Atheists & Agnostics

That's what happened to my dad. The more he learned about Christianity, the more he realized it was a big lie and he became a UU minister.

The one person who had the most influence in developing early Christianity wasn't Christ, but rather Paul the self-appointed apostle who never even knew Jesus. Jesus and the actual 12 apostles were observant Jews and never wanted to be anything else. The religion they developed was simply a segment of Judaism. Paul sold (literally) the promise of eternal life to the gentiles, who were for the most part Romans and had more wealth than the Jews. The problem he had was Jesus' real apostles knew that in order to be an observant Jew, one had to be circumcised per Genesis. This was part of the covenant with god. Paul abandoned the covenant out of necessity because he knew his followers weren't going to get circumcised and in the process created a whole new religion that suited his circumstance. Out went the requirements to follow god's law and in with the new singular requirement of accepting Christ as your "lord and savior". The idea of worshiping Christ was abhorrent to Jesus' real apostles because it breaks the first 3 commandments. Jews don't worship the Messiah, which is exactly what Jesus claimed to be(with a very poor Messianic claim, but that's another story). This put him at odds with the real apostles, but eventually he won out because he was recruiting a lot more people to this new religion. The rest is history.