> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.the-unpreached-bible.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Why I Stopped Believing - URL: https://www.the-unpreached-bible.com/why-i-stopped-believing/ - Published: 2026-08-18T03:01:24.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-18T03:01:24.000Z - Description: Not because of anything a skeptic said to me. Because I read the book — and then dropped one assumption and read it again. - Author: Isacc Johnson - Tags: Deconstruction Not because of anything a skeptic said to me. Because I read the book. I want to be careful with this one, because the genre it belongs to is usually terrible. Deconversion stories tend to be either a grievance list about a church or a highlight reel of the worst verses. Mine isn't either. I grew up in it. I believed it. And for a long time I did what most people who take the Bible seriously do: read the parts that get preached and take everything else on trust. Then I started arguing in comment threads. That sounds like a small thing, but it wasn't. When you argue in public about what a text says, you have to actually go and look. Not once — every time, because the person on the other side is going to check. So I looked things up constantly, for years, and something started happening. The arguments I was winning fell into two kinds. Either the other person didn't know what was in the Bible, or they knew exactly what was there and would not let it mean what it said. Somebody would tell me the Antichrist was coming. The word appears five times in the New Testament, never once in Revelation, and each time it describes a category of people already present — anyone who denied a particular claim about Jesus. Not a single figure. Not a world ruler waiting somewhere in our century. Somebody would quote the end of Revelation to prove the Bible is sealed. That warning turns out to be about a single scroll, written when there was no Bible to seal. Somebody would explain the rapture. It turns out to be a nineteenth-century invention, carried into America in the footnotes of a study Bible. Back then I loved those arguments, and I have to be honest about what winning them did to me, because it did me no good at all. Every one I won made me more confident. I was defending the faith against people I would have called blasphemers, and I was beating them with the text itself, which felt like proof the text was on my side. Correcting somebody's bad reading left the book completely intact, and left me more certain than before that the trouble with Christianity was always someone's sloppy handling of it and never the thing itself. I was becoming an expert on other people's errors. That is a comfortable place to stand, and I stood there for years. What actually started the deconstruction was reading the passages without my presuppositions — and I only started doing that because I wanted to understand the Bible better, stripped of everything that doctrine, dogma, and sheer distance had added to it over several thousand years. I can't tell you the day it happened. At some point I dropped the presumption that God is all good. I think it started with Abraham. He is arguing with God over Sodom, trying to talk him out of destroying the righteous along with the wicked, and he asked: > Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just? That question stopped me, and not because of the answer. Because of what it takes for granted. Abraham is holding God to a standard, and he isn't inventing that standard on the spot — he is appealing to one he expects God to already be bound by. Justice is the measure. God is the thing being measured. So questioning God, his character and his decisions, is not something the Bible forbids. It is something the Bible does. I leaned into that, and then I questioned all of it. I will admit I was scared to death at the beginning. There was no sudden epiphany; over time the verses just came into focus differently, and I could see them more clearly. That's the shape of the whole thing. The Bible doesn't make excuses for God — people do. We make so many of them, and we make them so automatically, that we stop noticing we are doing it. Take them away and what is left on the page is inexcusable: a character nobody would defend for a moment if they met him in any other book. Buried underneath the beliefs was the text, and the text has problems, and those problems don't get fixed by reading more carefully. They get worse. That's the part nobody had prepared me for. I'd been taught that careful reading was the answer to every difficulty — that if a passage seemed wrong, I hadn't understood it yet. Careful reading turned out to be the problem. The more precisely I read, the fewer places there were to stand — even when I was standing on faith. What I'm interested in is what's on the page. That's what these books are — one contested subject at a time, the text quoted, the standard defense stated properly and then answered, and no pretending that clearing away a bad interpretation solves the underlying problem. If you're somewhere in the middle of this yourself, the twelve-verse guide below is a decent place to start. Check every one of them against your own Bible. That's the whole method.