By Nikki ~ I am a very reluctant atheist. Having been brought up in the church and primed for becoming a missionary and marrying a nice Christian boy, to now find myself as both an atheist and a lesbian has been disconcerting, to say the least. There were three main things that eventually led to my deconversion. The first was a love of truth; the second, a deep disgust with hypocrisy; and the third, my final acceptance of the fact that I am not, have never been, and never will be straight. My love of truth paved the way. Many times as I grew up, things would bother me about what I was being taught. I wondered about the stories of God ordering genocides in the Bible, or just outright murdering people himself. I puzzled over discrepancies between the Gospels of Matthew , Mark, Luke and John. I wondered why, in all my years of being a Christian, I had never seen even one verifiable miracle. But I simply chalked it up to my lack of understanding, and went on as before. Then my hat...