Go figure.
Larry Borgia, are you going to tally the results at some point? It’d be interesting to see what the stats are, assuming Doper atheists are a representative cross-section of atheists (and I realize that’s one heckuva assumption!)
C, II
C: Raised in a religious Catholic household, and 12 years of parochial school.
II: An ideal not likely to be realized anytime soon. In practice I’m tolerant of religious beliefs to the extent they are tolerant of mine (which most of them aren’t).
I gave a preliminary tally in post #67. I thought the poll had died out, but more people are responding. I’ll do another tally sometime tomorrow or Sunday.
A One
D, 1
Fundie upbringing (and I can fall back into the patterns without missing a beat when visiting my folks), but I’m an anthropologist. Any/all religion makes sense to me, in its own context.
<shrug>
B1
Raised in Presbaterian household with church/Sunday School once a week and typically, but not always, a prayer at formal meal settings like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Parents got “Born-Again” later but I was well into my late teens by then and little effected.
Q1 A
No church at all, in my home life. Mom said she believed, then she read “Chariots of the Gods” and decided she believed that. Dad said he was agnostic. But I did go to a Quaker boarding school for several years (against my family’s wishes) and attend Meeting for Worship twice weekly.
Q2 II
Sam Harris’s two recent popular books End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation summarize my views best, though admittedly he did more strongly clarify and organize his thoughts than I did mine.
D, 1
Current tally:
AI: 15 AII: 6
BI: 16 BII: 8
CI: 13 CII: 7
DI: 8 DII: 2
Ai
Wow! There are only **two ** DII’s?!
I know that I’m one of them (even with the little bit of “C” and little bit of “i”); I wonder who the other one is (though not enough, apparently, to re-read almost 100 posts).
I reckon that familiarity doesn’t breed as much contempt as was previously thought, huh? 
That is interesting. You’d think people who grew up fundamentalist and turned atheist wouldn’t exactly be the most religion-friendly people in the world.
Indeed. But, ahhh, here on the Dope, as in real life, one learns something new every day. Okay, then…most days. 
BTW…Larry Borgia: I was doing a quick skim of some of the other posts, when I realized that I inadvertently attributed authorship of this thread to pseudotriton ruber ruber.
:smack: My bad, man, and my humble and heartfelt apologies. (FWMyDefenseIW, I think I got your names mixed up b/c I’d previously posted to a thread that **prr ** actually did start.) Does this make me a shlamiel? And you, of course, the shlamazel?
That’s what I thought. Of course, this isn’t a very scientific poll, and I wish I’d worded my options better, but still I’m pretty surprised at the result.
D.
As to my current attitude toward religion, I used to itch for fights with religious types. But as I grew older, I realized that I was demonstrating the same intolerance that I hated in religion. So now, while I’m still pretty much convinced that religion is harmful vestige of a more ignorant time in human history, I won’t get up in someone’s face about it as long as they stay out of mine. I don’t always live up to that ideal, but I’m tryin’, Ringo. I’m tryin’…
B Ii
Blend of B, C, and D; cross between I and II, leaning toward II. Sorry, I have complicated views on most things.
Upbringing: My father was more or less lackadaisical toward religion when I was a kid, despite becoming a bit of a religious nutball these days. My mother religion-shopped for a while, dipping into the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Pentecostal churches along the way. The church I most remember attending was the Pentecostal one that wasn’t too far away from our house. (If you don’t know about the Pentecostals, they’re mostly freaky fundamentalists. I remember a film they showed one Sunday about the Mormons that painted the LDS as borderline Satan-worshippers. The witnessing and speaking in tongues stuff freaked me out even as a kid. It disturbs me more now.)
She got enough into religion that she hosted bible studies and taught Sunday school for a while. I attended both of those with her until my mid-teens. On the other hand, my mother was a bright, mostly logical, and compassionate woman, so she also taught me to think about things, find answers for my questions, and to try to see things from other people’s perspectives, along with pushing all the religious crap on me.
We varied between attending church regularly, along with the bible studies, and not going at all when I was growing up. The church stuff was more regular between the time I was about 10 or 11 until around age 15 or 16 when I gradually changed my mind about religion and stopped going.
Views on religion: I don’t find much of anything that’s actually positive about religion (the charity stuff is mostly self-serving given that they evangelize constantly in exchange for providing their services) but I also recognize that some people will always be religious, even if they have to invent the religion themselves. I think you could start from scratch with a completely atheistic upbringing and still end up with some religious wackos. Too bad.
I’m not going to go out and try to “convert” anybody, though my opinion is that most religions have overall been a nasty blight on human history. I’m all about maximum choice and freedom, so as long as it doesn’t affect me, I don’t care what people believe.
I admit that I think less of people if they are strongly religious, even if they seem to be smart and well-informed on other subjects. It strikes me like buying into New Age stuff does to most mainstream Christians: kind of kooky and softheaded. When I see religious issues affecting law and government, as has been the case all to often in recent years in the US, I find religion to be a lot less charming and silly than I normally do and start thinking of it as extremely #^¢*ing disturbing.
C - 1.5
C - Altar boy, choirmaster, studied in Catholic schools all my life. Parents devoutly Catholic. Mother “dabbled” in Hinduism and Buddhism.
1.5 - It’s simply too much to ask some religions not to want to impose their beliefs on secular institutions - something that I think is really counter-productive - not even mentioning the propensity of extreme fundamentalists to use violence to achieve this objective.
C, I.
My mother dragged my brother and me to church every single Sunday until he, then I reached the age at which it became physically impossible and/or completely exhausting for her to continue doing so. This means I attended a mainstream Lutheran (Rocky Mountain Synod, thank you very much) church until I was about sixteen. I went to Sunday school and youth group, attended Vacation Bible School and church camp, and I was confirmed in the Lutheran faith. I remember our family practicing the at-home devotionals the church promoted during Advent and Lent, and I was encouraged to participate in all church activities. I was an acolyte and a member of the choir. Nevertheless, my mother was as strongly a member of the “polite people don’t talk about money, sex, or religion” faith as she was a Christian, so I was also taught to be rather circumspect about my beliefs. My mother, although she was a Republican until Nixon cured her, was fairly socially liberal for the time, and she very explicitly taught us that racism was wrong (although we never, ever heard a word about homosexuality - that “polite conversation” rule precluded any discussion of the sort).
I believe that the general precepts of the Christian church (and, indeed, most religions) are worthwhile. I came away from my religious background with a strong sense that it is my duty as a human being to treat others with charity and love and to constantly examine my own shortcomings with an eye towards overcoming them. I just don’t believe in a god any more. I have no problems at all with the idea of others practicing their own faiths, as long as they don’t try to tread on my right not to practice it.