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I was raised as a Christian by very fundamentalist parents. They are much more liberal about their beliefs now, but when I was a child I learned that man and dinosaur roamed the planet together and that the Earth was young.

Both of my parents have Seminary education and Divinity degrees, and we've discussed a MULTITUDE of interpretations of God's will, God's mind and the Bible.

There are many reasons I believe that Christianity is not true and that there most likely is no god(s).

1) NUMEROUS DENOMINATIONS, RELIGIONS AND GODS
There are over 600,000 Christian denominations. If Christianity is so "right", why are there so many different viewpoints on the specifics? The consideration of all the various Gods and religions. I can't imagine that all of them or only one of them would be right.

2) The lack of writings by Jesus himself.
Did Jesus really exist? Surely he would have wanted to write down his views on the world...on his divinity...his plans for the salvation of his children.

3) The Bible.
It is not in any way shown to be the inspired word of God. Open a high school biology book. There is more knowledge in one of those. Also, compare the 10 Commandments to The Bill of Rights. When comparing the two, you will notice that the Bill of Rights is much more eloquent and the 10 Commandments seem ridiculous and not at all rational. My favorite quote about the Bible is by Michael Shermer and it goes as follows:

"The Bible has written all over it, the fact that it was a human-edited, socially constructed collection of books put together by people over many, many centuries."

When you look at the Bible objectively, as "just a book" you realize how petty it is. When you look at it as the "inspired word of God" you wonder how it got to be that way...You may say I have a skewed view on God because of what I call his despicable behavior in the Bible. But how do you explain that kind of behavior from a being for whom we are told is all good?

How can you show the Bible as being Divine? If it's moral standards were above our own I might be able to take it more seriously.

It is full of contradictions. How does one possibly know how to interpret what God wanted you to learn from it?

As for one of the contradictions in the Bible, I know it says the following:

Exodus 20:13 "Thou shalt not kill."

Then later says:

Exodus 32:27 "Thus sayeth the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, . . . and slay every man his brother, . . . companion, . . . neighbor.

I Samuel 6:19 " . . . and the people lamented because the Lord had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter."

I Samuel 15:2,3,7,8 "Thus saith the Lord . . . Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. . . . And Saul smote the Amalekites . . . and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword."

Numbers 15:36 "And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the Lord commanded Moses."

Hosea 13:16 "they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with children shall be ripped up."

4) The religions BEFORE Judaism and Christianity.
There was religion long before Christianity came to be. We are supposed to imagine this relationship with a god that started between Adam and Eve and that this relationship has continued until this day. If Judaism had been the first religion and had it been widespread across the planet, then this would follow along with the Bible. But the truth of it is, Judaism was a small religion practiced in one region of the world. Did God ONLY communicate with this region of the world??? More ancient religions were in existence before this. More gods were worshipped before this. I have an encyclopedia with over 2,000 listed gods in it. There have been much more worshipped...but a staggering amount, huh? Why is it that we call all these other religions mythology? OUR RELIGION is not myth...but ALL these other religions are. BAH!

5) EVOLUTION.
Evolution is a fact. We are animals - more specifically mammals and primates. If God made us in his image, then why did we evolve? Also, once you see the beauty of evolution you don't need a belief in a creator God. We are still unsure about exact origins of life - after all it happened billions of years ago, but we do have evidence of the Big Bang

6) The supposed miracles of the Bible.
There is no physical, scientific evidence of any kind of supernatural occurence in the world. Jesus supposedly produced miracles. Where are those miracles today. My favorite quote regarding miracles is the following:

"If I had the power that the New Testament narrative say that Jesus had, I would not cure one person of blindness, I would make blindness impossible; I would not cure one person of leprosy, I would abolish leprosy."
Joseph Lewis (1889-1968)

Many people today believe that they see preachers lay hands on sick individuals and heal them. There are individuals who go around and put on shows for entertainment based on "group hypnosis" where they make suggestions to the subjects to do certain things, these people oblige. Group fervor and mentality is interesting. Many people have walked on glass and hot coals in their bare feet and experienced all sorts of personal experiences that they feel are enlightening or perhaps even divine in some way. I have listened and read accounts of people experiencing the healing or prayer and miracles. It is often exaggerated. I often witnessed people "speaking in tongues" as a child. Are thes manifestations based on supernatural or divine interventions? I think not. If people can be so deluded about such things today, and believe them so strongly, I have no doubt that the same would be true from people 2000 years ago. Jesus didn't have an objective person following him around to test his miracles. There is only supposed personal accounts, a lot of which would be considered hearsay in a court of law. Where are the objective accounts of Jesus' life? Where are the scientific accounts of Jesus' life? Where is the book of Jesus?

7) EVIL in the world.
Destruction. Famine. Daddies raping daughters. Brothers killing brothers. Hurricanes, floods, tsunamis. Children dying. People starving...to DEATH. Retardation. Deformities. If God is good and loves us, why do these things happen? Bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen to good Christians. I absolutely hate hearing a Christian say they are "blessed." What about the people who aren't "blessed?" Why is God not blessing them? Why are some people special enough to be blessed, while others have their children murdered, their bank accounts emptied, etc. regardless of their pious nature and pleas to their God?

8) The doctrine of Original Sin and sin in general.
Christianity teaches us that we are all born into sin. There is also a view taught on every Sunday that the world is getting further and further away from God and that you can see this in our teen pregnancies...our drug use...our violence. That society is becomming more "sinful." I really hate this view. I LOVE LIFE. I love my fellow humans and try to make each day a little bit better for my family and friends. The world is getting BETTER, not WORSE. There is less violence now than ever before. When religion ruled the world, we called it The Dark Ages. I don't have to mention the violence those times saw.

It may be that Societies are worse off 'when they have God on their side'

9) The ARROGANCE of Christianity.
This is the ONE way. Christianity explains the mind of God. How can anyone KNOW the mind of GOD?

Why is it that so many people profess to know the mind of God? It is interesting to note that you can take 100 people who believe in christianity, send them to the same church, give them the same bible and you will get 100 different versions of the mind of God. You think the person sitting next to you feels and thinks the same way YOU do??? Think again.

10) The lack of evidence for a God
I do not believe in pink unicorns, I do not believe in Harry Potter, even though there were several books written about him, I do not believe in God, even though there were several books written about him/her/them.

If I saw a man named Jesus feed a multitude of people with 2 loaves of bread and five fishes; if I saw a man named Jesus bring Lazurus back from the dead; if the Bible were indestructible; if I saw Jesus killed and then come back to life; if I saw Jesus ascend into heaven; if amputees grew back missing limbs after prayer; if God appeared to us when we prayed to him; if my brother (who was in a terrible accident and died 4 years later) had been healed from being a vegetable, if ANY miracles were to happen as a matter of fact, then I would see that there were evidence for God and would believe. The people who supposedly saw these miracles were given a chance that makes faith unfair for the rest of the people living over countless millennia.

11) The fact that prayer doesn't work.

12) The fact that the type of God in the Bible does not equate with my sense of moral system.
I am more moral than the God of the Bible, hence he cannot be my God. You may say that he should be above human standards, but that's just bullshit.

13) Because of the multitude of interpretations of the Bible and other holy books.
If you could present 4 Christians with a real-life problem that people typically turn to God for help for, and put them each in a separate room to pray to God for an answer, you are going to end up with 4 different ideas about what God would suggest to the person with the problem. Why is this? Because they are not praying to God at all. They are praying to themselves and each person has an idea about what is right according to their God. Even though they all supposedly worship the same one.

14) You cannot show that the Bible is the word of god and not just a book full of myths and magical stories, and you cannot show evidence for anything of a supernatural nature.

The burden of proof lies on the believer. And there is no physical proof. Mediums really don't talk to the dead. There are no fortune-tellers who can see the future. Amputees do not grow back limbs. We cannot see evidence of a spirit or any kind of energy leave the body at death. No ghosts or spirits have ever been recorded under scientific conditions. Believing in a god is not based on evidence.

15) I have to judge the existence of God by natural laws, by what I experience, by what I know to be true. By what I can observe.
If there were a god, it would only make sense to me that he would have evolved himself. Of course, there is a Christian philosophy that says the Christian God has changed and is changing.

I say, the Christian God is changing because the human race is changing, and we are the ones who invent the Gods.

The fact that there are over 60,000 CHRISTIAN denominations and so many more Gods that have and are being worshiped, and even many more ways of interpreting the Bible, I can't imagine only ONE of them being correct. Since there is so much to choose from, I must choose that they are all bullshit and come to the default belief of ­ 0 ­ none of them are true, God does not exist.

16) The consideration of time and space.
What gets me? It's the great, vast enormity of our universe. People really don't understand just how vast it is. Consider this from the absolutely wonderful book, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson,

"Now, the first thing you are likely to realize is that space is extremely well named and rather dismayingly uneventful. Our solar system may be the livliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it - the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets and other miscellaneous drifting detritus - fills less than a trillionth of the available space. You also quickly realize that none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system was drawn remotely to scale. Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals - the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations - but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter - five times further from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3% as much sunlight as Jupiter...On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway.) On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be about 16,000 kilometres away."

And that's just our solar system. It is estimated that there are 200 BILLION galaxies. With the enormity of the universe, I can't imagine that we are the only life and that all this was created just for us. We are a minute speck.

And time. It is estimated that the "Big Bang" or whatever produced the exitence of the universe occured about 13.7 billion years ago or so. 13.7 BILLION YEARS. A long human life is about 650,000 hours. We aren't even a speck in the eye of time.

So take my life experiences, the consideration of time and space and add very convincing evidence for evolution and you get what I am now. An atheist.

I could go on and on. But I'll try to sum it up a little: The first and foremost reason I am an atheist is because of my knowledge of evolution, astronomy and science in general. I can't see a world that would be "designed" like we have come about. Evolution by natural selection can explain almost everything we wonder about in the natural world here on Earth. Why would a God create a universe 13 BILLION years ago, then let the Earth form 4.5 BILLION years ago, just to have a religion that would FINALLY worship him only 2000 years ago? It doesn't make sense.

Evolution can explain almost anything we wonder about here in the natural world. Why is our DNA almost 99% the same as chimps? Because of evolution. Why do we need sleep? It seems a designer could have formed us without that need, but evolution can say we need sleep to conserve energy. Why do we have appendixes that are useless? Why would God design us with useless organs? Evolution can tell us that these organs could have had a purpose in the past, but don't anymore. Why do chickens have teeth when they are in their embryonic forms? Why would a God form a chicken "in the womb" with teeth that get re-absorbed back into the body later? Evolution has an answer.

Turning away from Christianity and my earlier beliefs took YEARS. But I've really thought it through. What I was taught and what I have read in the Bible was not sufficient enough to answer my doubts and provide me with a rational reason for believing in a god. If you are interested, you can also read something else I have written...How did I become an ATHEIST???

This was originally posted as a blog – here.