In the past eight years or so I have lost my faith, a faith that I held fervently since a young child. I finally lost my faith while attending a Bible college, of all places, due solely to the fact that the narratives and teachings in the Christian Bible cannot be reconciled with each other. Not only are they not compatible, but they are, in fact, contradictory. I spent many years playing the mental gymnastics that apologists must do to reconcile these troubling matters. The result of any sincere apologist is one of three: a claim to faith, a claim of ignorance, or a rejection of the belief. I, evidently, chose the third and least favourable in the eyes of my family and many friends.
My hope is to complete a private book for my family, who do not entirely know the extent of my agnosticism. I will be using this blog to throw around ideas and request challenging critiques from the faith community for the purpose of writing this book. I will not answer to religious zealots or blog trolls, but I will gladly debate and discuss various Biblical and theological topics with philosophically astute or learned seminarians or mature Christians.
If you have currently stumbled across this blog, however, you have done so much too early. Much of what I will be writing here is, of course, not from my own mind or reasoning. I stand on the shoulders of giants in both philosophy and Biblical scholarship. While I have certainly read much in the past, I am finishing several books that will be prevalent in this articles on this site and will be holding of commencement of this blog until those few excellent works are finished. In the meantime, find my other writings, along with many great contributors, at de-conversion.com.
I hope to see you soon.
John B. Richardson @ July 20, 2008