It's time to call a spade a spade. The times in my life when I felt that my relationship with God was at it strongest completely overlapped with the periods when I had the most destructive views of myself. The converse is also true; I felt most distant from God when I actually had a decent sense of self-worth.
Here are some examples.
1) I felt close to God in 2012 during and following my fraternity pledgeship. I interpreted the trauma inflicted upon me as God testing me and growing my faith, rather than sticking up for myself and asserting to the fraternity, "This cannot happen."
2) I felt distant from God in Fall 2013 after months of counseling. In these counseling sessions--which were with a Christian therapist, by the way--I learned to accept my thoughts and feelings as legitimate and worthy of others' considerations.
3) Since Fall 2013, the health of my self-perception has increased. And I haven't felt "close" to God since then.
I suppose when "God" is defined in the way that he was for me throughout most of my life, you inevitably must devalue yourself in order to have a relationship in good standing with him.
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Evangelical Christianity is powerful in the sense that it exerts dominion over every aspect of your life. Under such a belief system, you're not allowed to quarantine your faith to a religious compartment of your life. Literally everything that you think, say, and do is subject to an audit. It's exhausting.
I marveled at the many people I knew in college who professed Catholicism. Their faith dictated little more in their lives than what they did on Sunday. Beyond that, they had a freedom far greater than anything that I was used to. And that in itself made me skeptical that their faith was real.
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"You know, I rather like this God fellow. Very theatrical, you know. Pestilence here, a plague there. Omnipotence! Gotta get me some of that." -- Stewie Griffin
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What is the rate of conversion to Christianity (or any faith, really) after the age of, say, 20? My guess is that it's tiny. Certainly a far smaller rate than the same rate sampled before the age of 10.
The point is this: How much of an indicator of one's belief system is the belief system of his or her parents?
What if my parents had been Buddhists? Or Muslims? Or atheists? It seems very unlikely to me that I would have found and willingly chosen to convert to Christianity under these conditions.
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If we really believe the words of the Bible, then God should be largely unknowable. Frankly, that's kind of what chapters 38 through 41 of the book of Job seem to imply.
That morality seems to be present in all people was somewhat of a startling realization for me when I got to college. Religion does not, in fact, hold a monopoly on morality; irreligious people are generally no more immoral than anyone else. For a while, I took that to mean that some form of God is present in everyone. That in turn invalidated a core pillar of my belief system growing up--that people are basically evil.
So then at what point does the use of the word "God" become arbitrary? If a supernatural being has the above characteristics (unknowable, yet manifested in everyone), what makes it "God" versus some generic cosmic energy, or even natural selection?
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"Oh, I love God! He's so deliciously evil!" -- Stewie Griffin
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Defaulting to a God hypothesis to explain things in the universe that we don't understand should not satisfy anyone. I don't say this because I think lowly of such a hypothesis; I say this because such a hypothesis discourages seeking to understand the world further. There is no need to learn, to study, or to think if every problem can be satisfied by, "God made it this way." What a waste of a human brain that is.
