I was raised with Christian values, but the household was leftist and academic. My parents were really an atheist and an agnostic, but they told me to tell people we were "Presbyterian" if asked. My dad claimed he "didn't know" what happened after death. My mother was sick of the question and assumed it was "just over". TLDR: I came into the world with a stacked deck against organized religion. Around age 11 or so, I made up my mind that Christianity was a bullshit social control system. First of all, the white bearded sky God was cartoonishly simpleminded. The thing that really made up my mind were the double standards. Murder was a sin, but if your "government" went to war, then suddenly it wasn't murder anymore, and OK to kill because it was politically beneficial to a bunch of powerful people. This was the crux of my early decision that popular Christianity was bullshit for idiots. Then at some point in middle age I became spiritual again, and started to study scripture with a more open mind. My conclusion now is that almost all organized religion is clever idolatry. Most organized Christians idolize government authority figures as God. They idolize their government, so if the government declares that killing in war is not murder, the government is God, and therefore it is not murder. This is true with almost all authority figures with organized Christianity. So these people are simply not Christians. They think they are, but they are not. They are sheep led by deceivers. Then as I studied more, I realized that modern versions of the Bible were entirely rewritten from the original Greek. Likely rewritten by jews, because all of the warnings about jews from the Greek versions of the Bible are removed in current versions. They've become references to "evil", and that's about it. What I'm struggling with now is a lack of a version of Christianity that isn't deeply corrupt, both in practice and in scripture.