This is a great journey-out-of-religion story from the YouTuber Holy Koolaid.

This story has many important lessons in it. First, the fact that it was a very long and gradual process. While the major tenets of most religions can be explained to a middle school student in under half an hour, the actual answers to life’s great questions take far longer to answer.

One thing that struck me is coming from a fundamentalist literalist background made him luckier. The advantage of fundamentalism (when it comes to arguing against it) is that it’s prepared to say what it believes and go to the mat for it. Modern religion has adapted (through a kind of memetic natural selection in response to environmental pressure from modernity and scientific discovery) and has become far less explicit in what it actually believes, so when he started doing research, the contradictions and mistakes became apparent quickly.

Whereas if you were discussing, say, evolution with a modern liberal Catholic, they would accept evolution which has a necessary consequence that Adam and Eve are mythical characters and as a consequence “original sin” is a kind of wishy washy nebulous allegory rather than an “event” that “happened”. Perhaps more on that later…