Greetings all,
I am an ex-protestant-penticostal-evangelist-fundamentalist-assemblies_of_god-christian.
Both of my parents were missionaries in their younger days, so I've more than been given an introduction to the religious perspective, I lived it for twenty years.
After that I found myself somewhat dissatisfied with the doctrine I had been taught, and took what I thought was the best road. I began to study, and to get out into the world to meet people from other walks of life.
This resulted in a radical shift of perspective from my home schooled upbringing which led rather unceremoniously to my declaring myself an agnostic as I could not get philosophically past a few points even at 22:
1 - The problem of evil.
2 - The problem of unequal opportunity for salvation.
3 - The problem of hypocrisy.
4 - The problem of the GOTOT's immoral acts.
5 - The problem of scientific/historical inconsistency with biblical timelines and 'facts'.
6 - The problem of the lack of evidence.
At the time I still held enough fear of death instilled from my early years that I posited that there must be another plane, some sort of supernatural trick to save us from death.
It was a good eight years before I encountered the work of Hitchens, Dawkins, Russel, Kant, etc. which lead me to a proper understanding of the four way chart (agnostic theist, gnostic theist, agnostic atheist, gnostic atheist) at which point I had to declare myself at the least an agnostic atheist toward all gods, and a gnostic atheist toward those god concepts which were self contradicting, which usually puts me only one god shy of a theist anyway.
More recently I have become involved in the debate on the existence of god(s) but more specifically on the debate about the proper path to knowledge.
Anyway, nice to meet all of you.
