Some people were raised in the same religion they practice. Others chose their faith out of a wide array of churches and practices and histories and ideas. What stood out for you with respect to your faith? Did you do it because you like the other people that worship in your church? Do you believe that your church’s interpretation of the “big picture” is more believable than any other interpretation? If you’ve moved away from the religion you were raised in, did it cause problems within your family? What bothered them about your change? Just curious. Thanks.
Really cute girls in Young Life. Plus, it was free.
I don’t belong to any particular demonination or church, and I generally keep my faith to myself, as my wife disagrees with it and would be annoyed if she found out what I believe.
Converted to Catholicism from the Methodist Church. No real beef with Methodism, really. It’s just that my inquiries into Catholic Church and its theology led to serious study of its beliefs and tenets, and I found it to be a better fit for me. Sure, there are some aspects of the Church that I may have an issue or two with, but I think any thinking believer would find flaws in any faith.
My conversion didn’t cause too much discussion in my family, except from one of my Aunt’s, who is a serious anti-papist.
Ethilrist, if you can’t tell your wife what you believe, who CAN you tell?
Unitarian Universalism.
'Nuff said.
Esprix
That’s a question I’ve been trying to answer for some time now.
I was raised Catholic and followed it as a child the way a child would. In my early 20s I became sexually active and rationalized this even though it was clearly against my religion. I still attended Mass though and one day was moved by the homily to confess my sins and get back on the straight and narrow. I’ll never forget how wonderful it was to be called back to God and now I practice my faith by following the tenets of the Church with a renewed spirit. It is not out of a childish sense of duty however, but out of love for and inspiration by a God who came out to meet me, a la the prodigal son.
I can’t say I don’t wish I had never trangressed the way I did, but the faith I have is so much stronger and alive having been through this renewal.
What Esprix said.
I have faith in myself. It is all I need. Be strong people.
**JESUS **
Just had to make sure you could see 
I was baptised, and subsequently raised, as an Episcopalian.
I wanted to enter the seminary, but I ended up taking my degrees in Engineering.
I just wanted to know how things work. (More or less the same thing as standing out in a field and screaming “Why?” to the infinite)
I am now thirty-four years old, and I have reached the following conclusions:[ul]I will never understand how everything works, but I can understand how some things work.
No one has any better idea of what is going on than I do, leading too…
If you want to tell me I’m going to Hell, I’m going to tell you to prove it. If all you have is your opinion I won’t waste my time talking to you.
I believe that there was an Act of Creation about fifteen billion years ago. I can not explain anything that happened after that.
I beleive that evolution is God’s plan.
I am fallible, and all of the above could be wrong.[/ul]
That said, I do not believe that I am entitled to proslytize. My faith is mine, and I don’t pretend to speak for anyone else.
If anyone wants to ask me what I think I’ll share my version of faith. Otherwise, I’m content to let people find their own paths.
Like so many others, I developed a belief system, and then found a faith that agreed with me.
I had a number of compelling experiences that (among other factors)my own implementation of Occam’s razor led me to interpret as having originated from the J/C God; There were a number of Christians in my circle of friends at the time, the ‘faith’ chose me…
I was brought up as C of E (that’s Church of England, not Chaotic Evil ;)). As a teenager, I discovered science and history. Science showed me a fascinating universe of incredible complexity with pretty good explanations of how it all worked. The requirement for a god to run the show evaporated. History taught me that a lot of man’s inhumanity to man is directly attributable to interpretations of god’s will. The big monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam) seemed the worst of the lot. Through inaction, God, Allah, whatever, condoned such behaviour by adherents.
By the time I was twenty I was an atheist. I didn’t decide to be an atheist, it was a non-religious experience.
Christian here.
If one day when you don’t even think you’re looking for anything, God walks up, taps you on the shoulder, and the world does a transformation before your eyes, you’ve kinda got to go with the experience.
Especially when you’re still having pretty good flashbacks, 32 years later. 
I was raised in a Christian church and can’t remember a time when I didn’t believe in God or that the Bible is His word. I didn’t become truly born again til I was about 20 (I mistakenly put this age down as 27 in another post) I’d only believed in God in my mind until the Holy Spirit began speaking to me and I realized my need to make sure I was saved. I now attend Second Church of Christ and we believe and accept the Bible to be literally God’s word, infallable and the final authority. As dreamer said, it was ultimately Jesus Christ who attracted me to my faith, the desire to be sure I belonged to Him. If it wasn’t for my first husband’s godly grandmother perhaps I never would have realized I was lost, thank God for her.
I read that Thomas Jefferson called Unitarianism “The Faith of Reason” and hoped that it would become the predominant religion in the US. So I checked it out.
I was raised in the southern baptist church, but even as a young child I never really had “faith”. I believed in God because I had been taught to, and had no reason to doubt the story. As I grew older I realized that a great many things I had been told didn’t make sense in terms of the world as I saw it. I learned that much of what I was taught as fact, with no real backing to it, was in direct conflict with a large body of information gathered through scientific means, which provided a great deal of explanatory power with a hefty backbone of solid evidence. As I learned about other faiths past and present, I realized that there was really nothing to distinguish them from what I had once believed. Over time, I left all my religious beliefs behind, and arrived at where I am today. Nothing really attracted me to the position I hold now, it’s just the default position for someone with no religious faith of any kind. My parents are both fundamentalist Christians and are deeply disappointed in me, although they’re pretty good about not talking to me about it. My mom cried when she found out, and told my dad, who has never mentioned it to me (we see each other, but don’t talk much, if you get my meaning.) I imagine my mom thinks I’m going through a phase and will “snap out of it”, no doubt my dad thinks I’m hellbound. My brother is an atheist also. Bad luck with the kids on my parents part, it seems.
Raised Catholic, now agnostic.
I can sleep in on Sundays, I can distance myself from a lot that I disagree with the church on, and I think that “enjoy this life as best you can, and make sure others do too” fits better than anything the church ever told me.
I think it was Neil Gaiman who said, “Maybe if people weren’t so concerned with where they will spend the next life, they’d do more to fix what’s wrong with this one.”
This is my first post ever, so if I make mistakes, please don’t hate me for it!
I was raised Catholic, couldn’t quite get my brain around a lot of what I was taught, and for many years, held no particular religion although I believed deeply in a Monotheistic view of God. A lot of things about organized religion bothered me. When I was 34, a friend started talking to me about the Baha’i Faith, and it seemed to address every problem I had ever had with organized religion. We don’t have clergy, very few rituals, a fairly conservative moral view, etc. and most of all, no thoughts that anyone who doesn’t believe exactly as we do will burn in hell! After a near-death experience, I did a lot of praying, not for God to spare my life, but for Him to tell me if this was the right Faith for me. After a couple of weeks of praying like this, I woke up one morning, and didn’t feel conflicted anymore. I made my Declaration the following week, and have been Baha’i (and happy about it) ever since.