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Embee's Pentecost Experience
I grew up with truly faithful parents and attended parochial schools for grade school, high school and college. Around the time I was 14, I realized that all the rituals of religion didn't seem to be indicative of anything that was real, and I stopped thinking any of it was true or interesting.In college, I took a lot of philosophy courses where we grappled with evil, death, God, faith, etc. Coming out of that learning experience, I thought that people were basically afraid to die (rightly so) and thus they invented an afterlife that would mean they didn't have to die forever. It made sense, but only as a human invention to forgo a nasty ending. That was my conclusion regarding life and God for the next five years or so.
My own life continued to be great—fun and full—and I had everything I wanted. I enjoyed my life, friends and family. I was in grad school, doing well, popular, funny and smart. There were no problems to prompt me to faith. I wasn't struggling with anything, except I had a vague idea that I still had to make a firm decision regarding whether I was going to believe in a God, or be an agnostic (doubter), which was the other option for me. I never considered being an atheist because I wasn't stupid enough to think that I could know everything. That is, I knew I was not smart enough to know for certain that there is no higher order.
