First topic - were you raised atheist or did you come by way of religion?

[Nicky]

I was raised as a Catholic, but my family was never really super religious. We went to church occasionaly at easter or christmas kind of thing. But then I went to catholic schools and was an alter 'boy' too.

It actually took me quite a long time to stop feeling quilty about not believing (I was 14 or 15 when I broke free of that). I probably did believe until my teens, or at least just went along with it cause I did not know any better.  My main exiting thought was that there are so many religions in the world, how could I possibly say my one was the right one?  Now I feel kind of sullied by the whole experience.

In some ways I feel rather anti-religion, but I'm not going to tell someone they should not believe in a god(s), only that I don't. Looking back it seems bizare to me that I ever believed in it all and ate 'flesh' made of ice cream wafers and had some dirty ash crossed on my forhead, or handled that 'holy water' with any reverence, or prayed to some gaunt dead guy on a cross wearing thorns on his head and a loin cloth, I even won a cup at the end of year at school because of my 'religious knowledge' for debating in competitions against other schools the meaning of parts of the bible, how embarrassing. That belief certainly made movies like the omen and the exorcist that much scarier though. I did enjoy the singing in church, nothing like a good sing-along.

You can probably tell I feel a bit bitter about it. I'm not sure why. I think it is because that religion made me feel so guilty - guilty about being queer, guilty about masturbation, guilty about hating someone, furious that I could be bullied by so called catholics, angry that I grew up in a family where dad was manic depressive and often became violent yet that was ok cause we ate waffers on a sunday.

What's your story Nero?

[Nero]

What's your story Nero?

Oh, I'm not atheist. I'm not exactly sure where I fit. Agnostic Christian? Is that an oxymoron? 

[Bombi]

Like others I was raised a catholic. My parents rarely participated. I passively bought into the religion untill my thoughts and ideas began to conflict with the dogma. I had to many questions that weren't adequetly answered and in my teens began to look eslsewhere for answers. This began my spiritual quest which is still ongoing. I call myself an athiest because it's the only label that works. I don't embrace a diety but look to science, nature and inward to find a place I feel whole.
Meditation is my prayer and the crutch I use to sustain sanity ( at least my version).
I've always admired the faith of others and their beliefs and sometimes wished my mind worked in that way. When asked my religion, my response is, I am a spiritual humanist.
Although I never specificall taught my 2 sons they too hold science and nature in high esteem.

[Stella Blue]

I was raised Catholic and sometime in my teens I really said the hell with religion. Now I don't practice, or follow any religion but I am very spiritual.

-Heather

[Dana Lane]

I wasn't really raised in a religious family. We went to church when my mother was 'born again' which lasted for a few months at a time. I did always believe there was a god until one day about 15 years ago when I was in my own 'born again' moment. I was driving down the road listening to the bible on cassette and all of a sudden a whirlwind of things went through my head.  Angry god, jealous god, fallen angels, dinosaur bones, kill your children with stones...and on and on. At that very moment I felt enlightened and new god does not exist. And the guilt I had inside vanished into thin air. Sin does not exist.

How liberating that experience was.

[lisagurl]

My family was not big on religion but they did send us to Sunday school more to learn about morals. I had many questions in Sunday school that they could not answer but only told me I had to believe. I made my own mind up after much research.

[AmySmiles]

My family went to church when I was really young, but soon stopped.  I've always been encouraged to make up my own mind about this kind of thing, and I just could not "get" major religions because there is always some kind of hypocrisy.  So while I was exposed to religion, I was never part of it and came to what I believe in through many discussions and a lot of introspection.

If you had to place me, I'm sort of a mix between atheist and agnostic.  While I don't believe there is a God in the sense most religions see him/her/it, I am not going to say there never was some kind of creating force behind the universe - whatever that force may be.  Was all that is out there always there?  Maybe.  Did it get created by some event?  Maybe.  I don't know.  I CAN'T know.  And I'm perfectly happy admitting that.

[Dennis]

Religion was irrelevant in my household. It was only as I got older that I realized that people defined themselves by it. For us, it was about as important as whether you had a TV or not. I was taught to respect people's religion, that it was important to them (but I never ran into christianity or other religions till I was a teen), but we didn't define as "atheist" or anything like that. I did read the bible and was familiar with the stories, because they form the basis of much of western literature. Also, later in life I took a philosophy of religion course in my undergrad degree, which was probably more interesting for the emotional reactions of the students than for the actual course.

I remember seeing a documentary on TV about scientology and the belief that aliens came to earth and planted the seeds of perfection in humans. I was about 14 at the time, and had just met people who were openly christian. I said (about scientology) "that sounds pretty nuts". My parents said "taken objectively, is it any more crazy than the christian set of beliefs?" And put that way, I had to admit that it was not. The point was to respect even the more marginal religions.

I still don't bother defining myself in reference to religion. It's a little less relevant to me and my life than television (and I would estimate I watch an average of an hour a week of TV). Seems to me that most people who define themselves as "atheist" are actually in some sort of protest - ex-christians or ex-jews or something.

Dennis

[Cindy]

My parents were devout Roman Catholics, in fact my dad ended up being ordained a RC priest by special dispensation from the Pope et al. I was sent to a Christian Brothers school, and was taught to think. I think I started questioning religion quite early, I couldn't cope with the fairy tale aspect and why one religon was right. I came out to my parents about the age of 13, it didn't go down well. I was told to go to confession to admit my sins, I didn't and gave up religion then and there.
I don't believe in deities, minor or major. I am utterly content in that. I respect peoples beliefs and would never belittle them. I tend not to get into religous discussions because of that.

Years after I left the Chritian Bros college, my Dad told me it was going Co-ed. I told him it had been ever since I was there, he never understood the comment

Cindy

[Agent_J]

Religion featured very heavily in my youth, being one of two regular breaks from the endless farm chores I was allowed (school was the other.)  My father's approach to this was to demand I recite verbatim how he believed, rather the way one expects a school child to be able to recite their vocabulary or spelling terms.  Absolutely no questioning was allowed and was severely punished.  This, in the end, meant I had to find my own answers to those questions, and those answers were not in the church.

A significant portion of this was, however ironically, to prevent me from leaving that sect due to fears about it since we lived in a region where the majority of the population belonged to another.  I realized this once in college and I began dating a woman who had been raised in that other Christian sect and there was suddenly much more pressure from my father about religion.

[LordKAT]

Raised strict Roman Catholic. It didn't last long. I was 'asked' to leave 2 years after high school.

[lisagurl]

Raised strict Roman Catholic. It didn't last long. I was 'asked' to leave 2 years after high school.

Yes, if you ask the hard questions you are excommunicated. But it is worth the look on their faces.

[Miniar]

I'm not "really" an atheist, though that's more by choice than anything else, and I wasn't raised one.
I was raised protestant, like justabout everyone else in this country.
I was taught to pray, sent to Sunday school, etc...
And I don't think I ever believed in what I was taught.
It never seemed "right".

[LordKAT]

Yes, if you ask the hard questions you are excommunicated. But it is worth the look on their faces.

To clarify a bit, I was asked to leave for giving answers, not asking questions.

[tekla]

To clarify a bit, I was asked to leave for giving answers, not asking questions.

Ahh, now that sounds like the Catholic schools I went to before high school.  I will have to cop to the notion that as I got higher (grade-wise, and in the 1970s California sense) that the teachers they gave me got better and better.  The Jesuits and the Dominicans (Dominus + Canine, literally Dogs of God - a little Catholic School Latin humor there) were very open minded, highly educated and far less interested in the answer per se (who really cares what a 14 year old thinks anyway?) than in the process you used to arrive at it.

For years it was pounded into my head that as Marcus Aurelius said "Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in (and by) itself? What is its nature?"  Which by some awesome act of god was the critical quote by Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs years later, which reminded me how close to serial killers (at least in the mental and imaginative ways) a lot of teachers (and most religion, to most people) wind up being.

So, even though everybody be all out there getting educated and all, the thing you have to look at is:  Are they educating me for my sake, for their sake, or for the sake of some institution? 

[Julie Wilson]

I don't consider myself an atheist because I don't believe in - not believing in something - and because I know I don't know everything.

So I consider myself an Agnostic.

I was raised Catholic and forced to attend church every week plus holidays.  I was forced to take various other religious classes including but not limited to Confirmation and Catechism.

My GID was the curse that would not go away, no matter how much I prayed so as I got older and left home I started exploring other churches because I figured that mine wasn't the "real" one, obviously "god" hated me and would not heal me until I belonged to the right church.

So I went from church to church, progressively seeking more fundamentalist and consequently "right wing" churches because I figured "god" had to be some sort of "hard-ass" who hated almost everyone, (since none of the churches I belonged to enabled me to receive his healing from my GID curse).

Eventually I ended up in a right-wing, whacko church that was all about the "end-times".  We met at a farm house way out in the boonies.  We grew a huge garden and canned our own food.  We stockpiled gold and guns and we were all about the return of Jezus because everyone else besides us was going to go to Hell and burn in a lake of fire.

But one day I looked around at my other church members.  A 12 year-old girl was trying to pull her father's shirt off so she could show her mother the hickey that she had given her dad.  I looked around... and I thought to myself... "These severely dysfunctional people who are wasting their time and their lives with this pathetic church... they are just as pathetic, miserable and dysfunctional as they were a year ago."

And then I started my own business.  I quit the church.  I quit tobacco.  And I began exploring transition.  Like any good addict I backslid and prayed once in a while but I eventually got over my cravings and addiction and now I am safely agnostic.  Perhaps there is an intelligence to the Universe but I am not going to pretend to understand it with something as primitive as "religion".  I am all about making the most of my life.  I have had a relatively successful transition, I am employed as a female, I am a female, I realize that I have always been a female.  I may have scars but I have always been a female.  I may have had to overcome great obstacles, one of the greatest being childhood brainwashing and indoctrination into religion but I made it to the other side and life is worth living, finally.

Seize the day. 

[placeholdername]

I wasn't raised particularly anything.  My dad is atheist (which I later learned is odd for being Mexican), and my mom is Christian, but I'm not sure she subscribes to a particular branch of Christianity.  Growing up she would occasionally bring me with her to church, but it's not like even she went regularly.  I don't know that I ever really started believing in god, but I definitely gave up on the possibility around the time I found out that Santa Claus wasn't real (which was pretty early).  I mean, there's about the same amount of evidence for Santa Claus being real as there is for God being real, which is to say, not really any.

[lisagurl]

Seize the day. 

Epicurus thought if there are gods they are too busy to bother with mortals. You will find many of his quotes in the NT but the church had banned his writings and school.

[Chamillion]

I don't consider myself an atheist but more agnostic.

I think I'm lucky in the sense that I was raised to have a pretty open mind about religion.  My mom is Pagan and while she taught me about the religion, she never forced me to believe in anything.  I was pretty young, probably about 6th grade when kids at school found out and they had a lot of ignorant ideas about the religion - thinking it's all about devil worshiping and evilness and other things.  So already at that age I was trying to educate people about it because I knew that wasn't what it was about, and had a somewhat tainted view on religion because of how judgmental people are about it.  My step-dad is Protestant and my mom and I went to church every Sunday with him for a couple years, but I was allowed to make my own decision and I didn't really see anything that religion had to offer me, so I stopped going.  My extended family is also Protestant and we celebrate Christmas and some other religious holidays but that's the extent of it for me.

I used to be anti-religion but I'm a lot less bitter about it now.  There are certainly very good people who use religion in a positive way and I'm happy for them, it's just not for me.

[Cindy]

It was interesting re-reading this thread after I had read Dawkin's "The God Delusion". I recommend it too all;  I found it very comforting and thought provoking. However I think the people who need to read it never will.

Cindy