for me, one of the biggest points of cognitive dissonance in Christianity was the realization that we were supposed to be pro-life but the character who goes by the name God / Jehovah / Yaweh / the Lord in our Scriptures was decidedly not pro-life.

the "solution" to this cognitive dissonance just brought more confusion: because God is perfect, God is exempt from being pro-life. God can kill babies and command genocides and still be pro-life. God doesn't have to be godly because He's God.

the progressive solution to this problem held me over for a while: the character who goes by the name of "God" in our Scriptures is not representative of the actual God we believe in; our God didn't actually do all that shit.

ultimately, that just raised even more questions.

once I no longer believed that the character who goes by the name "God" in the book was truly representative of whatever God may actually exist, i had a hard time finding value in a religion oriented toward that book -- especially with all its potential for abuse.

If the Bible can't be relied upon to tell us the character of the Divine, why are we elevating it above any text at all? Why not read the whole cannon of human wisdom and curiosity -- all poetry and philosophy and fiction and myth penned by everyone since the beginning of words?

Of course there are ways to read the Bible that produce a decent Deity, but if I'm going to read into the book a God I have come to believe in based on experiences in my own body and community outside of the book, why waste time with the book at all, & its minefield of triggers?

I came to believe that the only way to know whatever God may exist is through my experience as a human (hello existential transcendentalism!). This isn't a decision based in pride. This is humble acknowledgement of the ontological limits by which I am bound.

If I can only know god through my experience, why exert strenuous effort trying to map that experience onto the fucked up character who goes by the name God in the Bible?

Why not just project my experience of the divine onto the stars & trees instead? Why not write my own book?

The folks who programmed my religious mind for the first twenty years of my life were wrong about almost everything. But there's one thing they got right: when you stop believing that their Book is the infallible and exclusive source of Truth, it all falls apart.