Why I am not a Christian

Ever since my deconversion several years ago, I always wanted to find a way to articulate my reasons for abandoning my former faith. I have articulated it in many ways and I realize this is going to be an ongoing process until at some point. I will enumerate reasons why I am not a Christian.

1. Faith- Faith is the essential ingredient in being a Christian as much as any other monotheistic religions (and non-monotheistic religions). What makes Christianity stand out from other religions is that it emphasizes so much on beliefs, while other religions emphasize more on rituals, cultures, etc. While it is possible to be an observing Jew without traditional beliefs, this is very rare in Christianity; it is often frown upon. Faith, for Christianity, is absolute and unconditional commitment to core beliefs of Christianity (known as Articles of Faith). However, this is very different from merely making assumptions. Many Christians use the fallacious argument that "we all have faith in something", pointing out that we make assumptions that we do not support with evidence. While these Christians may be unto something, the problem with their argument is that making assumptions (or merely having them) is very different from having unconditional commitment to beliefs. When we make assumptions, we can see these assumptions as "working-hypothesis", we use them as useful instruments to solve problems and understand the world. So, for example, if I try to solve the problem I have to make assumptions on what could work. However, I can test this assumption by solving the problem according to that assumption. If it turns out that the assumption is wrong, I discard it to find a better assumption. The thing is that we do not throw the baby out with the bath water, there are parts of our former assumptions that are right. We keep those parts and add them into new assumptions, and we repeat this process until we solve a problem. We do this with other things besides solving problems, such as understanding the world. Basically, we do trials and errors with our assumptions until we can come up with one that is basically right (or relatively right). What this means is that we are able to treat our assumptions as fallible, we can change them if we see that they are wrong; this is how our brains work so we can avoid making future mistakes. However, this potential quality of assumption is lacking when it comes to faith. Merely making assumptions is open to revision and even abandonment, but faith demands unconditional commitment to the assumption. For some Christians, it does not matter what the evidence or arguments say; your unconditional commitment to the assumption matters more than evidence and arguments. My problem with this is that it amounts to Dogmatism, which is the attitude in which you refuse to revise or change your beliefs since you assume that it is absolutely true even though evidence/reason says otherwise. A lot of Christians like to sugar coat this with fancy or pretty words like "faith" or "hope", but ultimately it's just plain old dogmatism. However, when people think about dogmatism they imagine aggressive, stubborn, and stringent pronouncement of their belief, but this is not entirely true. You can have complacent dogmatism as opposed to aggressive dogmatism; a Christian can be complacently dogmatic in so far as he is simply satisfied with his commitments that he does not feel the need to doubt it; aggressive dogmatist is not merely satisfied but aggressive about his commitments to the point of pushing it unto people. Both forms are still dogmatic, while the latter is more harmful, both approaches are still dogmatic. For me faith is just a non-starter because the kind of attitude has a tendency to produce sloppy thinking which comes along with logical fallacies and bad arguments. I said "tendency" since there are some intelligent Christians who come up with clever and methodical arguments absent of logical fallacies, but what I find is that these Christians are in the minority. I also see that other religions have a similar unconditional commitment except it's commitment  to different beliefs. How can you tell which beliefs are true? unconditional commitments alone does not inform us which one is true, it only informs us which ones we are committed to. I simply have no use for faith, it's very useless in informing us anything about reality. Having commitments  are important, but to demand that they should be unconditional is usually unreasonable since beliefs can be fallible. This does not mean we should not be committed to beliefs, we should but when there is reason to suspect that there is something wrong with the beliefs we should re-evaluate our commitments. Since I reject faith, it follows that I cannot be a Christian. I could be a deist, but even then I find the existence of God dubious. 
2. Existence of God is dubious- When faith is taken out of the equation, the belief in the existence of God looks dubious. Faith creates a sensational feeling of certainty that often makes the belief in the existence of God self-evident and difficult to doubt, but this is merely a sensational feeling of certainty. It is only about our subjective attitudes about our beliefs, but not objective indicators about reality. It tells more about ourselves than reality out there. Once we take off our "faith-goggles", we see the belief in the existence of God for what it is: dubious. I'm not saying it is false, I consider myself to be an agnostic atheist, meaning that I do not know for certain whether or not God exists but I lack the belief since I think it is implausible (but not impossible). So why does the existence of God look dubious? It looks dubious because once we have a better (though not complete) understanding of the universe, it becomes apparent that a lot of the phenomena or events in Nature are explained in the context of Nature from varying layers. We have causal mechanisms, laws of Nature, natural causes, and natural patterns to explain many things in reality. This gets to the point that the explanatory role of God becomes unclear: in what sense does God explain reality? One could point out that God could start the beginning of the universe, but it is unclear if the universe ever did have a beginning. One of the common misconception of big-bang is that it talks about the beginning of the universe, this is not true. Big Bang talks about the beginning of the expansion of the universe. When scientists extrapolate the expansion to singularity, it's unclear what it exactly looks like because it is beyond the observable universe. We are simply unsure, for all we know perhaps the universe always existed! That is as much of a good hypothesis as existence of God, but I think the former is slightly more plausible given the Laws of Conservation. However, I am not physicist, so I'll stop there, but my other point is that if God exists as a supra-cosmic being who interferes with natural/human affairs, we should find events that cannot be explained in the context of Nature alone but explained by divine providence. We haven't found such events, which makes the claim of the existence of God suspect to doubt. Many believers say you cannot prove the negative, I disagree. As long as you use Modus Tollens in which X implies Y but not Y, therefore not X, then you can prove the negative. Just point out that if God exists, then the universe should have events that is only best explained by divine providence, but since you cannot find such an event, then there probably is no God. This all depends on what events occur and how people interpret them. The problem is that people tend to misinterpret events as miracles, when in fact there could be natural causes (more often than not). This makes me doubtful of the existence of God, but I do not reject it out-right. After all, it is possible that God interferes less than how believers anticipated. It is possible that God exists but chose to hide himself or the events he cause. However, such reasoning is ad hoc at best, it creates an extra-hypothesis for the sole purpose of avoiding falsification, but fails to be supported by independent evidence. Pseudoscience tend to use a lot of ad hoc reasoning, which makes their belief suspect to doubt; same applies to theism. What makes the existence of God dubious is that alot of the evidence and arguments used to support the existence of God are not too strong. There are some clever ones, I'll  grant that, but that doesn't make them true. A good example is the fine-tune argument which is probably the more compelling arguments, but it seems to have it's problem. If you think carefully, the fine-tune argument can easily collapse into another problem of evil. If God fine-tuned the universe to create life, but parasites, predators, diseases, old age is part of life, then God fine-tuned the universe to permit suffering of life. But how can an all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent God do such a thing? If God is all-knowing, he should know the consequences of fine tuning the universe in the certain way; if God is all-powerful, he could have fine-tuned it in such a way that minimizes or eliminates suffering. But so far from observation there is so much suffering in life for millions of years even until the present day. This makes the fine-tune argument look bad! Also, even if the probability of life is so low in the universe since the value of cosmological constants are extremely sensitive that only certain values is conducive to life, how does this prove the existence of God? all we have is a data that needs explanation, God is just one of them but there are other alternative ones. What makes God a better explanation? If it's evidence, what can we appeal to besides the data that needs explaining? It's arguments like these that makes me doubt the existence of God, it makes me think that so far it's implausible (but not impossible). I'll grant that at least it could be the case that God exist, but I will not grant the case that it is highly reasonable or probable.
3. Bad Science and Anti-Intellectualism: This pertains mostly to conservative evangelical Christians and other conservative varieties of Christianity (i.e. Southern Baptism, Seventh Day Adventist, Pentacostal, Charismatic). Many times these Christians insist that they are not against science, they are only against evolution and big bang. However, I must disagree: by cherry-picking which part of science is true or false goes against the very spirit of science. Science is about using variety of empirical methodologies to test models and hypothesis in order to find evidence FOR and AGAINST the model; you do not cherry-pick evidence. Once the hypothesis is overwhelmingly supported, the consensus of scientists reflect likewise. This is why looking at the consensus among scientist is more reliable than looking at consensus among politicians; unlike scientists, politicians lack empirical methodology. This is why going against the scientific consensus IS going against science, you are not only going against the consensus but also what the consensus reflect: overwhelming evidence. You can doubt that such consensus is based on overwhelming evidence, but don't take my word for it: go read those peer-review articles. This also happens when it comes biblical scholarship; many biblical scholars use different methods to approach the bible, but they usually come to conclusions that goes against the beliefs of many conservative Christians. What happens is that they denounce the scholar's conclusions, and insist that bible is still the "Word of God" (whatever this means). Christianity has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism. Not all Christians are anti-intellectuals, there are intellectual who are Christians (i.e. Cornell West), but these kinds of Christians are not very common. Part of the reason is because many Christians distrust rationality, this is because rationality can come to conclusion that conflict with Christian beliefs. Remember earlier that I said Christianity requires unconditional commitment, well if anything conflict with it then it has to be rejected even if it is supported by overwhelming evidence or good arguments. This is why I find it difficult to accept Christianity, because majority of Christians fall under this description. I know there are Christians who are more liberal and "modern", but this is one of the reasons why I lost respect for Christianity.
4. Too much trust in personal experience- Christians tend to emphasize a lot on testimony both in the bible and outside the bible. Testimonies are bunk, since they are essentially just anecodtal evidence. In Natural sciences anecdotal evidences are highly unreliable. This is because anecdotal evidences are based on eye-witness accounts, which is problematic. It is problematic because a lot of studies in psychology shows that our personal experience is subjected to confabulation, cognitive biases, and fallible memories. It turns out that our memories are not very reliable since it does not act like photographic pictures but rather reconstructing our past experience by filling in the gaps. Testimonies are not free from this kind of problem, it often involves recalling memories. Also, testimonies often beg the question: they are appealing to the very belief that they already believe in to interpret their personal experience. They'll tell you that they believe, if you ask why they'll point to their testimony. If you ask why their testimony is true, they'll point to their belief. If you ask why their belief is true, they'll point to the testimony. It's a vicious never-ending circle. While personal experiences are important, I think Christianity places too much emphasis on personal experiences as testimony.
5. Morality: Christians like to see themselves as paragons of morality (mostly the conservative ones). They either insist that their belief is the source of morality or that at the very least it makes people into better people. I find this difficult to accept given that majority of Christians endorse homophobia. I do not think homosexual sex is immoral, perhaps it is not pleasant to observe but that does not make it immoral. What makes something immoral is if it causes (1) suffering (or gratuitous pain) (2) debilitating agency or personhood. However, Christianity goes as far as to say that the bible is the source of morality, but I find this difficult to accept. I find it difficult to accept that subjugating woman is a moral thing to do in church and house. I find it difficult to accept that people who simply do not believe are sent to hell (or just burn out of existence). I find it difficult to believe that something innocuous as pre-martial sex is immoral (given that there is careful use of contraception which minimizes risks, but not eliminate it). I think that most of the moral claims that Christians are committed to are mostly cultural taboos or mores than real objective moral truths. I do agree that killing, stealing, and lying is wrong, but the bible is very vague about these things. My problem with Christianity is that their moral beliefs are just plainly wrong. I know that there are some Christians who are not against homomsexuality, pre-marital sex, and such. However, more often than not, I find them in the minority...which tells me more about Christianity.