When a church changes theological direction they do it gradually so as not to tip off the less theologically astute pew potatoes. The church I reluctanly went back to as an adult did just that. Fire the long term Arminian pastor, switch to elder board rule, and bring back former calvinist pastor. Former calvinist pastor starts to piss me off every Sunday with his rants that seemed to be picking a fight with me directly. I was always lining up with the example he used in his sermons of how not to be. We adjusted by working in the nursery and leaving afterward skipping the service. Even though we were totally unhappy there it never dawned on us to leave or try another church. I think it was because we knew any other church on the approved list to try would suck just the same.
I had no idea what was pissing me off exactly but in the meantime realized that I didnt believe in the God they were selling anymore. Since this was the only Christianity I knew, I figured I was becoming an atheist. So I searched the web and started listening to podcasts and got a pile of books to read to better understand this worldview. I learned more from these podcasts about all the differences in than in the Evangelical world and why they were full of crap. One podcast in particular talked in depth about calvinism and I read more and figuered out what system terrorized me as kid and why the new pastor pissed me off so much. Calvinism was a basically narrow minded theology that uses fear and fake intellectual depth to lure adherents in. Funny how none of these podcasts mentioned pre reformation and Lutheran theology and tried to debunk that. The target was fundamentalist and petty evangelical theology the new atheists like to beat up on. That was what appealed to me was the new athiests were doing a comedy roast on garbage theology that inspired Bad Religion to write the song "American Jesus".
After reading some Ehrman and others I decided to talk with pastors at the old church to discuss the problems I had with their theology. This was a mistake since they had no answers and just made me a poor sap who was going to hell in their eyes. All of the stuff they gave me to read didn't answer any of my questions about where the new testament came from. You would have thought it fell out of the sky a complete work by how they made it sound. They couldn't answer the basic arguemnts Ehrman brought up in his writing and I felt they were selling a bad belief system. They even did a doubting thomas ss class for me and it usually was me ranting all of the new athiest arguments I read and them just sitting there with nothing to say.
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