.Assuming of course that you could narrow it down to a last straw.For me, it was evagelicalism‘s goose-stepping march towards war with Iraq in the face of inadequate evidence that they posed a legitimate threat, coupled with ‘Marriage Protection Amendment‘ campaign nonsense. At that point, I was like, Do these people REALLY think that the Jesus of the gospels would be on board with this crap? And I realized there was no real substance to Christianity.My opinion, of course. Perhaps God will one day cast me into the Lake of Fire for such thoughts.What was the last straw for you?
The people did have a large role to play in it, but my personal issues are more far reaching than the sheep. I had, and still do, a hard time accepting how any loving deity can allow such horrible things to occur in this world, without doing anything about it. I don't like how people will be on hands and knees begging and crying out to god for help in their darkest of hours, and you get nothing in return. I don't like how people will follow god for years without any question, but when you want some sign to prove to your own self that you aren't crazy - there are no signs. That is when I realized that there is no way there is any such god of peace and love. Such a god would be there for you when you ask and need it. If there is a god, it is uncaring and unsympathetic to the needs and wants of it's own creations.
It was when I was a schoolkid, too much of the that doesn't make sense and that doesn't ring true perception of Christianity, as compared to my simultaneous growing awareness of objectivity based on scientific evidence. I had all sorts of paradoxes and inconsistencies in the things the Christians were trying to teach me, and my attempts to understand them got nowhere as everyone I asked just quoted the bible. Circular arguments abounded. It's like there could be no other source of authority than the bible, not even evidence, and any conflict meant the evidence must be wrong. One key point was a Christian leaflet warning of a dead-straight planetary alignment, and why people needed to turn to god to escape the potential cataclysms due to tidal effects. My scientific side made me aware that the upcoming alignment was just the planets occupying a 90° sweep, and the tidal effects would be less than caused by any satellite in earth orbit. The leaflet was complete BS, but some disingenuous or foolish person had created it and many, many Christians just accepted it. They let themselves be deluded by making zero effort to question. There just seemed to be a mentality of unquestioningly accepting faith that led to delusion, and no method of filtering out nonsense. I increasingly realised that their belief was just based on an ancient society's attempts to understand the universe with their limited means and lots of incorrect presumptions, and wondered how would people know or not if this was as BS as the leaflet. So it was this lack of any way of telling the truth apart from a delusion. Not a way of doing things acceptable to me. BTW After the planetary alignment, a number of those people had convinced themselves that only prayer had averted a disaster! I had already realised I was an atheist by then.
I couldn't get down with the whole our way or the highway attitude that most of my fellow Christians had. I couldn't see a loving G-d sending good people to burn for eternity just because they didn't follow Christianity or fell in love with someone of the same gender. Homosexuality and murder both land you in Hell? Yeah, okay. I didn't get it. I also became more and more convinced, and still am, that the whole religion is based more on the teachings of Paul rather than Jesus. In the end it just wasn't for me so I bowed out.
