I was raised as a Protestant Christian also. The proposed world-view made little or no sense to me then, and things have not improved in that regard. I believe that calling in to play entities that essentially have to be generated and injecting arbitrary parameters for them and their likes and dislikes is a pretty strange way to try to find truth, or understand the Universe better, or even seek right living. It just complicates the problem to add in arbitrary datums. And as far as I can see, most models of reality held forth by organized religions are essentially nothing else. In spite of having a strong sense of spiritual nature, phenomena and such. I think Henri Bergson was far more effective than Aquinas in offering workable explanations, for example.

A