Post religious stress disorder

Have you ever heard of anyone trying to disprove the Lord of the Rings? Or Game of Thrones? Aesop's Fables?
I have continued to study the Bible and examine it very carefully, but I have started to ask myself why. I have found numerous contradictions and falsehoods, the worst of which is Matthew 11:25. (Jesus literally thanks God for hiding his message.) So why do I continue down this futile path of studying what I know to be inherently false?
The truth is, I see a lot of others who have transitioned beyond religion that do the same thing.
It has been very difficult to move beyond the religion that I accepted as fact for so long. I'm not even sure I could have comprehended what it's like to not think I have someone in on my every thought. I still see things in an in-between state. I still see both sides of the Christian/non-Christian coin. I can have a conversation with a theist and see how they view things. Maybe it's overactive empathy, but I'm more inclined to think it's the years of thinking that way hanging around in my mind like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused.
This may be the reason why I have continued to study.
I still need to assure myself of what I know. That the religion I once accepted is false.
Transitioning beyond religion is not just a flip of a switch. It's not an on/off situation, it's a quantum state of being both or neither at the same time. I also think it's something most people will not understand.
In general, I think people prefer to have a stance on one side or another and have trouble being anywhere in the middle because it means they don't fit with either side.
That's where a problem lies for me. In my normal everyday life I don't have to justify where I stand on beliefs, but with my family it won't be that way. In fact, I don't really believe any amount of study on my part will change how they will receive this news. I honestly worry that when I tell them, the news will be met with disappointment. Is it strange that as an adult I still fear disappointing my family?
I think a large part of my studies and even in writing this is exploring my position so when this conversation happens I know where I stand.
I'm losing the drive provided by all this post religious stress disorder though. It gives me hope though, that I won't grow into an old man reading the Odyssey, trying to figure out why I ever really believed it in the first place.

Facts, opinions and guesses

I was recently directed to a NY Times blog post by a coworker about moral facts. I found the post very interesting in subject and execution.
Moral fact is something philosophers debate and the idea is that some actions are morally right or wrong on a factual level. It's not really so simple though. As with most things in philosophy, you could spend a lifetime debating it (and many have) and be no closer to a resolution than when you started.
The writer of the article asked his son:

“I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”

What a tricky question to be asking a grade school student who has been told facts are verifiable and opinions are what someone believes or thinks.
What's funny is, I read this as a guess or assertion, not an opinion or fact. This is probably due to the fact that intonation doesn't translate into text. The statement can be proven true or false though, so his opinion on the matter is meaningless. If he had said he believed Abraham Lincoln was the first president, he'd just be wrong, opinion or guess. But if he said he thought Abraham Lincoln was the first president because he abolished slavery, paving the way for a US which was true to the Constitution  (all men being created equal,) then I could not prove that's not what he thought. But Lincoln would still not be the first POTUS.
It brought me down this line of thinking that opinions on matters of fact have no value because there is a factual answer. What does it matter if you have an opinion on whether an oak tree has leaves or that mammals have hair? Eventually I asked myself, what value does one's opinion have on god? Not necessarily the God of the bible, or Allah, but just a deity if any exist. In truth saying there is or are no gods has no value. It is either true, or it is false. You cannot assert something exists and it be true if it does not and vice versa.
My first though was that belief or unbelief is a guess because it is about something asserted to be real or factual. Here's the problem though, I cannot prove something nonexistent isn't real.... can I?
Do you believe aliens have visited earth? I once saw something in the sky in my early teen that I still cannot explain to this day. It was a light that flew out of the clouds and then returned to them. IT FREAKED ME OUT! It was a ufo in that I couldn't identify the flying object, but the probability of it being an alien craft are pretty darn slim. Maybe it was a helicopter with a spotlight pointed right at me and that's why it moved so weird or some other much more terrestrial cause, but I still can't explain it and any effort towards that end is a guess, but I found this in a paper written by Steven Hales:

You can’t prove a negative! You can’t prove
that there are no alien abductions! Meaning: your argument against aliens is inductive, therefore not incontrovertible, and since I want to believe in aliens, I’m going to dismiss the argument no matter how overwhelming the evidence against aliens, and no matter how vanishingly small the chance of extraterrestrial abduction.

Honestly, I am quite certain that life exists elsewhere in our universe, galaxy and maybe even solar system, but I don't have proof... yet. It's my conjecture. I also think giving my ufo a terrestrial origin in favor of the more fantastic is speculative. It's a guess.
Now replace all the alien stuff with a deity.
I know myself. If I found evidence for a deity I would be happy to think there was something beyond this world to go to after I'm done here. I'm not dismissing evidence which supports that idea because I don't want to believe. I'm only relinquishing my faith because of the blinding lack of evidence to support it. I have said many times that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but maybe, sometimes that's all the evidence we have.

ISIS vs The Crusades

The Crusades were a string of military campaigns against Muslims to reclaim the "holy land." A lot of bad things happened in the name of religion to include rape and pillaging.
Recently Obama made a few comments in a speech comparing the movement of ISIS to the Crusades. Christians were quite up in arms about it too.
Many believers around me were quick to discount the comment because the Crusades weren't a representation of "true Christianity."

Joshua 1

11 “Go through the camp and tell the people, ‘Get your provisions ready. Three days from now you will cross the Jordan here to go in and take possession of the land the Lord your God is giving you for your own.’”

The book of Joshua is all about the purported original military campaign to claim the "holy lands" orders by God.

Joshua 8

2 You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king, except that you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves. Set an ambush behind the city.” (That’s God talking)

Later in chapter 8 they kill all the women and children by burning them alive in their city.

Joshua 17

13 Now when the people of Israel grew strong, they put the Canaanites to forced labor, but did not utterly drive them out.
(BTW this isn't what God said to do, but he did command Moses to do it.)

Now fast forward to the Crusades, a series of holy wars to reclaim the "holy land" back from Muslims which had conquered the area. Immediately, the plan sounds very much the same as what God instructed the Israelites to do in the Bible. In both instances it seems like terrible things were done in the name of God. How do Christians know the Crusades weren't ordered by God? What makes them so sure that those who took up the religious war in the name of faith were not doing God's work?
Most religions are quick to give their deity glory for things which are favorable to them, and even quicker to blame whatever does not on the human element of their belief system, but here we have a very clear case where the Bible and a more modern event seem to reflect each other very well but believers only accept one as the "true" will of God.
The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is a self-proclaimed caliphate (a religious state headed by a caliph) whose goal is to unite rule over Muslims all over the world, and in the process rule the world and cover it with sharia law. They commit terrible crimes in the name of Allah. The force women into torturous marriages with their fighters. They've tortured and killed so many people for various reasons which violate their faith.
Are you seeing a pattern yet?
The truth hurts and the truth is that when ISIS burned that Jordanian pilot alive, it wasn't anything the Bible had not done 1000 times over in the name of God.
Religious wars are wars where imaginary leaders call the shots, and whomever thinks they have been chosen by this imaginary leader and is crazy enough to "hear" their voice and can convince others of the same, is a very, very dangerous person indeed.
This is why so many in the nonreligious community view all religion as bad. It can lead otherwise good people to do the worst things imaginable because their faith tells them it is right.

When doing research for this post, this was a top google link on ISIS and I loved it.