I have been placed under pressure to explain why I do not believe in God. The people who ask this  question are most often people who have the biblical god in mind. For kicks I usually ask them, “which god?”  Of course they mean the god they believe in or at least respect as an existing entity and he is, the god mentioned in the Bible. They are not terribly concerned with the idea that history has thousands of gods, even millions, running about the place in people’s imaginations. All they know is that they don’t believe in those gods, but are curious why I don’t believe in theirs. I can just imagine a Hindu asking them why they don’t believe in Brahma or  an ancient Egyptian asking them why they do not worship Ptah. Their reply would most likely be the same one I give to them - I don’t believe they exist.

Anyway, like many people from my end of the world, the Caribbean, I grew up with the belief that God existed and the Bible in one fashion or another is related to him. In addition, I grew up believing he had a son by the name of Jesus and this Jesus came to earth to die for the sins of mankind AND resurrected to heaven and will someday return to exile unbelievers to hell or some everlasting separation and promote the righteous believers to eternal bliss. My impressionable mind did not come with a belief system in place. All that I came to know about a deity came from being taught about one. I just happened to be born into a region where the Christian god held sway in the popular belief.

Growing up, I did not have any doubts such a god existed. My grandmother (in St. Kitts) took me to church, a Catholic church. In the evenings she sent me with neighbors to a local Pentecostal style church. The idea of God was drilled into my head, a constant reinforcement. I also grew up during a time when the Christian influence on the society around me was very strong. People did not dare play any secular music on Sunday and it was important to be in church. In my grandmother’s house, the radio stayed on Gospel programming 24 hours a day. We had no television at that time so ALL information I knew about the world was filtered through a Christian belief. I knew nothing else. As early as age 4 I was already reading the Bible and grew to know the stories it contained very well. I had a mind for adventure and the Bible contained more than enough for it to excite me to read it.

I moved to New  York City at age 8 to live with my dad and while my father held Christian beliefs, he did not go to church, but he sent me and my brother to church with some neighbors. Again, the whole Christian concept continued to be reinforced in my mind. There was something a little different though. Unlike living a little small Caribbean town where everybody practically believed the same thing, I now lived in a large metropolitan city where all kinds of people had all kinds of different beliefs. The god I believed in was just another god amongst many others that other people believed in. Naturally I believed my god was the true god and all the others were false, but I was too young to understand that to the fullest.

Ont thing in school that interested me was Greek and Roman mythology, stories from well over 2,000 years ago, stories that preceded the Christian era. I took a very deep interest on these stories and I could not help but notice how some of them seemed to resemble stories I had read in the Bible. I did not put too much thought into it at the time, but it would come back to play a role later in my life.

I moved to my birthplace of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands when I was 12. Two years later I was invited to church and as they would say, “gave my life to Jesus.” Being that for the first 11 years of my life I was already groomed in the Christian faith, I went into this new life running. I was already a voracious reader so I read my Bible religiously. I would win all and any bible contest. I memorized whole passages. I actually read all the boring chapters, memorized the names of even the most remote Bible names. By the time I was 17 I had read through the Bible two times already.

The church I was going to, however, was a rather strict church. Women were not allowed to wear pants (even at home), wear makeup or jewelry. We were not allowed to listen to secular music as it was not edifying. It made most of us very judgmental and hypocritical. We even looked at other Christians who wore jewelry and makeup and questioned their faith.

At 17 I moved back to New York to further my education after graduating High School. Now having a job, I was able to buy even more books. I invested in study bibles, bible concordances, bible dictionaries and lexicons. I bought all kinds of books on biblical apologetics, books on how to defend the Christian faith. I bought books that answered all critics. I was constantly reading and constantly studying. I even taught myself some Greek and Hebrew to understand the Bible better.

During my studies, I would come across some disturbing things in the Bible, however, I just brushed them aside figuring God knew what he was doing or that there was some explanation which God would explain someday. I would read through the mid early Old Testament and read about all kinds of atrocities committed in the name of God. I would read where God [allegedly] endorsing slavery and murder and the invasion of other people’s property, even ordering his people (Israel) to take slaves and/or make slaves of other people. My explanation was that such people were evil and God was simply punishing them by having them killed or enslaved. I reasoned that because God created all life, he could do whatever he wanted with anyone even if it seemed evil or unfair to me. End of story.

By this time I was attending a different church. This church was not legalistic. The folks were more genuine and in a big city like New York, rather accommodating to people I would once thought should not even be in church. I found my happy place. I was serving God and feeling comfortable in church.

Moved to Florida after 4 years. Eventually found a church similar to the one I left in New York City. At this point I was at the height of my Christian experience. Had the whole thing down to a science. Was very happy. Then the wheels started to come off.

I received word from New York that my best friends lost their mother. While contemplating something to send for them to express my condolences, I began to re-read the book of Job because that book deals with the suffering of the righteous. As I started to read it, I noticed something rather troubling that I never noticed before. All my life I was told the book of Job was a book that held up Job as a blazing example of faithfulness to God in the midst of tremendous suffering and one that showed how good God was. What I never paid attention to was how the whole saga began. Satan appeared before God and actually was having a conversation with him. That alone bothered me because I always thought that Satan had no place in the presence of God, yet, there he was. The next thing was that God was the one who drew Satan’s attention to Job and when Satan made the claim he could turn Job away from God, God, his ego getting the best of him,  gave Satan permission to go torment Job in every and any way but not kill him in the process. Satan then goes off and abuses Job, even killed Job’s children and reduced Job to sores, boils and bad body odor and took away everything he had. Job stays faithful to God, God rebukes him when he questions him and in the end allows him to recover an blesses him as a result.

Now, despite the happy ending, the start of the story just would not leave me. What I got from it was that God and Satan essentially made a bet with their egos on the line. Job was used as the hopeless bum to prove a point. If I or any other father did such a thing with our children, we would be tossed in jail and reviled by society as sick bastards, but God is praised ad Job is seen as an example of strong faith. It made absolutely no sense to me, still I hung on despite these doubts.

I began to re-read the Bible again, but by now I had a pretty good understanding of world religions and religious history. I realized the Old Testament was not put together until at least thousands of years AFTER the early events it described. In other words, it was later Jews who complied and edited it. Why is this important to know? A story told days, weeks, months or centuries later allows later editors to retell it which means they can add or delete to suit their bias at the time. This is precisely what happened in the Old Testament. I also noticed that some of the things I read in the Bible, I read similar stories in cultures that came before the people who actually gave us the Bible. Long before the Jews had a story about Noah or a creation story, the Sumerians and Babylonians did and the Jewish version appeared to have borrowed from those earlier peoples to pattern their own story.

Then I read about the Persians (modern Iranians) who ruled over the Jews 600 years before the time of Christ. I realized they had a complex religion and that the Jews borrowed heavily from them to form the basis for some of their own religious concepts.  Those Jews then passed them down through the centuries until we get to the time of Christ. His followers, Jews, then passed it on to the large Gentile community around the Mediterranean Sea, from Egypt to Rome. In other words, the “Christian” story nor the God of the Bible was nothing more than a rehashed, regurgitated old story passed down through the ages from one people to another. With a stroke of luck, Christianity met good fortune when the Roman Emperor, Constantine, adopted it as the official religion of the greatest empire of the time. From as far east as modern day Iraq, to as far south as Egypt and as far west as modern day England and France, Christianity became the religion of the vast Roman Empire of which all of those regions and points between were a part of.

1,000 years later, other empires rose up within the remnants of the old Roman Empire,  empires like  England, Portugal, France and Spain. These Empires then sent conquerors and settlers over the high seas to conquer and spread the Christian story. They eventually made it to Africa and taught it there as well as rape that continent and kidnap it inhabitants. Many of those people are our ancestors who were taught the Christian faith by the very people using it to oppress them. After 400 years we are still a people enslaved to the religion of those oppressors.

This testimony was a very condensed version to try to keep it within a readable format. If you look around the blog you will find topics I discuss on their own that will help to prove why I do not and cannot believe in the Bible and its god. Please feel free to read them.