This whole topic brings up so many reactions from me that I hardly know where to start. What follows is pretty jumbled, so I hope you can bear with me.
OP, I feel you. I wish you peace as you sort out all of these very tough questions and issues.
I was raised in a Bible-based, evangelical home. This meant literal interpretations of the Bible; the various posts by caracarn remind me very much of my former life. I was a wholehearted believer (accepted Christ as my savior, and did my best to 'walk the talk') for nearly 30 years. Was a Josh McDowell apologist with the best of them; evangelized during college outreach trips; spent a summer as an evangelist one year. Led Bible studies, was considered a leader in my church and in the faith groups I was part of.
In my early thirties a crisis of faith descended on me. I'm not going to re-litigate it all here, but suffice it to say that I spent 5-6 years in a "dark night of the soul" where questions I had glossed over for years took center stage, and I finally let myself ask the questions for real. When I did, I was horrified to discover that my faith did not stand up to close scrutiny at all. "Truth" as I knew it, didn't exist the way I had always understood it. I went to Calcutta, literally served the poorest and sickest people on earth, as I sought God's face. I consulted theologians; I read every apologetics book I could; I explored Catholicism; I prayed incessantly; I searched my soul for some unconfessed sin; I examined whether I was letting my emotions lead me or my intellect. I spent about six years in a particular hell of questioning my faith and finding no satisfactory answers. I started a blog to try to sort out my questions, and in the process connected with others who have de-converted. I begged God to clear out the cobwebs, to lead my path. I received silence.
In the end, I discovered that the gift of faith that had sustained me for decades had... evaporated. The faith didn't hold together for me anymore. Not from an intellectual perspective, not from an emotional perspective. The "presence" of God that I had felt repeatedly throughout my life was simply... gone.
At one level it was a sucker punch, but on another level the most freeing thing I have ever experienced. At still another level, a lonely journey. At yet another, a grief-filled process of losing the community and storyline that had sustained me most of my life. I have yet to recover from that last one.
It has been devastating to my devout mother to hear of my de-conversion. I have no doubt that she prays for me daily. I hate that she worries for my soul (though theologically she adheres to "once saved, always saved" so you'd think she could relax!). We had one conversation about it four years ago; we don't talk about it anymore. Though I notice all the holiday cards she sends me these days are religious, whereas they used to be irreverent jokey cards.
I found myself having reactions reading caracarn's posts. They're not directed toward me at all but I feel angry and insulted by what comes across as prostheletyzing. Which I used to do myself by the way. Having been on both sides of that kind of exchange, the arguments ring so hollow to me now whereas they used to feel so obviously true when I was a faithful adherent. For example: regarding the thing about the KJV translation of unicorns being wrong. Caracarn I think at one points says basically, "well the KJV people have been shown now to have been wrong in how they understood the original language." For this and other areas of scriptural interpretation that have shifted over the years (see, for example, slavery), I ask: if God is unchanging, yet people have gotten their "understanding" of God wrong at various points in history, what makes you think YOU are right? Why would God obscure his truth to millions of the faithful over thousands of years, but now he's revealed his full truth to your particular denomination, your version of the 'truth'? I stopped believing that my evangelical church had a lock on the truth when I reflected on the likelihood that God had hidden the fullness of his truth until a bunch of Nordic immigrants to Minnesota figured it out and founded the First Evangelical Free Church.
For awhile I considered joining the Catholic Church - by my research and study and reflection, their theology hangs together MUCH more consistently than the evangelical dogma (and make no mistake, "bible-based" faith communities have their share of extra-biblical 'rules' that you are expected to abide; saved by 'faith alone' is total bullshit lip service given the behavioral codes that can be in play in such communities). But I could not honestly pledge, as a convert, that I believed everything the Catholic Church taught in its dogma. So I hung back and didn't join. The ceremony and pageantry never quite sat well with me. And eventually faith fell apart altogether.
So. At one level I am a much happier person; I had felt the weight of the world on my shoulders as an extremely faithful adherent who grappled with questions like - should I give everything up to serve the neediest and poorest in the world? What does God want of me? Why is God such a jealous, shallow fuck, to insist that we worship him? Is he a narcissist or what? Why is a transactional confession of belief the thing, the technicality, that will erase an otherwise shit life that hurt lots of other people? What justice is there in that? Why through an accident of birth do I have every possible fucking advantage over someone else who through accident of birth is starving in Somalia? The Christians I knew who praised Jesus for finding their keys or getting them that job when there is serious fucking human suffering that God seems to ignore elsewhere in the world started to drive me batty. That God is a petty-as-fuck god and patronizing explanations that God cares about the smallest things started to ring pretty damn hollow once I was working in the international humanitarian and conflict resolution fields. Etc. Etc.
On another level, I do feel like I have lost a handle on my core purpose in life. And I have lost community. Which I still mourn. I'm not sure I've figured out who I am absent "evangelical Christian." That said, I met my husband after my crisis of faith, which I am endlessly thankful for, because he's no evangelical himself and we are largely on the same page when it comes to the role of faith/community in our lives. We go to a Quaker meeting now and we really appreciate it. I can't imagine how hard it would be to be navigating these incredibly hard questions with a partner who still felt strongly that the truth resided in the faith of my upbringing.
I'm sorry for the word vomit here. Like I said, I kept a blog for several months where I grappled with various aspects of my faith questions. I'm not comfortable sharing the link here but if anybody is interested in reading it you can PM me. My only caveat here is that this is not an invitation to find places to evangelize me back into the faith. I have extremely bad reactions these days to any effort to 'educate' me on apologetic arguments I may not have considered in my de-conversion process. I desperately prayed not to lose my faith and I examined *everything*. Please don't assume you know more than me on these questions. Thanks. :)