Even as a JW, evidence/empiricism was important to me. I compartmentalized and suppressed critical thought when it came to matters of my religion, however. I was very good at this.
After leaving JW, I naturally fell into a "semi-Christian" belief system. I basically was Christian in belief, but in areas I questioned, I did what I thought was best in action, not necessarily according to that belief. Then, just as I saw inconsistencies with real life vs. JW belief, I began seeing the same with Christian belief as a whole as well. This led to questioning that belief with the same level of critical thought I applied to other areas of my life.
You know the story from here. The OT was untenable. Its god was the polar opposite of anything I considered morally acceptable. Upon closer scrutiny, the NT was almost as bad, or at least inconsistent with the OT, and itself. I studied evolution, physics, history, sociology, and psychology well enough, that an abstraction easily emerged that religion was nothing more than a human made social meme to serve several purposes, some of which were less noble than others. I declared myself agnostic by this time, (I was out about a year).
Two critical points in this development happened in 2007. The first of which actually involved my second adult experience with marijuana, which was very frightening at the time. It was one of those classic paranoia experiences. It involved thoughts that my entire understanding of "existence", (including all of the social constructs, such as what is "moral"), was brought into question. While this was extremely off-putting at the time, (I stayed away from the drug for at least another year), as I processed that experience over the next year, I began to realize I learned something important from that experience. What I learned in a very concrete manner, was that morals are indeed a social construct, and something that evolved socially, as humans became increasingly aware of their consciousness. This fit nicely with what I already understood about human social evolution. The lesson stuck.
The next important development took place a few month later while reading a biography about Einstein. That bio included an explanation of special relativity that allowed me to understand how time is relative to space. I quickly formed a mental extrapolation that made it crystal clear that if god existed, it could certainly have no such thing as a timetable, unless it either existed outside of time, (which would mean that the need for a timetable is little more than superficial), or was confined to that same physical law, which of course would mean that god is not so powerful, if the laws of physics confine it. That was inconsistent with any understanding of god I ever held to, even as a JW.
It took another 4 years for me to be comfortable with the thought that my agnosticism was really just a "friendlier" term for atheism. I knew four years prior that no god I studied about could be real, (certainly by the time of the special relativity lesson). It then simply became a matter of accepting that atheism is nothing more than non-belief, (which is how most people incorrectly use the term "agnostic").
d4g
