My parents were pretty atheistic, except for a tentative turn toward Episcopalianism on the part of my mother during my teen years. I had no religious instruction whatever growing up. Of my grandparents, only one was a churchgoer, a fairly observant Catholic, though she never seemed particularly religious to me. Religiosity has not been a part of my heritage for some generations, it seems.
I’ve always heard it as “I’m a fallen-away Catholic. I’m not sure there is a God, but I am sure that Mary is His Mother.”
Apparently tho, Martin has become much more actively Catholic than he was when he said that.
My mom was raised Methodist in an unreligious family. Her brother Alan died when he was in his early 30’s and I think that may have had something to do with her lack of faith, but we don’t talk about it because it makes her sad. My dad was raised Jewish, also in a rather unreligious family, and he never believed in god as long as I’ve known him. When they decided to get married, neither her church nor his synagogue would perform it unless one converted, so they got married in the Unitarian Church.
When I was a kid I remember going to the Unitarian Church for Easter and Christmas a few times, and I went to Temple on the High Holidays a couple times. I’ve always self-identified as Jewish, at at some point I figured that meant I had to believe in god so I convinced myself that I did, but I always knew it wasn’t really true.
In sixth grade a friend of the family taught “Vacation Bible School” at her church that summer and asked my dad if he’d sign me up. My father famously said “You can’t do anything to him in two weeks that I can’t undo in the other 50,” so I went. I guess the point is that I participated in the frou-frou parts of religion with some frequency in my childhood, but it was always clear that my parents didn’t take it that seriously, and neither did I.
–Cliffy
Both parents nominally Church of England, which is about as mild as organised religion gets. I was baptised, sent to a few Sunday school lessons (probably for the same reason as sandra_nz). At primary school (way back then) we had prayers and Bible stories at morning assembly*. Went to church as a boy-scout because you just did - even did the bread ‘n’ wine thing (aren’t you supposed to be confirmed to do that? Whatever, I’m sure you’re not supposed to as an unbeliever).
I think the Big-Guy-in-the-Sky thing first looked bit iffy to me when I was nine-ish. Why was I getting the finger for killing that nice Jebus guy? Bugged me even as a kid.
S. Clanger. Atheist.
*this was not a faith school, standard practice for the time I guess.
My mother was raised a Roman Catholic and my father a Lutheran. When they married, my father converted to Catholism. I was raised a Catholic. I was baptized, confirmed, etc. IIRC, in high school my history teacher was talking about infant baptism and brought about some questions in my head about the true purpose for it. Doubts began to form, but I still semi-regularly attended Mass.
As I grew older, I began to develop more questions and fewer answers. In college, at some point, I began to honestly doubt the existance of Gods. It wasn’t any sort of an anger with any particular God. To be angry with a God would imply that the God existed. I don’t believe that any do. Within the last couple of years I have become a bit more outspoken about my athesism. The reasons for that are better left to Great Debates.
My parents hope that I will return to the Catholic Church, but we don’t discuss religion anymore. They can pray for me and I don’t object to it, but they know not to bring up the topic of religion anymore unless they have a long time for the discussion.
My wife still considers herself a Christian, and I don’t bring up the issue with her anymore, unless playfully.
I am a strong (but not militant) atheist.
Religion was not part of my immediate family’s tradition. I can remember going to church only a few times when I was younger: weddings and funerals mostly, though I recall being dragged to one big-n-flashy Easter service to humor a humorless relative. As far as I know, my mother doesn’t think about this stuff at all, while my father worships at the church of the iconoclastic misanthrope.
On the other hand, I grew up in a pretty rural area, and I was a member of a couple of square-dancing clubs as a kid, so I had a lot of exposure to religious people and religious thinking. One neighbor boy, for example, on the morning walk to the school-bus stop, would repeatedly warn me I would find myself in Hell if I didn’t start going to church, regardless of whether it was my parents’ choice to go or not. And as indicated above, we had some extended family who were, and are, heavily into the church scene. (One of my stepfather’s sisters gave everybody a ridiculous “come to Jesus” DVD for Christmas just two years go.)
Basically, while I was not raised to be a believer, the subject was definitely on my radar. Indeed, instead of being raised to believe, I was raised to read, and think, and decide on my own, and I found myself reading a lot of books that at least tangentially dealt in questions of faith. I was fascinated, for example, by the fictional Mercer faith in Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and I read *Mortal Gods* by Jonathan Fast several times for similar reasons. It hasn’t held up very well over the years, but it was definitely influential when I was young. (The kinky alien sex didn’t hurt either, I tell you whut. But it was the religious angle that brought me back to it.) It was also an annual reading of Orwell’s Animal Farm (with slowly growing knowledge of its historical context) that seeded my early realization that pretty much all irrational belief systems, whether religious or economic, are rooted in the same cognitive (or sub-cognitive) framework.
Basically, I was raised with nothing, and I came to strong atheism on my own. That being said, it isn’t a controversial position in my immediate family, though I’m sure there are some extended blood relatives who would be horrified. Needless to say, it’s not a topic of conversation at our reunions and holiday get-togethers. We’d rather bash the Mariners pitching staff. That, at least, we can agree on. 
Went to Catholic school from Kindergarten through high school, agnostic now. I developed a good sense of skepticism & cynicism pretty early (I blame Matt Groening’s Life In Hell and The Straight Dope), and when you’re forced to say the Our Father and such every day for thirteen years, it tends to lose meaning, IMO.
:rolleyes:
It’s that it’s easy to get back in, when needed. After all, “we” are the church of the deathbed conversion. 
And I have to tell you - I’ve never heard of anybody being “thrown out.” The RCC has about a billion adherents - obviously they’re not picky about who belongs. 
Both of my sisters are married to Divorced men. So both my sisters are not welcomed. :rolleyes: right back at you.
Sounds like you are in the wrong thread BTW, this is for non-believers.
Seriously, my sister did not want to leave the church, she is not a part of it because she has made the sin of marrying a man she loves that was already divorced.
Jim
Merge these and you’ve got me. I still believe in God, but not the man in the sky bit. More along the lines of God represents the physical laws of nature.
I don’t recall ever attending church until my mom married my step-dad (age 5). After that we attended Southern Baptist churches. When I say we, my mom and step-dad attended for barely a year before it was just us kids going. I really liked going to church then, because it was the only time of the week that people my age were really nice to me. As I grew older I stood out more and more and would frequently end up alone at church (or just with my sister) and would change churches to find a place where I meshed better. I attended church camps and vacation Bible school (and helped teach) to help me find my place, but never found one.
My first clue that there was a problem with Christianity was when my primary Christian influence began hurting me, if you know what I mean. For a long time I tried to seperate the man from Christianity but when you consider that the people that hurt me the most are religious, the only times I’ve been stolen from (camera and car) where times I was in and around a church, that the only times the people I went to school would even acknowledge my existence was on Sunday it doesn’t take long before you start questioning it.
I stopped attending church around 13 and kind of supressed everything to the back burner. It wasn’t something I was comfortable thinking about and I was already really different from other people so that not believing was what I considered another step into social isolation. That and I couldn’t help but wonder how I could have more compassion and ability to forgive than the Christians that supported things like the death penatly - imho, its a religious inconsistency. Overall, I ignored questions I had and continued believing; primarily for Christmas. I thought that the religion could be refocused and that if people acted the way the did towards me around Christmas all the time, well maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Then I met my husband (in college). He’d grown up very Catholic, attended a Catholic prepartory school, Catholic undergraduate school in Dallas, protested abortion clinics, etc. By the time I met him (while he was in graduate school) he’d started asking questions and was on his path to self discovery (yet maintained certain Catholic traditions). When he proposed I was all set to convert to Catholicism until he provided me with a list of reasons. His list compounded existing questions I had and since he was the only person I knew that had a real religious education he took the brunt of my questions. My sister who is a fundamentalist Baptist took some, but her patience with my never ending question grew thin, particularly when I’m asking about inconsistencies (as do most fundies, from my experience).
I slowly dropped Christianity and decided to test out Judaism and attended a temple (Reform=temple) in Seattle, where I met a couple brillant rabbi’s. One was a Christian scholar from Ohio, who I learned more about Christianity from than I had my entire life. Of course, while I considered these rabbi’s brillant and I thought the services were like stepping into Fiddler on the Roof, I was no more Jewish than I was Christian. The most important thing I learned from them is how little I actually know about religion. What I knew made little sense and I wanted my lack of belief based on something rather than randomly connected dots, so I started reading.
Now, it’s one of the things I’m most interested in, and have seriously considered returning to school to get a degree in religious studies, because I want to learn as much as possible about it (I want be an expert). Not because I think its true, but because I see it as a cultural tool that has been used repeatedly throughout history; huge cultural significance, which I find interesting. Of course, that’s the non-scientist/engineer in me talking.
So, this is where I’m at now. I think I still have a long way to go, a lot more to read and learn, but definitely not Christian and definitely not religious.
Strong agnostic here. My parents were both raised Catholic; my mom got The Works while my dad’s family was Easter and Xmas. She was confirmed, he wasn’t, I don’t think. Both of them stopped going when they were in their teens; it wasn’t a big deal for my dad’s family, but it was for my mom’s. I think my dad’s rejection of the Church was apathy-based while my mom’s was more based in ideology, or at least phobia. She said she was scared of the statues of the saints and freaked out by the rituals. Then again, her family were hardcore Catholics.
My mom considers herself an agnostic; I’ve never really talked about religion with my dad although he sort of balked when I said I’m not a Christian in that “oh, yes you are, you were raised that way!” way which I guess means that since America is a Christian country (and he is a Republican) I should just consider myself a Christian by osmosis, or something. But religion’s never been a big deal in my family, although I found out later that my grandma cried for days when my mom refused to baptize me.
My dad went through a phase when he wanted to join the LDS because they live longer than non-LDS people. My mom said he could get the desired effect by not smoking and eating healthy, so he quit it after that.
A lady I knew in Seattle was officially excommunicated from the RCC when she was 21 because she had a hysterectomy. The priest came and did some ceremony over her while she was in the hospital recovering and told her she was not welcome in the RCC - something that completely horrified her, because she wanted to remain an active member of the Church, just not have any kids.
Did she have the hysterectomy for reasons of birth control, and not cancer or another disease? That could be the reason why.
- Raised Quaker
- Attended Quaker schools
- Retain Quaker values, minus the “Inner Light,” faith & God components
Solid Agnostic
Yes. She did not want children.
I had the same question/point as davenportavenger, but didn’t ask because I didn’t think that doctors performed medically unneccessary hysterectomies. I learn something new every day.
My parents were raised in a “spare the rod and spoil the child” tyrannical Baptist upbringing, and as a result ended up agnostic non-churchgoers.
I was raised with no religion present, but with no discouragement of it also. I frequently attended church while young with best friends or families of friends to explore, and my parents didn’t oppose this in any way.
I stopped going to church in my early teens, already quite agnostic, and gradually settled into athiesm by my late teens.
Essentially, the more I read and learned as I grew up, the more I questioned. The more I questioned, the more answers were found in science and history and philosophy, and the fewer answers were found in religion.
This thread is very interesting and it is a pleasure to read aboout people’s experiences.
My mother was raised hardcore Catholic, her mother was very religious and her two older daughters were raised “in the church.” My mother married very young into a very unhappy, unhealthy relationship which ended in annullment 6 months later. I guess she felt that she wasn’t the horrible sinner the church said she was, and really questioned the belief system she was raised with. When she married my dad and had my sister and I, she decided not to baptize us or to raise us in the church, because she didn’t want us to be raised with the guilt and shame that she was. My father is an atheist and was more than fine with that.
So I was raised with no religion. My JW grandma gave me “My Book of Bible Stories” and would sit down with my sister and I once a week and read with us. I remember really liking the cool stories with angels and flaming swords and people being thrown into fires and Jezebel being tossed out a window and such. I believed none of it. My sister and I would sometimes go to church with our friends, but basically we were just there to play in the church playground after the sermon.
By the time I went to high school, I was an atheist. I wouldn’t call myself hard-core, because if someone was able to present proof of Deity, I would accept it. But i’m not expecting anyone to ever prove it.
I grew up Catholic.
From a young age, I found mass and discussions of religion tiresome and faintly distasteful. I believed in God, but thought the idea of Jesus stupid even if some of the depictions were touching.
The only way I can explain my relationship to religion now is to say I’m a little grossed out by it. Like when I see a billboard advertising some religious tent meeting and my reaction is “Eww. Don’t you people have lives?”
I don’t say these things to believers’ faces, of course.
My mother is a Methodist, who has been attending church intermittently throughout her life. My father is Jewish, and required me to attend Sunday School at a Conservative Synagogue until I was ten years old. Neither of them truly believes in the official stances of their chosen religions, and neither ever has, as far as I know. Neither ever spoke to me about religion prior to adulthood.
I am a full time, unambiguous atheist, and have been ever since I was old enough to choose a religion.