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http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/testimonials/daniels.html

1. Purpose of this testimonial

Whenever I have shared the story of my deconversion from Christianity with Christians, I have been met with various combinations of fascination, surprise and disapproval. There is often an assumption that if I had embraced a slightly different brand of Christianity, I could have avoided coming down this path. It was because of my wrong ideas about Christianity, or because I wasn't truly a believer in the first place, or because I did not seek God earnestly enough, that I ended up abandoning the faith. Sometimes when I provide reasons for my doubts, the interrogator will summarily dismiss them and ask, "So what's the real reason you left Christianity?" Most believers want to know what it is that brought me to this point. Though they do not always express it openly, I often sense their conviction that my disbelief must stem from an inward moral flaw they would like to uncover.

The purpose of this testimonial is to open a window to my life as a Christian and my reasons for leaving the faith, allowing others to evaluate the authenticity of my former faith and the motivations for my doubts. To that end, I have liberally sprinkled my story with a healthy--some might say excessive--dose of personal prayers, correspondence and reflection. My hope is that this will help some of my family and friends understand, if not appreciate, how I have come to where I am. Additionally, I would like to provide encouragement for those who recognize many of the problems of Christianity but who struggle to give wing to their doubts. I do not believe this will cause committed believers to leave the faith, but it is my hope that it will aid those who have already begun to question their faith.

Based on the words of a Christian friend with whom I've been meeting monthly to discuss our respective beliefs, a case can be made for the effectiveness of a testimonial-style approach versus a context-free treatise on a subject as personal as faith:

The topics we cover in our discussions sometimes make me question my faith. But what has a greater impact on it and brings deeper questions and pain to my heart is when I hear you say that you have sought God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and not found Him.[1]

A chronological recounting of my life story provides the framework for this document. I have interspersed editorial reflections of limited length at various points in the story line. For extended arguments in of my views, please read the appendices in the companion document. For those with limited reading time who simply want to understand my journey, this testimonial will suffice, but those who wish to engage in written or oral debate with me are requested to read both documents in their entirety. Depending on how many responses I receive, I may or may not be able to engage with everyone, but I will make it a priority to answer at least family and close friends.

There are several flavors of agnosticism, so I'll take the opportunity up front to clear up any uncertainty as to my present position. I consider myself to be an atheistic-leaning agnostic, meaning that I suspect there is no God, while leaving open the possibility that God does exist.

Though I have thought about undertaking this project for some time, the immediate inspiration for taking it up now has come from my recent reading of a quite similar story by Kendall Hobbs.[2] I highly recommend it to anyone who finds my testimony in the least interesting.

2. Life as an Evangelical Christian

2.1 Early years: Unquestioned faith

I was born in Ethiopia in 1968 to evangelical missionary parents. My mother's father was an independent fundamental Baptist pastor, whom I to be a very kind and warm grandfather. When she was nine, my mother vowed to devote her life to God as a missionary and to abstain from all alcohol and movies. She kept these vows until her death from cancer five years ago at the age of 63. I have never met a more selfless individual, and I will always respect the life she lived. She began her missionary career in 1960 as a single nurse in the mountains of Ethiopia, traveling by mule to treat those in need of medical care.

My father was reared in the Conservative Baptist denomination, which was somewhat less fundamentalist than my mother's church, but was very evangelical nonetheless. He built a house by himself at the age of 16, sold it and gave the profits to missionary causes. Having grown up during the Depression, he learned to be industrious, hard working and devoted to the causes he believed in. He ed the Sudan Interior Mission (now simply SIM) and traveled to Ethiopia in 1960 as a building construction engineer, overseeing projects such as Bible schools, hospitals, bridges, missionary housing and seminaries. He met my mother in 1965 and married in 1967.

One of my earliest memories is of a frightening nighttime thunderstorm when I was four while on furlough in California. I called to my mother, who came and comforted me, saying that Jesus would protect me, and inviting me to ask Jesus into my heart. Trustingly, I prayed a prayer to accept Jesus as my personal savior. I don't know how much this decision affected my life at such an early age--I couldn't claim a dramatic conversion from a profligate life, though I did understand that I was a sinner and that I needed to accept Jesus' sacrifice to take away my sins so I could be with God. I was committed to the faith I had been taught, and read the New Testament and nearly half the Old Testament when I was ten years old.

But I was a typical kid, squabbling with my younger sisters while growing up in Ethiopia, California, Arkansas, Liberia, Oregon and Nigeria. I attended a mission boarding school in Nigeria as an early teen, and one teacher in particular impressed me with his sincerity and love. He lived a disciplined life, running with his dog in the countryside for half an hour each day and spending a great deal of time with his wife. He often emphasized to his students the need for us to talk with God and to relate to him even more personally than with our closest friends.

I can distinctly the first time I took his advice to heart. I was lying on my bed trying to get to sleep and started pouring out my heart to God, telling him my feelings, praying for all my friends, and letting him know how much I appreciated him until two in the morning. The joy that I experienced at knowing that I was communicating with the very One who had made the entire universe was exhilarating. I continued for many years maintaining an almost daily time of prayer and reading the Bible, even though it wasn't always as remarkable as it was when I first began at the age of 14. I sought to please God in my thoughts, actions and words, and even my sisters noticed a significant turnaround in my life as I promoted peace instead of dissension in the family. However, I understood from Paul's epistles that God's acceptance of me was based entirely on his love for me, his sacrifice on my behalf, and not at all on any of my personal accomplishments or righteousness.

Partly through watching the missionary movie Peace Child during my ninth grade year, I became convinced that God wanted me to bring the gospel to those who had never heard of Jesus. I particularly sensed God's call to translate the Bible into one of over 3,000 languages in the world in which it was not available.

High school was a difficult but character-forming time of life. I have very fond memories of the tight-knit group of Christian classmates at the missionary boarding school I attended through ninth grade. My sisters did not share my enthusiasm for the rigors of the school, but my awakening to the place God had for me in his world, along with the fellowship of like-minded friends, made the strict regulations of the school and the absence of my parents more tolerable. During tenth grade I transferred to another Christian missionary school in Nigeria, this time a relatively large day school with a much greater mix of religious backgrounds among the students. I missed the cocoon of the boarding school, but I continued to grow in my knowledge of God and the Bible. I read a good deal on young-earth creationism and wrote a private manuscript defending creationism against evolution.

When I was sixteen our family moved to Arkansas, where I attended a public high school for my junior year. You can imagine how much like a fish out of water I felt there. I recall holing myself up in my room many evenings, listening to songs on the local Christian radio station, and weeping myself to sleep. During my whole year there I knew no one who shared my zeal for God. I did have some friends, but I longed to have someone with whom I could open up and share the experiences of my faith.

Our next move was to East Texas, where my father became involved in a US-based technical mission organization. For my senior year I attended a public high school again, but my experience this time was considerably more positive. Having already adjusted somewhat to American culture, I was able to make more friends and was known as one of the most devout believers in my class. Following my parents' example, I refrained from attending movie theaters, though I did break with them in listening to Christian rock 'n roll. As another example of my rigidity, I still recall with pain the evening I invited a committed but less-legalistic Christian girl to the annual coronation, which included a dance. I was convinced that dancing was not appropriate for serious Christians (I refused to listen to secular music because of its immoral messages, let alone dance to it), so I sat at the dinner table while my date danced with others. A teacher in attendance asked me why I wasn't dancing, and when I explained my reasons, she said she could see the logic in abstaining from dubious activities like drinking, but not dancing.

One of my best friends that year was a Mormon, so I read extensively on Mormonism from an evangelical perspective, finding numerous faults in the Latter Day Saints' scriptures and discussing them with my friend into the wee hours of the morning. After pointing out a number of historical and theological flaws in Mormonism, he confided in me, "Religion is a bitch." I responded that no, it was clear the universe was created by a Personal Being, and so it was a no-brainer that we needed to give Him our allegiance. I never did convince him to leave his faith, but I became more confident in the moorings of my own faith. I did agree to read an apologetic book he gave me entitled A Marvelous Work and a Wonder and was able to find enough faults in its reasoning to be able to dismiss it quite readily. It did not occur to me to be so critical of Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict, a popular evangelical apologetic work I read during that same year.

Though we were not Southern Baptists, our family attended a local Southern Baptist church during our time in East Texas. I invited to the church at least one high school student who subsequently accepted Jesus as his savior. The summer after high school graduation, I went with a couple of friends to share our faith with people in parks and door-to-door, inviting them to believe in Jesus and attend church. In doing so, I felt that we were in the center of God's will and experienced a sense of euphoria as a result. I carried out this kind of direct evangelism a few other times, but I was never a regular at it.

Although our family was wary of charismatic and Pentecostal experiences, I did seek the baptism of the Holy Spirit in a tent during a Christian music festival put on by the organization founded by the late singer-songwriter Keith Green. I experienced a flood of emotion, but never was aware that I was supernaturally speaking in tongues. Afterward, I remained open to the charismatic branch of the evangelical faith, but never considered myself to be part of that camp. Theologically, I became inclined to call myself an "evangelical ecumenist," focusing on what united the evangelical faith and not taking strong stands on points of disagreement. I continued to distrust non-Protestant and liberal faiths, but I did consider myself to be a little more ecumenical than my parents.

I chose to attend LeTourneau University, a technology-focused nondenominational Christian college in Longview, Texas. I was still interested in Bible translation, but having written to Wycliffe Bible Translators (the organization I was to later) concerning my dual interest in computer science and biblical studies, they recommended I pursue a degree in computer science, as these skills could be useful not only in Bible translation but in a number of other endeavors. So I studied computer science and engineering, while taking at least one Bible course per semester. I enjoyed my experience there, though my social skills were probably stunted by my obsession with good grades and by the paucity of females on campus.

During spring break of my sophomore year, I sensed a dryness in my relationship with God and found it difficult to keep focused on God while praying. I decided to begin typing my prayers daily on the computer, enabling me to gather my thoughts and avoid daydreaming. My relationship with God was revitalized as a result, and I kept up this practice off and on until I left the faith.

2.2 Crisis #1

It was during my junior year of college that I began paying attention to difficult ages in the Old Testament in my personal readings, some that troubled me for ethical reasons, and others that seemed to be internally contradictory. For a while I disregarded them, thinking there must be a good explanation, and who was I anyway to question God (or was it really God)? But enough of these difficulties built up in my mind that I decided to face up to them, so I began in Genesis, listening to the Bible on cassette and reading the text, writing down any age that troubled me or appeared contradictory. Appendix C contains a partial list of these verses. During spring break, however, after I had reached the book of Jeremiah (over half-way through the Bible), I met an attractive young lady at a Bible college I was visiting. We struck up a long-distance relationship, which, looking back now, helped take my mind off my doubts and likely provided a good incentive to dismiss them. Whatever the explanation, I was able to regain what I considered to be a full-fledged, robust biblical faith, at least for a time. Though we dated for ten months, I never did kiss her, wanting to reserve that honor for my wife!

During my college years I had been introduced to the evangelical news and opinion magazine Christianity Today and became an avid reader. I felt it helped broaden my perspective and provided a global context for my personal faith. In contrast to my earlier beliefs, the magazine staff accepted the earth's great antiquity while rejecting evolution, which helped temper my strict young-earth creationism. In my senior year, I wrote a paper on the age of the earth for my Pentateuch Bible class, advocating a day-age theory to square the Genesis with an old earth. It was a book by Christian geologist and old-earth creationist Davis Young that convinced me I had been wrong about the age of the earth and that my reasons for believing in a young earth had been merely illusory. However, I never entertained the thought that evolution as an overarching concept could be true, considering it to be simply preposterous, not to mention unbiblical. I now feel that this transition to old-earth creationism was significant in that it moved me toward a tendency to rely on physical and historical evidence to interpret the Bible rather than the other way around.

Out of a desire to serve God and to break out of my social shell, I chose to become the director of student ministries for the college student body during my senior year. It was a stretching experience as I helped organize teams to restore run-down houses in town, plan student mission trips to Mexico, conduct worship meetings, and so forth. Despite the pace of my activities, I remained consistent in praying, seeking God and reading the Bible on a daily basis.


Continued here: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/testimonials/daniels.html

wow! that was the longest article i ever read in my life Poor guy.

BUMP!!!

People NEED to read this article. The whole thing at the link. PLEASE!!

long and worth the read