Hi friends. I'm new to the board. My name is Jason, but most folks call me Jay.Below is an excerpt from my deconversion story.I entered the University of Tennessee in the fall of 1994. My experience in college was by far the most influential in making me the person I am today. It was the time when I first began to question beliefs that I had previously held as axiomatic and completely unassailable. Because of this, it was also a very difficult period. And it was the time that I first really started taking my Christian faith seriously. I had been brought up to believe in what is now referred to as Young-Earth Creationism (YEC), which is essentially the belief that the Biblical record represents the chronological totality of the Earth?s existence (roughly 6,000 years). My mother had bought me children?s books containing many young-earth ?proofs?, which had been produced by YEC organizations such as the Institute for Creation Research, and most of my family revered such famous YEC personalities as Henry Morris, whom we idolized as advancing the Truth against godless and deceitful Science. I had also always been taught that the theory of evolution was a great satanic lie. My parents, in fact, both graduated from Bryan College in Dayton, TN, site of the famous Scopes Trial of 1925. Bryan College had been named for William Jennings Bryan, one of the leading prosecuting attorneys in that case and devout adherent to Biblical YEC. From this one can see clearly how strong were my fundamentalist roots. Not only did I adhere to YEC and anti-evolutionism, it had never even occurred to me that these ideologies could ever be reasonably challenged in the first place. It was simply inconceivable. During my freshman year of college, I took an elective class in astronomy. I was enthralled by it. I found it fascinating and of great interest, and I still do. About halfway through the course, however, we began studying the age of the universe and the various evidences and methods by which scientists had come to the conclusion that this was something on the order of ten to fifteen billion years, and that the age of the Earth was around five billion years. This precipitated a great crisis of faith for me, because I respected the evidences that I was being shown. It just didn?t make any sense that so much data could have been interpreted so badly such that my family and I could still be correct in our beliefs. I began to read everything I could on cosmology, and I paid special interest to Christian apologists (?Old-Earth Creationists?) who sought to reconcile the Genesis account of creation with modern scientific cosmology. Chief among these was Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist who has written several books on the harmonization of cosmology and Scripture. I read hisThe Creator and the CosmosandCreation and Time, and was both relieved and excited to learn that not only could the Biblical creation story be reconciled with modern scientific understanding, but also that there was apparently a great deal of evidence to suggest that the universe had been purposefully designed. I spent many months anxiously poring over the young-earth/old-earth controversy. It was a very emotionally turbulent time in my life; I was grappling with the loss of a cherished belief, and my parents and I argued frequently, sometimes heatedly, over the issue. They were unhappy that I was abandoning YEC in favor of something I had learned at a secular university. At the end of this period, however, I came away spiritually refreshed and strengthened in my faith, as I had seen, thanks in large part to Hugh Ross? writings, that even the most overwhelming of scientific bodies of evidence could not disturb the fundamental accuracy and truth of the Bible. This conclusion ushered in a golden age of my spiritual life. I became joyfully devoted to my Christianity, and I undertook a long and serious study of the Bible, even going so far as to compile my own topical Bible index, just to have a quick reference for answers to my own questions on various doctrinal issues. I also continued to read Christian apologetics, favoring Josh McDowell and his famous work,Evidence that Demands a Verdict. I became more active in church attendance and evangelism, and I joined the Promise Keepers movement. My future wife was growing in her faith right alongside me. Although during this time and for years before we had had an on-again, off-again, tumultuous relationship, we were both very serious and very committed to our faith, and this was a great source of strength for us. During this time I had many wonderful spiritual experiences. My brother and I attended a Promise Keepers rally at Neyland Stadium on the UT campus, which was the most powerful and moving spiritual experience I had ever had. My future wife and I started attending a dynamic, spiritually-active church in Knoxville where we felt very comfortable. My older brother Joe and his wife were also experiencing something of a spiritual rebirth during this period. They were both baptized outdoors by the minister of my parents? church, and started holding weekly prayer meetings at their home in middle Tennessee. I used to make the three-hour drive every Wednesday just to attend these. I was baptized as well. At my my future wife?s urging, she and I were baptized by the minister of an on-campus Christian chapel. For the first time in my life, I started taking the ?Great Commission? seriously, and began actively witnessing to friends, fellow students, and coworkers (this led to more than a few heated arguments with those acquaintances of mine who for one reason or another rejected the Gospel; I really couldn?t see their skepticism as anything other than stubbornness, inspired by either sinfulness or pride). Perhaps the greatest experience that I had during this period of religious renaissance was the time I felt called by God to openly pronounce my salvation. I believed that God was asking me to make a sign emblazoned with Romans 8:2 and to hold this sign on the busiest street corner on the University of Tennessee campus as a testimony to what he had done for me. Although I was terrified to do so, I obeyed, and was thrilled that God had called me to witness for him in such a bold way. But there was a disturbing undercurrent to my spiritual life during this entire period. I began to be troubled by the inconsistency I saw in Christian thought, both in myself and others. I was always bothered by the fact that my fellow Christians relied so heavily on sentiment as a basis for their faith. Our church community was very open and sentimental, and hardly a week went by that some or other member didn?t have some sort of semi-charismatic, rapturous, spiritual experience (myself included!). I really began to wonder if we weren?t all deluding ourselves. At church, our head pastor frequently used fallacious arguments in his sermons, and tended to speak highly of individual religious experience as a justification for belief. I remember going home almost every Sunday struggling to reconcile my intellectual opposition to what I was seeing and hearing, with my deep belief in and love for Jesus and the Bible. My brother?s weekly prayer meetings fell into a disturbingly predictable routine: those of us in attendance would take turns praying aloud, and most of us usually became overwhelmed with emotion and wept during our orations. This sort of ?group therapy? was a great catharsis, but I always wondered how much of it was really inspired by the Holy Spirit. The most difficult questions, however, arose as a direct result of reading the Bible itself. The more I studied the Scriptures, the more I began to see logical problems and apparently self-contradictory passages. I wondered why Paul and James seemed to take completely opposite sides on the question of salvation by faith or by works. I wondered why Jesus claimed at one time that his testimony was valid, and another time, that it was not. I wondered how a moral and loving God could have directly commanded the Israelites to perform the unspeakable atrocities recounted in the Old Testament. And Istillwondered how plausible it was that the creation account in Genesis was really supposed to be taken figuratively, with the Hebrew word for ?day? supposedly meaning ?era? or ?epoch?. I dealt with these and other questions one at a time, seeking reassurance in apologetic literature of all stripes. Sometimes I was relieved to find a reasonable answer to my questions, and others, I was greatly dismayed to find that the usual Christian explanations for some of these problems were quite weak. I was suffering horribly with doubt and insecurity. But I couldn?t give up. I simply had to be sure of my faith. It was never enough for me personally to just ?let go and let God?. I should mention here thatI never found a scriptural problem for which there was not a ready explanation. It was indeed possible to ?make things fit?. For me, the question became, how plausible are the explanations? How much exegesis and hypothesizing should really be necessary to harmonize the Bible with itself, if it was really God?s Word? Since leaving college, during the past two years, perhaps as a result of my immersion in the higher-education environment, my intellectual curiosity has blossomed, perhaps even more fully than it had when I was an undergraduate in Tennessee. I?ve been reading more history and philosophy, and my interest in these and other topics has deepened considerably. Coincidentally, neither my wife nor I have seemed to show much interest in living an active spiritual life. From time to time we?ve both had the desire to find a good church to attend, but we?ve made only cursory searches and attended only one, for only a few weeks. I?m not sure what she would say, but I for one am quite happy to not be burdened with taking time out of my weekend to go to church, especially when my current religious beliefs are so ambiguous. About a year ago, out of idle curiosity, I began to research various controversial belief systems. I?ve always wondered why people believe silly things, and my library job now afforded me the time and resources to investigate the matter. I began to read criticisms of the claims made by various religious cults, conspiracy theorists, UFOlogists, and commercial scam artists. I also began to dabble in cognitive psychology in order to try to understand why people hold such ludicrous beliefs. I found several good Internet sites that offer essays and articles to debunk them. This was all a very academic and casual exercise for me. Until one day when I asked myself a fatal question:Why don?t I hold Christianity to same the standard of skepticism that I hold these other belief systems to?Why did I reject the apologetics offered in defense of Scientology and Islam, for example, but adhere to those advanced in defense of Christianity? It just didn?t make sense, especially since I was learning that the rhetoric and explanatory techniques employedwere almost always exactly the same, regardless of the belief system in question. I?ve always had a strong, even preternatural, preference for order, symmetry, and consistency. I find double standards and special pleading to be troublesome and unpleasant, especially in my own intellectual life, so it was inevitable that I posed this introspective question. I should at this point introduce a parenthetical comment about the traditional one-sidedness of my study of Christianity. As a child, I had never been exposed to any form of skeptical or anti-Christian literature. Such writings were viewed by my parents as diabolical (my mother even told me just a few months ago that she believes that I?ve sinned by reading material critical of Christianity). During the height of my spiritual awakening in college, I read a great deal of apologetic literature in support of my religion, but I never even considered reading anti-Christian responses to Christian apologetics; in fact, I didn?t even entertain the idea that a response was even possible, so firm was my belief in the apologist?s craft. When one day I inadvertently stumbled across a website that offered essays in rebuttal of my belovedEvidence that Demands a Verdictby Josh McDowell, my heart raced with fear and I hurriedly clicked away, telling myself that the arguments therein probably weren?t good ones, anyway. At the time I was untroubled by this sort of rationalization, because I still tended to view the act of questioning what I had been taught as sinful in itself. But as I mentioned above, in the last year or two, I lost the ability to insulate Christianity from my own natural skepticism. I ceased to believe that it should be treated any differently than any other belief system that advances truth claims. So, I trepidatiously began reading responses to Christian polemics. I could write extensively on the topics I investigated, but it?s enough to say that this process led to the end of my intellectual faith. There were just too many ad hoc explanations, fallacious arguments, and overreaching rationalizations for me to continue believing in the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, and in Christianity as a truthful representation of reality. I no longer call myself a Christian, but neither am I sure what to call myself: skeptic? evidentialist? agnostic? atheist? Each of these terms describe at least some small aspect of my current worldview, but none describe it fully or accurately. I suppose the term ?unbeliever? will have to suffice until I work out my own personal philosophy. I don?t know why this has happened to me. The most common Christian diagnosis would be because I?m privately harboring pride, or sin, or ?anger? at God, but I really and sincerely do not believe any of these to be at the root of my deconversion. I see it as strictly intellectual. I must admit that the reason(s) for my departure from Christianity may be purely deterministic, a mixture of life circumstance combined with current psychological need(s). This would entail the possibility that I may one day return to the fold. I don?t think it likely, but it is possible. In any event, although this new life change has been difficult and painful, I finally feel ?whole?: I don?t feel torn asunder by cognitive dissonance. I also feel freer than I ever have in my life: free to not feel guilty about who I am on the inside.