It sometimes surprises me that more folks who study religion full time don’t become atheists. It seems to me that any critically-minded exploration of religion, grappling with the details of faith and myth, would have to lead a person to, at the very least, some very serious questioning.

That seems to have been the case for blogger Carly Jurica, whose minor in Biblical and Theological Studies began her journey away from acceptance of Christianity’s claims. “I was ending up with a lot of questions and very few solid answers,” she writes.

Things really began to change for her when, after suffering her own traumas, and witnessing those of others, she found how empty the claims of God’s “goodness” sounded.

Suddenly, the cop-out answers of “It’s all a part of his plan” and “He works in mysterious ways” just weren’t good enough anymore; it was time to be honest and say, “If there is a god and this is his plan, then it’s the fucking worst and most cruel plan he could have come up with. It sucks.”

Finally, as she attempted to make deeper sense of apologetics, she saw just how flimsy faith’s foundations really are:

I decided to come at my reconstruction from a place of reason and began researching Jesus and the Bible from a historical standpoint. What I found blew away my life-long indoctrination in apologetics. For me, there wasn’t so much a straw that broke the camel’s back as there was a mountain dropped on the poor animal–a mountain of evidence pointing in the exact opposite direction of my entire life.

Did you arrive at your nonbelief in a similar way? Did a better understanding of a former religion make it easier or more obvious to reject?