My story, which I recount in my book, Still Small Voices, is one persevering as the mountain of contrary evidence threatened to drown me in cognitive dissonance.



When I would inevitably stumble upon the Bible's falsehoods, violence, sexism and immorality, I resisted the more obvious conclusion--that it is the product of flawed, ancient, tribal peoples. Instead, I convinced myself that there was some perfectly rational explanation for all disturbing passages (or worst I occasionally denied that they were morally problematic at all), and that I would endeavor to discover said explanations. To that end, I asked all I could, read all I could, studied Latin, Biblical Greek and Hebrew, and enrolled in a Master's in Biblical Studies Program.



However, none of this brought me any closer to any resolutions or inner peace. In fact, the more I learned about the Bible, its sources, compositions and contradictions, its textual variants and the Church that produced and promulgated it, the more difficult it became to believe.



Of course, all of this was happening as I tried to have a personal relationship with an invisible, silent and unresponsive being. Prayer proved no more effective at resolving my cognitive dissonance than study. When I asked God to help me understand these things, I heard nothing but silence. When I asked God to intervene in my personal life, he was equally absent.



This. The silent, absent God in my own life made an intellectual question--the problem of evil--a very personal one. You must not misunderstand. I live a fairly decent life. However, it did dawn on me one day that I had been both foolish and arrogant to imagine that there is a God who would listen to my relatively minor supplications when he clearly has and continues to ignore the much more dire pleas of so many billions.



But if God does not answer prayer, if he not did inspire the Bible, if this was the only life I had to live, what had I been doing with myself? I had tragically spent some of the best years of my life chasing an illusion.



I became angry; not just over my own finite wasted time but over the wasted time of all of humanity. I became angry over all the health care debate hours wasted arguing over how the invisible man in the sky wants us to use our genitals; all the brilliant minds devoted to deciphering some relevance from antiquated ancient texts; all the material resources directed towards cathedrals; and of course angry over that most precious of finite resources--time; all the wasted, finite human time.

Carolyn Hyppolite has written what I consider a masterful first person account of her struggles with the Christian faith explaining why she came to reject it. In this intelligent book she highlights the intellectual hypocrisy of Christians, how their faith denigrates women, how it fails to deal honestly with religious diversity, the absence of God in the world, the problem of suffering, and more. Ultimately she highlights the irrationality of faith itself. She is not alone by any stretch. Her numbers are growing every day. She’s just sharing what so many of us have concluded on our behalf. Highly recommended! It deserves a wide readership. On Amazon she tells us: