I think this is a very good thread and something very worthwhile to talk about. I am stricken by people who have had 'religious' or 'christian' upbringings and who have been very disenfranchised as a combined reslut of lack of results for that belief system and/or witnessing lack of immediate evidence of what might have been expected or hoped for.
If anyone is angry or disbelieving in any given belief structure, and does not fully understand the aforementioned things then it is good to ask questions and consider what anyone might have to contribute. I am always curious to know what people think and why they think as they do and love to listen and appreciate what they have to say.
I left Christianity because it very seriously was driving me to suicide. Apart from hearing how god doesn't make gay people at church, and how Christians treat gay people, especially here in the south. It was verses in the Bible like the one below that got to me. So, without contrivance or adding anything to it to make it sound like it means something else.......
Leviticus 20:13
"If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."
And it actually says this in Hebrew as well I looked it up.
I take this verse to mean that the Christian god actually is anti-gay. There are those who would disagree and I also tried going to the Metropolitan Community Church which teaches this verse means something else, but their claim is a lie. It means precisely what it appears to mean. It's an all encompassing edict against homosexual relations and does not specify any exceptions whatsoever, and it doesn't matter that Christians no longer go by the Levitical codes. The fact that it's in there at all is enough.
My mother discovered my desire to die and after getting counseling from a therapist because my mother insisted and knowing that suicide is permanent I felt I should make an attempt to really make sure I was correct in what I was thinking. So I studied the Bible for a couple of years and actually read it, something that most Christians have never done. That's when I began to doubt. I began seeing the inconsistancies, and those things that are logically absurd. I eventually got online and began researching other religions. This led me to Buddhism and Conversations with God. Conversations with God was the beginning of my journey toward atheism. It allowed me to let go of the Christian god and embrace a god that was more in line with nature. Once I did that it was only a few but very difficult steps to believing that god was all there was and that's when I became a pantheist for a short time and then I realized that the term god was a human concept and that it was unnecessary which led me to a kind of theistic naturalism, which eventually led me to nature itself with no belief in a god at all.