lake monsters. I don't necessarily think that all religious people are deluded, irrational nuts (although a minority in the world are creating havoc and I just keep thinking they're mistaken, and may very well hold perfectly rational and coherent reasons for their beliefs.
I saw that many people had different reasons for believing in Gods, including (somewhat over-simplified):
They had simply been indoctrinated at an early age, and the beliefs became so much a part of their life that the idea of questioning or doubting simply never occurred to them. They believe it because they have just always known it to be true. (As mentioned above, people usually end up with whatever the religion of their family happens to be.) They feel that we must be here for a purpose. The universe and this beautiful Earth cannot all be a pointless accident, and God is the best explanation. We are all here for a reason, but only God knows exactly what that reason is and we'll just have to trust him. A sense of justice. It's not fair for evil people to commit all sorts of terrible acts and simply escape punishment by dying. The idea of heaven/hell ensures that good people are rewarded and bad people are suitable punished. A deep objection to being merely "animals". Many creationists, for instance, are offended at the idea that humans simply evolved along with all other animals. God made us separate and special, and we have a "soul" but the animals do not (biological snobbery?). Comfort. Many people find it very comforting to believe that a loving God is always watching over them and caring for them, and when anything good or bad happens to them, this is all part of his Plan for their life. Also, religion is obviously very comforting when faced with the death of a loved one. It's much easier and more reassuring to believe that Grandma is free from pain now, up in Heaven with Jesus where she's waiting for us to join her for eternity, than to think that she has simply ceased to exist and the universe will have forgotten her in a couple of generations. Afterlife. It seems almost incomprehensible to believe that when your body dies, your existence ends. Sensation and awareness are so much a part of our existence that it is extremely difficult to imagine no longer being able to experience anything. Try to imagine that, for example, a big meteor crashes into your house and instantly kills you at the end of this paragraph. We just cannot imagine not existing or abruptly ceasing to be aware and conscious, and so it is quite natural to think that something will continue to exist after the death of our brain. It's a short step from there to accepting the idea of an immortal soul, and heaven or reincarnation or some other form of afterlife.
So, I questioned my beliefs and they didn't stand up to much scrutiny. I abandoned religion as it had nothing to offer me (it had never really played a big part in my life anyway) and set off down the Road Of Truth. You can join Unsolved Mysteries and post your own mysteries or
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