As I just explained to a believer who asked me "how did it happen ?", my path was more like yours, Dwayne. God, as I understood it, just faded away, not with a bang, but a ....
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>From time to time I wonder how it came to pass that my
once fervent faith "just faded away".
The only answer I've been able to provide - and it's an admittedly incomplete one - is that the extensive religious training I received throughout my childhood ironically gave me the tools to at first analyze and later, in the "fullness of time", abandon belief.
This training wasn't the kind of church doctrine and lore my Roman Catholic friends were compelled to learn, it was a direct study of the Bible itself to the point of memorizing long passages from the Old and New Testaments; standard practice in the American protestant tradition. Indeed, my religious teachers often pointed sleepy students towards 2 Timothy 2:15 which advises believers to "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth" King James Version).
And so, unlike my Catholic buds, who often, even in defiance of their Holy Mother Church, seemed tightly wound up - at first, passionately devout and later, bitterly rejectionist because, I suspect, they were rebelling against a physical institution and not the directly "revealed word of God" - the emphasis on ideas and study led me, logically it seems, right out the door with nary a moment of drama.
.d.
In all probability the airplane is banked and is turning, although your sensations make you feel it is in straight and level flight. Don't act according to your sensations. Check and cross check your instruments.
Pilot's Information File, 1944
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