by Amanda Norton

Created on: February 23, 2009

Ask any atheist why they are an atheist and I'm sure they'll tell you it's due to a lack of evidence. I'm no exception. Like most others though, I did not wake up one day and decide all the "evidence" I used to accept was false and that there is no god. It was a gradual process that led me to my current way of thinking and dis-belief. It was a journey that began by reading a book.

Like many, I already had a preconceived image of who Jesus was and what he did. I was quite familiar with the stories of Jesus' life and death. As a small child I attended Sunday school, and as I got older would attend church occasionally with friends. My parents were not religious and I can't remember one instance of them attending church. They never forced me to go, I went simply because my friends did. We weren't a religious family at all. We didn't say grace around the dinner table, and I was never baptized. As an adult, I never attended church and religion and god just wasn't something I thought about. I assumed there was a god, but just never really gave it much thought beyond what I was taught. Religion and god was never a big part of my life.

Then one day I read a book. No it wasn't one by a great philosopher, or a scientist, or any other great intellectual mind you may be expecting. Rather it was a simple work of fiction that started me on my journey. Strangely enough, and as corny as it may sound, my journey started after reading The Da Vinci Code. I came away from the book wanting to know what was really fact and what was really fiction. So armed with my library card and my computer, and with the help of
google, my search for answers began.

For the first few months, I consumed anything I could about the life of Jesus, and the history of Christianity. What I found surprised me. I began to ask myself how we could know so little about a man who had such an impact on today's world. I then began to question whether or not Jesus ever actually existed. From there I moved on to various other religions and their histories and found that previous (man)god's had much in common with the Jesus of Christianity. Christianity started to become more fable than fact to me, a fable that borrowed form others.

Next I started to think about the concepts and attributes of god in general and in Christianity. Have you ever tried to understand the trinity? I found it quite hard to stomach that god was three in one, all separate yet all one; is Jesus god or is god god? Why would Christians maintain that

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