"why atheism is a burden not a benefit, page-61

wesr: Reading the bible is what stopped me being a theist (I then dipped into deism).

Later, I researched the origins of the bible. When I discovered that the God of the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic holy texts ("Yahweh"), was originally a pagan god, namely Yahweh the storm god - one of the seventy children of the father-figure god El, and who had a wife named Asherah and who fought with the god Baal - that's when I became an atheist. We know exactly where the three abrahamic religions come from, we can identify who modified what texts and when, and we know what other religions the holy stories were copied from. I would note the discrepancies in Noah's ark, the constant mentioning in the old testament of yahweh in comparison to "other gods", the two distinctly different creation stories in Genesis, the slaying of Marduk, and numerous others taken from neighbouring religions which pre-dated and competed with early Yahwhism. Yes, I am well versed on the bible and it's history. Respectively they are both why I am no longer a Christian, and why I eventually became an atheist.