I decided to actually try to answer this question for realz.
I was raised to be a cultish Fundamentalist Christian, and I believed it all, very seriously. For most of you who don't really understand the nuances of Christian theology, my particular branch had some beliefs that set them at odds with the rest of Christendom. They did not believe in H-E-Double HockeySticks, they instead believed sinners would be destroyed in a firey pit and would experience nothing beyond death. They only believed that a select few of the good would go to Heaven, the rest would be resurrected in their physical bodies and live in a Paradise on Earth. They did not believe in the Trinity, they did not believe that Jesus was God, they believed that Jesus was just a man, but a perfect man.
When I was 15 my faith stopped making sense to me. My objections were two-fold. The first was that I was taught that God was this grand engineer, an architect. This was drilled into my head from many anti-Evolutionary studies. Those were my favorite studies, I always loved hearing about science, even bogus science. But the saviour-to-humanity path was too convoluted for my acceptance. God needed somebody to read the Bible
and learn about Jesus
and take the ritual of Baptism to be saved? What of those who were born before 33 AD? Who of those who lived deep in the rain forests, what of the children who died in the first hour of life? My faith had answers to all of these, all of them sounding reasonable.
But I objected to the shape of the design itself. It's convoluted, inelegant, inefficient, ungodly. And at that point in time my eyes were open to see other things in the design of nature that were of a similar failure. Vestigial tails, pinky toes, mosquitos, the diseases that are animals, viruses and bacteria.
My second objection was to God's judgements. Original sin to me seemed unconscionable. I could believe that sin was a choice given to Adam to choose, if he so wished and did. It could be a fair thing to punish Adam for being wicked, but I could not understand the decision of God to punish all of his children and his children's children. I could not understand the destruction of the world in the Flood in Noah's time. Why did God intervene then? It seemed a good time as any to have the incoming Apocalypse. Why destroy almost all of the Animals? It seemed silly, childish.
I made a decision, it's what my church would've called an act of blasphemous arrogance. I decided that many of God's actions in the Bible were not Godly. I decided that I had a better conscience, and better design skills than God did. But, me being the 4 that I was even then, I decided that I wasn't going to do what was expected of me and live my life being angry at my church. I decided instead, that if the God of the Bible that was taught to me didn't meet my standards, it must mean that God was to be found elsewhere.
I did a lot of searching. I researched many religions. I did a lot of inquiring into the nature of the universe, everything from learning the sciences to rolling up my sleeves and try to explore metaphysical realms myself. I couldn't take anybody's answers at face value, I had been tricked before, and I could see how easily others could be tricked into thinking they were right.
I had a type of
double vision. I held two versions of reality in my head, one reality where the world was how I understood it with my own senses and reasoning and there was a God, and one where there was not. It was almost like a schizophrenia, and at the beginning I did feel unstable and unhinged.
But as time went on, I learned more, I understood more and those supposedly opposing views merged into each other. I'm not entirely sure that I gained answers to my questions, but the questions themselves were no longer relevant. I was able to feel confident in my conclusions. They started from two postulates that I still think are true. 1) If God wanted me to find him, he would allow me to. 2) I truly wanted to find God.
So, what I've found, what I believe, is that if I believe in God or not is not important to God himself. This was my first conclusion, it was the easy one.
The hard conclusion came next. It was trying to, from that point of view, to understand if good and bad mattered. And if so, how to tell the difference. This ends up being one of those incredibly stupid questions. It's like looking for your keys all over the house when they were in your pocket the whole time.
And, that's all I need to know to live. I'm interested in some of the particulars, but they are no longer important to me to live and to understand.