I sometimes get asked if there was a moment when I realized I simply did not believe in the Christian God and subscribe to the Christian faith any more.   What I have been trying to explain is that for me it was a long drawn out process.  It was not a matter of my being a fundamentalist, then finding a contradiction in the Bible and throwing up my hands in despair and saying “Oh no!  There *is* no God!!”

It didn’t happen like that at all.  I didn’t go from being a fundamentalist to being an agnostic.  It was a many-year struggle in which I went from a rabid fundamentalist to becoming a slightly left of center evangelical to being for many years a liberal Christian active in the church and thinking as deeply as I could about the theological views that had long been established in my tradition.

I explained in the previous post how it was the problem of suffering that finally made me leave the faith.  And in a sense there *was* a moment, at least as I remember it now.

When I moved to Chapel Hill in 1988 …

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