TV is great for gathering ideas. The other day I saw a quick image of a woman praying. She looked desperate, and seemed to be pleading with her god. It brought back all the times I had tried to plead with, bargain with, and promise anything to god so that he would help me or my loved one. I carefully tried to phrase my prayers in the form acceptable to god, that is, the form of the Lord's Prayer. This meant that before I told him what I needed I first had to praise him, thank him and glorify him. This etiquette for prayer was one reason why I started to doubt the existence of the god I learned about in Sunday School.
When I started learning about Greek and Roman mythology in school, I was taught that the Greek and Roman gods were very vain, needed constant attention, and basically acted like humans, while at the same time I was learning in Sunday School that the Christian god was a supreme being and above all those lowly human traits. This confused me because the Lord's Prayer seemed to show that my god required the same kind of attention as the Greek and Roman gods, and the Bible showed he could be just as cruel. I never did understand.
I think I was in high school when I started questioning some of my religious teachings. I wondered about this prayer thing; I questioned why my god would help some people and not others; and why he would condemn some people to a gruesome life after death while allowing others to spend eternity with him. The reasons given always seemed vague, and practically unfathomable to us lowly humans unless we had enough "faith." This faith thing is another extremely vague concept which I told people I had while trying to understand what it all meant. To make things worse, my church was the last place I could go to for answers to these questions; and I never even dared to ask anyone in my family because I always thought that to question was a sign of being weak in faith. It wasn't until I went through a few bad church-related experiences that I learned from the books I was reading that questioning and doubting were acceptable to my god, but by then it was too late. I had started to look for answers in books.
My questioning and doubting progressed as I read not only about the history of Christianity, but also about new discoveries in science. The more I read the more I became convinced that religion was nothing but a source of comfort to some people and a means of acquiring power to others. The version of what is now the New Testament was chosen by the bishops and councils of the Church because it was believed to be the one "story" that would be strong enough to unite the various factions fighting for control of what became Christianity. After reading about this bit of history I turned my attention away from religion and focused on what science had to say about the origin of the universe, the cosmos, space, etc. Science began to make more sense to me, and science answered my questions.
