Or are given an opportunity to figure it our for themselves without having it been told to them as well.
I was raised Atheist so I went through a phase of trying to believe rather than the other way around. Many of the books I loved (predominantly Anne of Green Gables) were about people to whom religion was a important part of their lives and I wanted to emulate that. Also, my parents allowed me to do Religious Education when it was offered at school and that was always a fun lesson - singing, and the lady who taught it was so lovely and I really admired her. Then a bunch of my friends joined Youth Group (hosted by a local church) and I joined to hang out with them. Religion wasn’t a big part of it, but it was brought up from time to time.
So, in my early to mid teens I really wanted to believe in God and I tried really hard to accept him. I prayed, I read about him, and I talked about him with friends and the leaders from Youth Group. The whole time, though, I knew I was just paying lip service and though I tried so very hard to believe in God and accept God, I just couldn’t change that inner core that simply didn’t believe it was true. It all just seemed so stupid, and the more I read the less I believed. I began to view the bible as a book of stories written by unsophisticated people to explain the world, and the stuff about Heaven and so forth as tales to comfort them when they were unable to accept death as final, and Hell and damnation as threats to keep them in line and behaving themselves in a manner that benefited society.
Observing Christians was the clincher though - none of them seemed to follow God’s word even though they claimed to. How could people who really, truly believed in God not follow his laws? Asking the question of a bunch of people, I was told that, essentially, that each of them came to their own conclusions about what God wanted them to do and which of his laws he wanted them to follow, and I found that ridiculous. I never found anything in the bible to suggest that he was ok with people picking and choosing the bits they wanted to follow, or that his commands could be safely interpreted as suggestions that didn’t have to be followed to the letter. The only way I could make sense of the behaviour of the Christians I knew was if they, too, were just paying lip service and deep in their hearts didn’t really believe either. I began to perceive Christians as people who went to church and talked about God to make themselves look good in the eyes of other people but who didn’t really believe in what they were saying.
I agree with those above me. I’ve come closer to finding true peace since I’ve lost my religion then I ever had constantly feeling that my best wasn’t even close to good enough.
In addition to all the other stories, another thing that’s given me pause as the light bulb slowly dawned on me (and my mixed metaphors)… that here on earth, people constantly lament the poor behavior of mere humans in comparison to the perfection that God will offer in the afterlife. Well, if you extrapolate that out, what is the real meaning (usually) behind why we expect punishment for wrongdoing? In my opinion, it’s for correction so that we will not make those mistakes in the future. Any good parent knows this and that’s why they use it sparingly and always with the permanent caveat of unconditional love. Right?
Okay. So if that’s what we expect should happen on earth, how much more so will it be in the Utopia that is Heaven? That’s the question I kept asking myself. Unfortunately, the answer is if you screw up in a certain way (hell, just being of the good variety is enough to express drop you to Lucifer), you’ll not get a chance at correction to make things right like even us puny mortals do. No, God decides that you’re a lost cause for all eternity and then decides to roast you for it.
That’s why in my agnosticism, if I choose to think I believe, I see God as something other than the biblical depiction. There’s just no way that an omnipotent, loving being in charge of things is worse than abusive parents. I just can’t believe that anymore.
And I highly thank everyone for sharing. I’m going to bookmark this and read it on those nights when I still find I’m afraid of my original ‘faith.’
Raised RC, for a while went to CCD and got dragged to church every week. Never enjoyed it, any of it, ever. CCD never talked about anything interesting, and seemed to move at molasses pace. Yes, Jesus loves me. You said that before. Can we move on to something more intellectually stimulating? What’s that? I can’t masturbate? Maybe this isn’t the right room or something (still gave me years of that goold ol’ Catholic guilt about jerking off though. I was such a failure at not looking at naked women and imagining what sex would be like with them, and I was sure that god was mighty pissed at me about it).
Never felt anything but boredom in church (ok, the anticipation of getting a donut in the basement afterwards was there), even when I got older and actually listened to the sermons, they never applied to any life problems I had, and never had any good insight anyway. The music in general sucked ass, not that you could make out many words.
I’m good at memorizing, and liked the whole chanting thing when I was younger. Never really felt anything from god during it though, or really ever. Maybe 7 or so years ago, I went to church on xmas because my mom likes to think it’s good for me and I thought I’d try to make her happy. I stood in the midst of everyone chanting about how they all believe in the same doctrine from the church, and there and then decided I could never go back. Oh, I visited beautiful cathedrals in Montreal and France, but I can’t ever sit through a service ever again.
So I guess I never really had it. I’ve read chunks of the bible and find parts philosophically and historically interesting, but that’s as far as it goes. Maybe if I had felt god it would have been a different story. I don’t regret it, though, or at least not much of it. Gave me a window into what believers believe, and what they do.
I’m not a believer, don’t remember ever being one
I tried to raise my kids as atheists
My 17 year old daughter is Pentecostal. ( I have no idea what that means ). Pentecostal.
I was raised Christian by a strict Christian Mother, I was taught one had to believe the Church and the Bible’s word or you would suffer in Hell.
I truly believed for many years, then I started reading the Bible, comparing the Church’s teachings, I studied History, Archeology,Other religions; then I decided I had been brain washed and started to use my own mind.
I realized that every thing that was written, taught or thought was strictly human, I didn’t lose my religion, I gave it up for something better,Freedom to use my own mind.
Monavis
I was raised in a non-Christian family in a non-Christian country. The whole religion thing is a total non-issue for me.
However, I WAS raised in what felt like a religion, very much. The religion of leftist, do-gooder, savethewhales-ism. Where kids wont get too many gifts because the kids in Africa and China don’t get gifts, either. Where my brother asked for a model plane but didn’t get it because toys like that promote violence. Where mom wouldn’t bring us by car because bicycling is better for the environment. Where we couldn’t watch anything that our father scornfully called “low-brow entertainment” on TV, and demanded we watch or read educational stuff instead that taught us about all that is wrong in the world.
Where I couldn’t really flirt with a boy because that would be unfeminist. I could have sex, no problem, but I couldn’t let him pay for me in a restaurant.
I sometimes wish I was raised Christian. That’s a much less demanding religion, IMHO.
I still am a bit religious that way. But I lost most of it as late as my mid-thirties, when I realised that doing good is something best done on a larger scale and by professionals. And that the leftism I grew up with is really a twisted kind of protestantism without God. If I wanted to call myself a rationalist, I had to look scientifically at the claims of my “religion” as well .
If it wasn’t for the first two sentences, I would swear that I wrote this. I was also raised in a multi-religious household: mother is Christian, father is Jewish; neither practice other than during holidays. I attended a Baptist church with my aunt sometime between the ages of five and ten, however I was never baptized because my aunt apparently wanted to give me a better opportunity to truly understand the significance of it. I stopped going before that.
In high school, I experimented with the beliefs of friends, but never really found anything that really seemed relevant in my life. Taoism and Buddhism gave me great insight into human nature, however. By the time I met my husband, a pagan who had left the Church of Christ behind him, I was pretty much agnostic. The nature-based religion seemed enticing for awhile, but it never really took hold either. I briefly attended a Unitarian church, more out of desire for community than religion.
At this point, I consider myself agnostic as well as I don’t really seem to need any more ‘higher powers’ in my life and organized religion is a big turn-off. I’m not quite ready to say definitively that nothing like that exists, because I’m cool with the idea and with not knowing for sure. I guess non-committed is my comfort zone.
Precisely. My point was is that such rebellion in typical Western religous structures is anathema to said structure, which ends up making said religion anathema to the questioner sooner or later as they can get no satisfaction (heh) from the holy books and authority figures who cannot handle such pointed inquiries. A more authentic faith would embrace the rebellion, foster it, encourage it (along the lines of “If you meet the Buddha in the street, kill him.”). I don’t really blame any agnostics/atheists here who get force fed these beliefs and eventually built up a loathing for them. The problem with Western religions (Islam qualifies too) is that there’s no other place to go once you reach that point, and that’s the sad part of it.
For me, the main thing which I clearly remember was being 9 years old and at my grandmother’s funeral, and how everybody was all weepy and such (and my grandma was a wonderful generous woman), when they should have been unreservedly happy that she was in heaven. My problem wasn’t with the heaven concept so much as it was with the attitudes of those who professed the faith they supposedly had.
I don’t see much loathing in this thread. I see not believing.
And you “don’t really blame” us? I hope you see how condescending you sound.
I’m not really sure what your point is, but I think you are off in several areas in both your posts.
I have no shortage of friends that turned to Unitarianism to fill their spiritual void from realizing they could not accept the church they were brought up in.
My dislike of religion is not tied to the RCC specifically but my strong interest in history. The more I studied, the more I found religion to be a problem. In my late teens and my twenties I saw no use for religion at all. I have since softened my views but as I do not appear capable of placing faith in religion.
Maastricht, that almost does sound like a religion and as I came to being a liberal later in life, I think I understand the desire to want what’s exactly opposite of the problems you face growing up. Also, I’ve wondered what it would be like for kids who were raised in that kind of household. Like you said, it must suck not being able to have a toy gun, enjoy ‘popular’ entertainment for the masses or, say, go to Disneyland. As a kid, that would be it’s own particular kind of hell. 
I was born and lived (until age 10) in a middle class suburb in South America. Religion was part of life. I tended to get the religious explanation for all things, and all things had some sort of religious (either catholic or local folklore) undertone or blatant message embedded in. From why mules were infertile (out lord jesus christ cursed them?!?) To why I shouldn’t carry too much around (not just because I would drop something which was obviously the point. I forget the why exactly, but it had something to do with Jesus, I’m sure of that).
Truly, as far back as I can remember, I didn’t really believe, but in some ways I did. I didn’t believe in Jesus as a historical figure who went around doing miracles very long ago (I mean, common, creating wine from water for a wedding party? really?) But I recall being scared of hell and the devil very much.
I think I truly started to think differently after reading my entire encyclopedia. The best gift my mom probably ever gave to me.
By the time I was around 9 or so I was convinced there was either something wrong with me or with the people around me.
It took until I was about 15 to figure out there was nothing wrong with me.
John DiFool’s point about a church’s self-interest being ill-served by their credal rigidity (in contrast to Buddhism’s elastic and arguably largely non-prescriptive core) reminds me of how some corporations have managed to co-opt irony, irreverence, and popular skepticism in their ad campaigns, etc. in their efforts to limit the degree the public feels alienated (and exploited) by them. But does that mean that the corporations are undeserving of that suspicion… or merely that they’ve become more canny and sophisticated in their modes of manipulation?
I think, however, that the Mosaic faiths operate on a [no pun intended] fundamentally different model than the largely non-credal Buddhist (or postmodern corporate, if you will) model he advocates. These religions are all about creeds, obedience, tests and displays of faith, and individual and community self-policing, in an us-vs.-them mentality which they actively inculcate. They don’t encourage or accomodate rebellion because their very rigidity, which can be a strength and source of cohesion and durability in the face of external threats, translates into fragility when questioned from within.
But I also think the contrast between the Mosaic faiths and others such as Buddhism can be exaggerated. In the end, we’re still talking about different varieties of faith in the unknown and unknowable. That’s either going to be acceptable or unacceptable to a given person, no matter how you gild that lily (or lotus). I’m sure there’s lots of basic tenets, practices and cultural biases that most Buddhists would fiercely defend, such as the authenticity of the Buddha, the validity of the institution of the lama as a spiritual guide (when Buddha himself had no such guide preceding him, or am I wrong about that?), the worth or necessity of prayer, meditation, chanting, and ascetic self-denial; the virtue of monks who beg for their food from peasants and the poor instead of doing practical work to earn it as others must; the traditional amenability of Buddhist belief with patently unjust caste systems, social hierarchies, the 2nd-class status of women, and so forth.
I remember starting a thread about this same subject, intending to post my story…and somehow completely failing to do so.
Anyway, mine isn’t too different from the others who came from a non-religious family. My folks come from a Buddhist background, but that’s really more of an outlook on life than an actual practice. When I was a kid, dinosaurs, mythology, and astronomy were among my big interests, so I was learning about cosmology and evolution alongside the creation myths of various different cultures. (I do remember thinking that the Judeo-Christian mythology was pretty dull compared to, say, Robert Graves’s rendition of some of the classic Greek myths.) When I actually met people who professed belief (generally Christian of some variety or other), it struck me as faintly odd, as if someone told me that the venomous snakes of Africa really arose from Medusa’s blood.
No one really tried to convert me to anything while I was growing up (we lived in a town with a large Jewish population, so I do remember wondering why I didn’t get a bar mitzvah like all my friends), so I was generally pretty content to let the pervasive Judeo-Christian societal bias float past me. I remember someone had given my parents a couple of James Dobson’s books on dealing with kids and adolescents (this was quite some time before he became a political figure, and way before the “show your penis to your son” idea); it didn’t seem at all strange to me at the time that he recommended that parents encourage their kids to turn to Jesus. It still didn’t make me want to do it myself, but I figured that it was another one of those things, like bar mitzvahs, that other people did.
I hit a rather difficult time in my last year of high school and first year of college, and for the first time in my life, I really did wish I had some kind of religious faith. This was also around the time I first started being confronted by active Christian proselytizers (proselytes?), both at home and at college. I started to wonder if they were right. I started to wish I could be part of something bigger, that I could trust in someone or something to help shoulder my problems. I really wanted to have faith.
Finally, I hit rock bottom, and one night, I tried to do what the proselytizers had told me to do—open myself up to God and pray. I tried for probably an hour or so, with as much effort as I could muster.
Nothing.
Not even a sense of a howling void (which would have probably converted me to the Church of Azathoth). Just blank. And after a while, I started to feel pretty silly. And a while after that, I thought, “You know what, Self, this is just stupid. You want something out of life, do it yourself, don’t expect anyone else to help you. You want meaning and justice and good in the world, * put it there yourself. That’s* how life gets better.”
Now, I’d be lying if I said that things magically improved after that. It actually took some years for me to fully internalize that philosophy. For a while I self-identified as a neo-pagan, just because the folks there tended to be fun and I found the outlook interesting, but I eventually realized that my involvement was more academic than spiritual.
And as I kept learning and studying, I felt more and more that you didn’t really need a god or gods to explain the universe. There were things we had a pretty good model for, and things we hadn’t (and haven’t figured) out yet. But taking the things we haven’t figured out yet and saying, well, that’s God’s work, end of story? I find that attitude problematic, for two reasons. One, it’s like saying, “If I can’t figure it out, no one can” (the Intelligent Design perspective), which strikes me as both shortsighted and arrogant. Two, it serves no purpose other than a roadblock to further inquiry—if it’s God’s work, end of story, why look further?
Whew! That was way too long. Maybe that’s why I didn’t post it before. 
I’ve enjoyed reading everyone else’s stories here, too!
To slightly alter a George Carlin quote…
Until I reached the age of reason.
I went to Sunday school and church when I was a kid, great social group, had good Sunday dinners with the whole church once a month and youth group when I was in middle school was fun. I really enjoyed the social aspects of it.
I went to a Catholic High School and boy… that sucked any fun I had out of doing the whole religion thing. Around this time I began to actually question what was being said to me. Its a lot easier to go along and have fun with then nice pastor of the nondenomonational church thats in our small town than it is to be treated like cattle that needs to be hit with a ruler.
Eventually I became agnostic… partially out of fear of “what if I’m wrong”…
I was this way for several years until after college even. Then a friend of mine sent me a podcast called the Non-prophets (he found it in itunes). After listening to them explain a few things on Pascal’s Wager and any one of the hundreds of examples of religious people doing stupid and harmful things to society and people because of their beliefs then I realized… God would see through any P.W. and I disagree with about 95% of what religion is… Besides the whole “Don’t be a dick and don’t kill people” message… Which I can follow on my own.
And one of my favorite web comics did something I just recently read…
I’ve always considered myself to be an agnostic, tolerant of opposing views on religion and spirituality. But recently watching a History Channel program that attempted to tie various scientifically grounded apocalyptic events with Bible prophecies, I was startled by the extent to which “religious experts” were held on the same level as actual astronomers, seismologists, and physicists, who actually boast some factual knowledge about the phenomena that were being discussed.
It isn’t that have no respect for religion or spirituality. If you believe that Jesus is your personal savior, that’s great–in fact, I sometimes envy people who have that kind of certainty based on faith. I also have nothing but respect for attempts to understand human and divine nature as expressed by religious thinkers through the ages. Not to mention the “prairie Jesuits” who went forth founding universities throughout the Midwest, some of which are world-respected today. What I have a problem with is these Bible hacks who spend their time looking at Revelations forwards, backwards, and sideways, and then claim to draw valid conclusions from that about where we are in Time of Tribulation. These people may have doctorates from evangelical seminaries, but to hear them talk, those degrees appear to mean little more than that they made it through the eighteenth grade of Sunday school.
So while this isn’t really changing my opinions for the moment, I can certainly see how it might for many people.
It was a long process. I was raised devout Catholic in a small town and had no doubts at all for a long time. Around high school I realized that I was uncomfortable with people openly discussing how Jesus was awesome. In college I began to feel like I needed to justify my faith to non-believers and I never really could. The death of JPII made me realize for the first time that the Church was a human political organization and a course on medieval history showed me that doctrines change over time. In 2004 I voted for Bush because I was “supposed to” and felt pretty gross about listening to Church authority. I was accumulating questions that I was afraid to ask because I was afraid I’d conclude that there wasn’t a god after all. Oddly enough, the sexual morality was the part I had the least trouble with, and I used that as a reason to hold on to the rest.
I then moved to grad school and left a circle of nominally religious friends for largely atheist ones and started to tell myself that maybe I wasn’t so sure about the supernatural side of the universe or the wrongness of un-sanctified sex. I felt deist for a while, but had trouble admitting it. I finally dated an ex-Catholic who put in words what I had been feeling for a long time and helped me accept my doubts.
It was scary, but also quite liberating.
I was raised Catholic and I went to CCD, but I hated going and never paid much attention. I also hated going to church as a kid because it was sooooo boring, even though we were just Easter-Xmas Catholics. I believed as a kid, sort of, but we were not a particularly religious family.
Then came high school and my Social Science teacher was an unabashed atheist. He taught us about evolution and we had classroom debates. The idea of no god or insufficient proof thereof was totally new to me, but that made much more sense to me than committing to a belief system based upon insufficient evidence. So, I learned that various religions were just different theories and philosophies of life that could be true or false, we really don’t know.
Then my mom found out I told one of my friends I don’t believe in god, and Mom was pissed. I confirmed to her I just don’t believe it, and that was that.
This was me from about six years and onward, except that I was raised in a Catholic family, and I was a worrywart. A huge worrywart. I had contingency plans for fires, earthquakes (in the Midwest!), catastrophic comet impacts, and the Rapture.
As an obsessive little kid, I probably knew the names of a hundred prehistoric creatures and as many mythical deities. Luckily, my mom was very indulgent of my interests, so I had access to a lot of books. She’s one of those otherwise-rational, practical- and scientific-minded religious people whose mindset I can’t quite understand now. My dad is a rare breed of Roman Catholic, biblical literalist, young earth creationists. His mindset, at least, is easier to understand, because at least it’s consistent. But anyway…
I was sharp enough to realize that the creation story I learned in church was kinda like the ones in Greek and Egyptian mythology, and that none of those remotely resembled the scientific version that I inevitably learned when I read about dinosaurs and astronomy and the like.
This should have made me a skeptic pretty quickly, but remember that I was a worrywart. Instead, my religious life was a long, drawn-out, fretful Pascal’s Wager. I spent years doing everything right, learning all the prayers, giving up all the right things for Lent, even trying to be a hardcore Catholic like my grandmother. (This was the mid-nineties, and our parish was pretty liberal–you didn’t see very many rosaries or saint medals, except on the ancient folks, and CCD was of the warm and fuzzy variety.) I’d realize that the church’s teachings didn’t make sense, or just seemed cruel, but I was afraid to reject them, and I spent a lot of time worrying about this “faith” stuff. Life would be so much easier if I just got zapped with some of that and I could believe sincerely instead of working so hard to do it all right. And I couldn’t just give it all up. Wouldn’t it suck if I did in fact go to hell, and I could have avoided it by doing and thinking a few simple things? At least, thoughout all of this mess, I never gave up on science. It was interesting and was a lot less frustrating then religion (for me)
At some point (11? 13?), I was simply over it. Maybe it was because my understanding of natural processes like evolution had deepened. Maybe it was this book that my mom bought for me–The Bible IS History–that was supposed to show all sorts of archaeological evidence for Biblical episodes, but which also showed how much fallible human work went into the Bible. Maybe it was because I realized the full impact of Pascal’s Wager, and that unless I was also observing Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and perhaps some religions that hadn’t even been invented yet, I was wasting my time. Somewhere along the line, I gained a larger respect for evidence, for faith had frustrated and eluded me so long, and anyway it seemed to lead people in completely contrary directions.
I guess my main point is that I’m very grateful to science and mythology for broadening my horizons in the first point. Dinosaurs, in particular, hold a special place in my heart, because I think that they were the original seed of my skepticism, and I get really angry when I see their mystique co-opted by the likes of Dr. Dino and the Creation Museum.
If I ever have any kids (not likely) or nieces and nephews (probably yes), Aunt wunderkammer is definitely exposing them to Pazu’s trifecta of awesome. Hey, it worked for at least two of us.