I love how this thread has devolved into a "debate" about the existence of God.
Thank you all for sharing your stories. This is a topic that hits home for me big time.
Starting in childhood, I was a devout born-again Christian. And I mean devout. The all-encompassing, delusional, scary kind. The "God told me to kill, so what choice did I have?" kind. (Thank you, God, for never telling me to kill...)
After years of struggle and denial, largely thanks to an early interest in 18th-century Enlightenment philosophy, I rejected all of that delusional nonsense. That was almost ten years ago.
It is not an easy thing to come to terms with the notion that everything you thought you knew about everything was based on a HUGE fabrication. That you have based your life on a falsehood, however briefly.
Today, I am a nihilist. Thank you for reading.