I Don't Believe in God.

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Please don't get me wrong. This is not the strident statement of an atheist claiming that God does not exist. It is the regretful statement of a person who has spent his life trying to find God and has failed. I started out life in a very Christian family and from a very young age attended Sunday school every week. I was enthralled with the stories. I was in love with God and wanted nothing more than to be a preacher when I grew up. My disenchantment with Christianity began in kindergarten when my best friend was a young Jewish girl. Every day one of the kids in class was chosen to save the prayer before lunch. It was a simple prayer in which we had to thank Jesus for the food we were about to eat. My young friend would not say the prayer. When I realize she was being subject to abuse, mostly mental, but some physical hitting by the other kids I decided that I could not say the prayer either. Being a boy the beatings that I received were a little more severe. The tale would probably have a happier ending if the teachers at the school discourage the beatings and protected my friend and myself. Sadly this was not the case; they in fact encourage this attempt to force us into a Christian mode. Somehow the Sunday school stories were not the same anymore. In my young mind and Jesus became associated with the kids that were hitting me. I quit going to Sunday school and I was on the first step to disbelief. As I grew older I developed a passion for biology and wanted nothing more than to develop a deeper understanding of life. The obvious conflict ensued. I could not reconcile the biblical story of creation with the obvious facts of evolution. If this story was wrong, then how about the rest of it? I moved on from biology and began to study history and comparative religions. I had to find some way to reconcile my belief in God with the idea that the Christian religion just did not get it right. At that time I had a very close friend whose father was a Pentecostal minister. I got into several discussions with my friend's father which grew more and more heated. In the end he became so angry with me that he forbad my friend from associating with me and told me that he was praying to God that God would strike me dead because I was spreading disbelief. Wow! What kind of god was this who would want me dead because I was seeking answers about him? After high school I enrolled in the best local college around which happened to be a Christian College. I continue to seek answers and continued to be condemned for doing so. I was informed that if I continue to ask questions and seek answers about the nature of God that I could no longer continue in school. I was getting really confused at this point, why was seeking knowledge somehow sinful and wrong? They told me that all the answers were in the Bible and if I booked outside the Bible I was condemning myself to everlasting hell. Wait a minute! There are more people in this world who are not Christian and there are Christians. What about them? Were they all going to hell because they did not believe in the Christian version of a God? I didn't think so. I just could not bring myself to believe in this cruel God that condemned people to hell for not following the Christian party line and believing as they were instructed to. I went on to a State University where religion played no part and pretty much stopped worrying about God. As I grew older I discovered I really didn't have any concern or any belief about God. I was too busy spending some time in the Army, getting married, finding a job, and generally getting on with life to spend much time thinking about God. Later in life I started to give a little more thought to God and decided that the idea that I was most comfortable with it was a kind of a general deity who had something to do with the creation of the universe but then it really didn't meddle with it. I settled on something that resembled the ideas of intelligent design. I could not see this designer doing much more than somehow manipulating things so that the Big Bang occurred and then left things alone. I was happy with this until I happened upon the whole concept of quantum physics. Quantum physics stated some ideas that provided more questions than answers in till I discovered the work of the mathematician Hugh Everett. In 1957 Hugh Everett wrote a paper which provided a rather slick solution to some of the questions raised by quantum physics. His idea involved the concept of multiple universes. This was considered a pretty crazy idea on his part but as physicists began to look at it they came to the realization that although the ideas seem crazy they were the only possible solution of the questions raised. This concept kind of threw the idea of an intelligent designer out the window. If the Big Bang was not a unique event and was not a rarity, but was in fact a common occurrence which is happening all the time then, most likely, there isn't any kind to designer involved. This also answered the question raised by the idea of the Goldilocks zone. The idea of the Goldilocks zone is that if anything were different, if the earth wasn't exactly where it is and temperatures and everything else weren't exactly right we couldn't exist. If everything is so perfectly designed then there must be a designer. If there are multiple universes then this whole idea goes right out the window. We are not living in a perfectly designed zone. We are in fact living in the one of many universes that just happens to provide the right conditions. There was no one who created one universe, there are many and we live in the one that we can live in. That pretty much ended it for me; my last reason for believing in God was gone. I come to this conclusion regretfully, I would really like there to be a God and I would really like all the things like eternal life that result from their being a God to be true. I just can't find the facts to support this idea.