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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