I Don't Believe in God

So it's been three and a half years since my last post.  There is a lot to say about these last few years; I am about a million light-years from where I was when I posted my last general update.  I am tempted to write an entire memoir explaining how I got to where I am now, but I think it might be best to say it right up front:

I no longer believe in God.  

I say this not with my head held high in arrogance in defiance, nor do I say it with head hanging in embarrassment.  I say it simply with the relatively recent understanding that God is not real, and all my efforts (on this blog and otherwise) were an attempt to convince myself that I actually believe the things I professed to believe.

Over the last several years, I have been practicing my faith in the absence of any deep and regular christian friendships (other than my wife), and this has allowed me to examine my own beliefs with much-reduced levels of peer-pressure.  As I saw my faith receding into my past, I began to identify my struggles with faith as (sometimes feeble, and sometimes quite effective) attempts to silence the inner voice that has always known the truth:

God is not and has never been real to me. 

This realization (which I have come to over the last several months) is simple, yet it opens up so many unanswered questions.  I'm tempted (as usual) to try to answer them all in this first post, but those are subjects for future posts.

Obviously I have exactly zero readers, so this post will go out into the ether without a sound.  But there's something so refreshing about it...  Now it's out.  Kinda. :)