Edit: I am well aware this is a LONG post. I gave careful thought to it when writing it and before I posted it. I guess you could title this, "Why I am NOT an atheist," although it's not a rebuttal or disagreement to Aussie_Devilette's OP. I finally decided to post this because it's about as much as my story as I feel comfortable posting in public and because it covers a lot of what we've discussed from a different viewpoint.


Spider, I know the reaction you're talking about. When I was a teen I had an interest in astrology and other metaphysical topics, a friend of mine was a born again Christian. She convinced me to change to her religious point of view. Part of it was the thing about God's love, but a lot of it was about the fear of he11. She talked about how breaking even part of God's law was the same as breaking all of God's law and basically scared me into throwing out all my astrology books and anything else on metaphysics as well and I started going to her charismatic church.


While I did change and switched over to the more traditional Presbyterian church I had been going to while growing up, what it did was scare me to the point where I didn't want to question or look around. If I dared to question God or Jesus, then even if, in the long run, I decided it was the right path, if something happened to me while I was going through that process, I figured I'd be in he11 for eternity.


And eventually, when I got into college and was around different influences and didn't have the weekly dose of religion, I started thinking. One thing I thought about was whether a loving God would do that to someone. If I was sincere in my beliefs and questions and needed to work them through, what kind of God would punish me for leaving the fold to work through that? The more I thought about that and similar questions, the more I felt that even if the price were he11, I could not, in good conscience, love a God who would claim to love us all more than we know and still have less tolerance and be more jealous than a human parent. (There were other issues, as well.) So I gave up religion for Lent.


I grew up going to an Episcopalian school and we had chapel 3 times a week. On the front of our prayer books (small ones, run off on a copy machine) it said, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (From Psalm 111, I think.) For me, it turned out that the courage to not be in literal fear of the Lord was the beginning of the road to wisdom -- not that I've ever reached wisdom, but it was the start of the road.


There were times that I tried to go back, out of fear or to see if it would work, but the Christian paradigm, especially the fundamentalist one, has never worked for me. When my friend had me convinced and I went to her church and did all the things I was supposed to, I didn't feel anything. When I accepted Jesus as my saviour, I didn't feel any peace, as I was told I should. I didn't feel anything at all. And as I did more of what I was told, I didn't feel anything at all. I thought something was wrong with me because I wasn't feeling all these warm and fuzzy feelings that everyone told me I should, but now I know there's nothing wrong with me at all.


Even though, after giving religion up for Lent, I still had some fears, they all were gone after I saw Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers in "The Power of Myth." It helped me understand that different people need different ways to express their beliefs and for some, a tightly controlled system that focuses on literal law is what they need. For others, that does not work and we're not psychologically cut out to accept such a system and essentially cannot work within those restrictions.


There have been times I tried to go back, but it never worked for me. When I tried to live in that mindset, things always got worse. And one thing that is a consternation to some of my fundamentalist friends is that when I prayed for help or for God to bring something into my life, thigns got worse. It was like "The Monkey's Paw." If I prayed for peace, it would come at a horrendeous price. I've been told a lot of different things, like I didn't have the right mindset (there's a lot of variations on that one) or that sometimes the answer is "No," and so on, but those who tried to explain that away to me could only rationalize away this part or that part, but fell short on understanding the whole situation, much less on explaining it.


So I left that path. It didn't work, it brough pain and made my life worse. As a sort of final concession, when a friend of mine made a suggestion to ask for help through prayer this past summer, I had over 40 people willing to pray for me with one focus throughout the day on my birthday. I had never done anything like this and hadn't tried to pray for anything for years. The result was devestating. Some of you may remember at one point I was considering giving up my writing and dancing and everything with any meaning or passion. That was from what happened in that situation, it was so terrible.


Now usually when something like that happens, the theory is God does it for a reason. For instance, something bad happens like we lose a job so we can get a better one. That was not the case. Honestly, the more I've had faith in God, the worse my life got. I'd lose a job and have faith God was leading me to a better one, but the next one started out as bad as the one I left.


It was only when I remembered what my high school coach used to say all the time, "If it is to be, it is up to me," that things got better. When I traded in faith in God for faith in myself, my life started to get better immediately.


I still had "relapses," but they never last as long as they once did.


I had a girlfriend a while back who was in Amway/Quixtar. They have weekly meetings they expect you to attend (and to pay them for attending, of course). They repeat the message over and over, then have conventions which are planned around brain washing techniques to imprint their messages on your mind. For most people there, this works and they come away as true believers. Then the weekly meetings (and they have more than one event each week to keep you coming -- and paying!) basically reinforce the message. Religion is tied in very closely, especially a twisted version of fundamentalist Christianity. At one point, one of the kingpins' wife gave a speech where she claimed God had given her new material for the Acts of the Apostles and it was a charge for them, as the chosen people, the Amway distributors, to go forth and spread Amway.


These people are kept in line by regular meetings that preach love, but also always include a healthy dose of fear and threats that if you quit, you'll never be successful, you'll be a failure, doomed to work 40 hours a week for the rest of your life, barely paying the bills and suffering for the rest of your life. When I saw that, even though it was decades later, it reminded me of my friend's church. While there is a strong message of, "God loves you," there is also the message of what happens to those who leave the flock. And this message, for many people, is reinforced at least once a week to keep them from looking into other possibilities or to scare them out of questioning.


I know not all churches are like this, but I do know some are. For those that doubt me, I'll introduce you to my neighbor. She tries to save me by scaring me every time I talk to her.


I have my own beliefs. They're from experience and I'm one of the few that I've met who was an atheist at one point who became a believer. I think that gives me a rare perspective. I had experiences that convinced me, even from a "logic" standpoint. I could narrate them, but then people will want to pick them apart or say, "This must have happened this way and you only imagined it," or they'll decide, in their own minds, that I misunderstood something or that things didn't happen quite that way. That's okay. They're MY experiences and about MY beliefs. I won't go into those experiences or my beliefs.


I will go so far as to say I don't believe in a capricious God who has made the rules of the Universe and interferes with them whenever it benefits her "plan."