I was raised a Methodist, and later a Baptist, and was comfortable within the confines of revealed religions until I became an adult. Somewhere around age 40 I began to question the edicts of revealed religion. What about the people who died before Christ? What about all the non-Christians in the world? It just didn’t make sense that all these good folks would be condemned.
Then I began to study scripture in earnest. I realized that God is portrayed in many different ways between the testaments. How could a loving God require that Old Testament heroes kill all the women, children and donkeys in furtherance of God’s will? It just didn’t add up.
It was very difficult for me to mentally challenge everything that I had been taught here in the Bible belt about religion. Nonetheless, I knew that I believed in God and maybe that was enough. I was impressed that the early American heroes like Jefferson and Lincoln were not church members, yet proclaimed a reverence for God in all their work.
Finally, within the last year or so, I crossed the bar and realized that I couldn’t intellectually buy-in to any of the revealed religions.
I was glad to find this organization that seemed to legitimize what I had thought personally for a number of years.
The toughest realization for me was that Deism was not synonymous with atheism. Now, having crossed that bridge, I am happy and look for God’s will in everything unhampered by synthetic beliefs of organized religion.
Thanks for all that you do.