I remember the first time that I questioned religion. It was when I was 5 and my grandma told me after an in-depth inquisition on my part that god was his own mommy and daddy. I just couldn't fathom such a thing, until eventually I brought myself to believe that I couldn't fathom it before because I'd never considered anything close to someone who came from nowhere. I had some idea that god was like a being in another dimension like in the cartoons I watched. Then when I was ten, I helped clean this rich lady's driveway. "She was really nice", said my step-dad at the time, "but she's doesn't believe in god." At the time I was essentially a communist, in fact I thought that it was my original idea until my dad told me to stop writing communist essays in my spare time. Anyway, I had this belief that all rich people were evil, so it wasn't a far stretch for me to assume that though the old lady appeared very nice, she must be evil because she's an atheist; I already assumed as much since she was pretty well-to-do. So then it came to be that one day my only friend who was my equal or pretty close on an intellectual scale challenged my beliefs with something simple "if god is omnipotent, can he create something that he can't move? And if there's something that he can't create or move, how is he omnipotent?" At the time, I argued my case alongside another friend, and due to some tactical sophistry(though I didn't know that word then), we came out as the apparent victors of the debate from the crowd's perspective. However, over the next month or so, I started to rethink my position. It's not that his question was so great, it was almost on the level of a semantical question. I defeated it by asking why 1/9 was .111... and 2/9 was .222... but 9/9 is 1. Asking him if he thought math was false because it's counter-intuitive at times. I had already strayed from christianity, though I pretended I hadn't, but I believed in some type of god, if I wasn't sure what type. I don't know when I came to believe what I do now, but I stopped being arrogant enough to think I knew anything after I read the Republic, or maybe a little bit before. Though I'm not technically an atheist right now, I have strong atheistic leanings, but there are a number of theistic positions that I think have validity, to include transcendental monotheism, paganism, and a number of other polytheistic scenarios. Plausibility is not likelihood, to be sure.
