I became an Atheist about two years ago. I know some people hate Canada Man's posts, but it was one of his postings to a Richard Dawkins video that got the ball rolling for me. After reading Dawkins, Hitchens, Krauss, Harris and Coyne, the key arguments that settled it for me were the problem of evil and the silence of God. Specifically what makes more sense, that suffering in the world is due to our being in a fallen state, or because we live in a stochastic world? I believe the latter. Also (in reference to the scriptures), why is there a multiplicity of religions and denominations? One would expect a sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and loving God to be able to communicate to us in a way that would be very clear. On the other hand if religion evolved naturally, the multiplicity of religions and denominations are exactly what you would expect to see.
I had been agnostic for 15 years. My deconversion however started with the problem of hell. As an evangelical I believed that hell was real and it was eternal, but my rational self started to nag me about the billions upon billions who would be spending eternity in hell. I was an ordained evangelist, had a radio program, held revival meetings, and taught apologetics, but the problem of hell kept eating away at me.
Back to the point on cherry picking. There is a movement in the Evangelical church now that denies eternal hell! So here we see the evolution of region at work!
As a child I started off believing in religion, but as I grew older and studied the history of religion, read the bible from cover to cover, and discovered the inconsistencies, contradictions, scientific falsehoods, and errors, I realized it's just a primitive old manmade book. There's nothing divine about it.
Here are some things that made me not believe in religion:
-To start with, everyone who believes in a religion believes that 99.9999% of all religions are manmade, except of course their own religion. Pretty convenient.
-Most people who belong to a religion are part of a religion that they were born into, the same religion as their parents, very convenient how the "right" religion just happens to be the religion someone was born into, yes there are converts, but a very insignificant number. The same devout Catholic born in Italy, would be a devout Muslim if he were born in Saudi Arabia instead, and vice versa.
-Man has created religion since the beginning of time, every culture, throughout every period of time has created or followed a religion. Thousands upon thousands of religions have come and gone since the beginning of humanity, it's clear that people love creating religions by observing history.
-Man has created many Gods throughout history with different names and different characteristics, but one thing has remained consistent, all of these Gods have been manmade.
-Talking snakes have never existed, man has never lived to be over 900 years old, and it's impossible for a super senior that's 500 years old to build a wooden ark the size of a football stadium.
-Stoning people to death for being homosexual, an adulterer or violating the sabbath is something only primitive humans could come up with, not God.
-In the days of the bible so many were supposedly speaking to God, but now we know that those who speak to God are just schizophrenic.
-A lot of the biblical stories were influenced by Babylonian and Egyptian religion. The "eye for an eye" concept comes from the Code of Hammurabi, written hundreds of years before the bible. In the preface to the law code, Hammurabi states, "Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, to bring about the rule in the land."On the stone slab there are 44 columns and 28 paragraphs that contained over 282 laws... Laws written on stone slabs by someone who was chosen by God, sound familiar? Moses and the ten commandments anyone?
I can go on but my point has been made.
