Thanks for sharing, steenkh. So basically you'd not really looked at religion itself, the God question, with skepticism, is that right? Not overly criticially, that is. You know, the whole where's-the-evidence routine?
You speak in the past tense. Had you been generally skeptical back in those days? Did you consciously make an exception when it came to God's existence, you know, about God's omniscience, and even about his existence? And how'd you grow out of your faith?
I was a child, and children generally accept what they are told. Criticism came with age and knowledge. Like a true god-of-the-gaps, God gradually retreated from every position that he used to hold, and I did not even notice when it happened. I came regularly in church (the only one in my family to do so), even though my faith in the official dogma were the first to go: I had no enmity, and I saw a lot of good people wanting to do good, and my teachers definitely were not Roman Catholic fundamentalists (being rather young, I never discussed stuff like contraception or homosexuality with them).
I never had a crisis of faith because my faith just evaporated, and I did not notice it. When I graduated, I moved from my home, I gave up my volunteer job at the church, realised that I had not believed for a long time, and started thinking critically about it all for the first time.
Incidentally, science itself need not, neither that formalized structure nor its actual results, necessarily come into play every time, isn't it?
No, lots can be achieved by logic and common sense. You just need to look at faith in an unbiased way.
And the less-than-nice biblical God is also probably not central to being rejected from a skeptical perspective, right?
I disagree, and that was why I wrote the original post against the OP: Any specific religion can be dismissed when you look at its central claims, but religion in general, as long as it does not conflict with what can be observed.
It is possible to believe in Last-Thursdayism (the belief that the world was created last Thursday complete with humans and memories) or that the world really was created a few thousand years ago, as described in the Bible, God just fooled us by placing all that evidence that the world is older. Science cannot disprove such silliness, but fortunately, even the believers find it silly, and they cannot believe that their gods would lie to them in that fashion.
As I said, science relies on unchangeable laws of nature, and there is no way scientifically to counter the belief that millions of elfs, or an omnipotent God are enforcing these laws, and can choose not to do so at any moment. Science can only point out that never in history has any of the fundamental laws been changed, and that the probability for the existence of gods and elfs must be ridiculously low.
