Prayer is Futile
The key driver that led me to forsake Christianity is realizing that prayer is futile. And even the times where my prayers were “answered”, there was always that one, small thing which could have made the whole thing circumstantial.
My two-year old daughter, after having already undergone two heart operations (she was born with a murmuring heart valve) as well as a lethal viral infection (which she had been hospitalized for as well), was now back in hospital, this time with a condition known as meckel diverticulum, causing her small intestine to blow up like a balloon and infecting everything around it. They had to cut her open and pierce the balloon, remove her appendix and sow her back up. It was another agonizing close call for our little fighter… Yet again (like all the other times) we had to rely on the expertise and care of the medical staff and doctors to save our little girl’s life. And God? He was probably elsewhere helping someone score a goal or helping a Pastor getting a bigger church building.
I had always been a firm believer. I believed in laying hands on the sick and healing them, like the Bible commands. But this time it was different. After seeing so many countless prayers go unanswered, and having grown fed-up with always searching for the fault / blame on my side, I made a cold decision to blame God for not answering my prayer for the first time. And once I allowed my mind the luxury of entertaining that one, single, blasphemous thought, I shortly thereafter allowed my mind to start asking all sorts of other questions as well. I also started entertaining skepticism and doubt pertaining to EVERYTHING I had ever been taught about God, as well as towards the Bible.
And what amazed me the most during all of this, was the blatant lack of interest God showed in winning me back. A scary thought suddenly crossed my mind: I had been at this cross road before. Countless times actually. But every single time before this one, I had allowed FAITH to convince me there had to be a reason why my prayer hadn’t been answered. God probably had something better in store for me, or He was delaying the answer to my prayer for a good reason. But the fault was NEVER with Him. This time, however, it was different.
Now, staring at my situation without my “faith lenses”, I realized that if I were God, and I had a son whose daughter lay dying in a hospital, and he asked me to heal her (which of course is well within my power, because I am God), I would have healed her in a heart beat, especially since love is kinda my thing. And it struck me like a bolt of lightning there and then, that I had been allowing confirmation bias to lead me by the nose. I had “read” whatever the outcome of any of my circumstances were, as being God’s answers to my prayers. For some unknown reason, I was suddenly able to see how ignorant that was…
I realized then that either:
1) If God existed, he was not involved in His creation.
2) If God existed, he was not the God of the Bible, because he didn’t fulfill the promises made by the God of the Bible
3) If God existed, I had no way of proving that he exists
4) There was a strong possibility that God doesn’t actually exist.
The wheels completely came off in literally a few days after that.
The doctors managed to save my little girl’s life (no thanks to God) and I resolved to find evidence of God’s existence from that day on, something which I unfortunately gave up on when I started digging into the history of the Bible, the church, the similarities between Jesus Christ and the prophets and heroes from myriads of other pagan religions (which it appeared he had simply been copied from), and most importantly, allowing common sense and logic to guide my thoughts and decisions instead of faith. Probably most important of all, was to have the courage to follow where the evidence (or lack thereof) was taking me.
That, in a nutshell, is the short version of my de-conversion.
