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This thread continues "Seeing the Dark," but I wanted to kick it off as something new rather than direct new questions to an old thread. A recent post stated that the evidence for Christianity and for atheism hasn't changed, so I must have. I'm paraphrasing. Now, this is of course true. BUT it's also silly. It assumes a static recipient of information who is unable to receive new information or reconsider previously held positions. It's almost like saying, Joe was not a doctor when he was 20. When he was 40, he was a brain surgeon. The information about human anatomy didn't change, so Joe must have. I mean, yeah. He got educated and is now a doctor. I was indoctrinated into Christianity from birth, first by a sincere Jehovah's Witness couple, then by an evangelical friend, then by TWI, then by an offshoot, and finally by a mainstream evangelical church. Not once did any of these folks seriously question the existence of God, and never did I. I doubted evolution no matter how much I learned about it. I believed Genesis and Exodus were history, and that gap theory explained why the earth was so much older than a Biblical calculation would allow. But nobody's perfect, and we all hold views and opinions that conflict with each other. You can smoke as if you're invincible, even though you know how bad it is for you. You may believe in Adam and Eve even though you know enough about science to know the human race was never down to two people. You may believe Exodus really happened and dismiss the fact that the,Egyptian civilization failed to record any of it. The discomfort you feel is called cognitive dissonance. You can deal with it (usually by compartmentalizing the conflicting beliefs) or you can confront it. What Changed Raf? That's easy. In the summer of 2012, after a long slow process of questioning a little bit here and a little bit there, I decided to confront my cognitive dissonance, finally realizing that everything, EVERYTHING made more sense if you remove a God from the equation. To be continued. [This thread was originally titled "What changed Raf" before it was correctly pointed out that one person's journey is not necessarily a proper thread topic].