Welcome.

Getting beaten up as a child sucks. Hope your life is a whole lot better now.

A somewhat related personal story: I was a Christian. I was plagued by doubts, and decided that I wanted to know what the truth was, even if it was something I didn't want to believe. I knew that I wanted Christianity to be true, but I didn't want to just believe for the sake of it.

So I started doing more serious reading. Not rationalist writings, but a thoughtful theologian and historian, NT Wright, who I've also seen appear on documentaries about New Testament history. I read the first two in what he was planning as an epic 5 part series: "The New Testament and the People of God" and "Jesus and the Victory of God".

I loved the way he explained history, and how to think about history (i.e. historiography). Also language, and ideas about the universe. He wrote very well, and warmly - you got the sense that this was a real human being, but he lacked the hubris that I'd often found in religious writers, and he seemed more interested in seeking truth than in claiming that he had it. He was the most rationalist of Christian writers that I came across.

In the end, the essence of his argument seemed to be that there is a way of understanding the Bible that could tell us something about God - if we believe in a personal god who is involved in the universe... and that if we believe in that kind of god, described in the Old Testament, then the idea of taking human form, and becoming the embodiment of everything that Israel was meant to be, does make sense. (He went into much, much more depth here about , and I can't do him justice at all, 15 years after I read it.) He didn't push the reader to believe - he just stated that it was something that made sense to him, and he did believe it.

He painted a picture and told a story which I found very appealing, to be honest. But in the end it didn't fit with how I understood the universe, based on the more solid ground of science.

I finally accepted that - my increasingly shaky belief was destroyed. It was hard, and I was upset - I'd been finding life hard, personally, and my beliefs were the framework that I'd used to attempt to make sense of things, such as an unhappy childhood and the death of both parents as a young adult. But I also felt freed, and after a couple of weeks, it didn't seem so bad. Years later, I'm much happier, and couldn't imagine myself as a Christian.

That's where I see the value personally in destroying false beliefs - I was freed to live without the restrictions imposed by a false belief system. The restrictions, in many cases, didn't have any sound basis outside the belief system, and I was better without them. There were positive aspects of Christianity, but I didn't need the beliefs to hold onto what I'd learnt about being compassionate and understanding, or about the value of community.

I felt that NT Wright told an honest, complex and interesting story, but in terms the reality (or non-reality) of a god, he made an intuitive judgement which I don't see as sound (and which was different from my own intuition). But he helped me think things through at a time when I wasn't getting satisfactory answers from other Christians, and I really enjoyed his writing. I might even go back and read him some day.

That's wide of the topic, I know, but it's kind of relevant, and a welcome thread seems like a good place to go on tangents :-).