For me, I was slain by an interesting and unusual grammatical construct.
I’ve never believed in a god. I went to church as a very young child, and even had prayer in school, but I don’t ever remember believing what they taught me.
I tried Neo-paganism, and while it is the closest match for me spiritually, I still couldn’t make myself believe in any diety.
Lots of things. It’s a difficult question. One of my favorite authors says that the things one believes in the most are the hardest to give specific reasons for believing in. I would have to say: my whole life. I’ve found myself drifting, or running, away from Christianity over and over, and it seems I’m always brought back.
For the argument, yes, I was raise Christian- Anglican, actually- but I don’t think that’s what has kept me here. And I might end up something else- Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. A lot of Protestants don’t count those as Christian. 
I was raised a Catholic and started seriously questioning the Ideas rammed down my throat when I was ten - I gave my parents priest a real shock when he told my class in school that all the people who did not know about Jesus were going to hell. I boldly stood up and told the priest that In that case God was evil because it was his fault that he had not sent missionaries to places like Africa - and Jesus was evil to cos he should have sent the Guys 2000 years ago! The silence was a little deafening and then I was condemned to hell for ever more for questioning the Priest and speaking Blasphemy!
I have studied most world religions and read all major texts. When I was in my teens I was most interested in Buddhism as it showed Compassion - Wisdom and relied upon the person and not upon some mythical deity. My studies took me into The World Of Buddhism and It’s many schools. I finally came across the Lotus Sutra and it’s teachings. After some five years of Study I was ready to take the plunge and have been happily swimming in the Lotus Pond ever since!
I went looking and found a philosophy and practice that allows me total freedom and total responsibility - and that makes me totally happy!
Another Buddhist here.
Nominally my family was Unitarian, but there wasn’t a convenient fellowship. For a while we attended a Presbetarian church. But I never felt comfortable with the idea of a creator/god. My parents always had lots of information on various religions around the house when I was growing up. I also did alot of research on my own. I guess I accepted the Buddhist world view sometime around college, but never really got around to finding a teacher. In the last few years, several friends who are Buddhist favorably impresed me. And I started studying with a teacher. The main attractions are Buddhisms basicaly agnostic approach and the goal (enlightenment) being a state of mind as opposed to an afterlife of reward or punishment.
Well, my current teacher follows the Vajrayana (Tibetian) traditions and I lean more towards the Theravada tradition. But western Buddhist tend to be non-sectarian.
No problems at all. When I told my mom (after having lived here in Japan quite a long time), she said she’d told the folks at church I was a Buddhist a long time ago.
I was raised in the Church of Christ, the same church His4Ever belongs to, and so for most of my life I would have been in full agreement with her. My whole family still belongs to that church, and I visit it when I’m visiting with family. No hard feelings against them, but it wasn’t right for me.
As I got older, I felt more and more that I ‘didn’t fit in.’ Their ideal was for a woman to get married and have kids, and then devote herself to raising them. The older I got without getting married, the stranger I seemed, and by the time I was 25, there was no one there I could even have a conversation with.
I began to have serious problems with their rules about the things that women are prohibited from doing. It sometimes seemed that I wasn’t allowed to do anything at all, so I had plenty of time to think about whether I thought God would really give me gifts and then not allow me to use them. It seemed kind of sick. From there, I started to question more and more of what I was hearing.
I came really close to dropping Christianity completely, in that church, because so much of what they were teaching just came to seem so wrong, and to be based on rules and negative feelings rather than the love and grace I’d been reading about in the Bible all my life.
Now I’m in the Disciples of Christ, but it’s been a hard adjustment. My life has been lived in a cloister of sorts- all my friends, my whole social life, my entire way of perceiving the world, and even my job was in the Church of Christ. It turns out that there’s a whole world out here, and it’s so much bigger than I ever realized. And now that I don’t have the preacher to tell me right and wrong about political and ethical and personal issues large and small, I have to decide for myself. But I now believe, as I didn’t then, that if I decide wrong in an honest attempt to serve God, that he’ll take the intention and forgive the errors.
Last week, I drank a half-glass of wine with my dinner, and what seems like a tiny and normal thing for you was a huge step for me, conditioned all my life that all alcohol is bad bad bad. (I was kind of hoping to like the wine, though. It was so strong, and it made my tongue tingly and numb at the same time. Strange.)
I’m Jewish.
I figure if it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.
Besides, I like the stress put on logic and thought rather than blind following.
That made my brain hurt. Could someone diagram that sentence for me?
I’m a recovering Lutheran. (It’s like a recovering Catholic with less sacraments.) For the longest time, I believed what my parents/pastor/etc. told me until I saw a huge display of anti-Christian sentiment in the church. There were two kids who lived across the street from the church, half-siblings living with a drug-addled mother. If anyone needed Christian charity it was them. The pastor, a wonderful man who sadly is no longer with us, took them in and encouraged them to come to church, join the youth group, and all the other wholesome activities they didn’t have access too at home. The Stuck-Up Contingent (9/10ths of the church, most of whom I’m distantly related to) didn’t agree and shunned the kids as well as the pastor and his family. After he left for another church, the kids left. I started having real issues with the faith then. I didn’t trust the people of that church anymore because I had seen that ugly side of them. This eventually generalized into distrusting all of Christianity.
After several years of this mistrust, I started splitting from the church. I met a person who was going through a spiritual quest, trying to figure out what she believed in. I started my own spiritual quest. At this time, my mother’s memory started slipping due to Alzheimer’s or a stroke, we still don’t know. This added a bit of the whole “anger at God” thing which pushed me even further away from the faith of my fathers. I looked at Wiccan, Buddhism, Taoism, Shamanism, and several other faiths until I settled into the indeterminate faith I’m in today: a kind of nature-worshipper with a little bit of Buddhist meditation thrown in. It works for me. Ironically, I lead a more Christian life now that I’m pagan than I ever did as a Lutheran.
**Ironically, I lead a more Christian life now that I’m pagan than I ever did as a Lutheran **
I’m not a pagan, but this pretty much catagorizes my situation nicely, in a nutshell.
I’m am escaped papist 
I’ve come to the conclusion that God doesn’t care what our religion is. God just wants us to lead happy, healthy lives ; if we’re happy, then God is happy —that’s how He gets his kicks.
That being said ,religion fills a definite purpose . If everybody, suddenly, stopped having religious beliefs( whether or not the beliefs are true ) , there would be a terrible instability in society. There’s an expression that says religion is the “opiate of the masses”. It has brought comfort to people who had no other comfort . I think of it as a spiritual “bullet” that we can bite on when in pain.
As somebody with a fairly sophisticated scientific training, I require a religion that fit all the scientific facts; it must be logical and devoid of silly superstitions—God would want us to use our minds to the fullest to understand the universe
Being born into and raised in a strict Christian religious cult gave me a head start on filtering out all the B.S. that’s inherent in organized religion, to put it mildly. Theist, yes. Jesus, I like. Religion, no thanks.
By what means did you arrive at that conclusion?
It was a long drawn out process , influenced by eastern philosophy and ( believe it or not ) computor science
I was brought up Catholic, but found it really boring. No offense please meant to Catholics or Catholicism.
My parents were nominal Catholics.
I found Jesus, or He found ,e at age 19 and a neighbor turned me on to a non-denominational church, where people spoke in tongues, beleived in casting out demons, and good contemporary chrsitian music.
Thats the kidn of church I’ve alwasy liekd.
Examples of these would be Assemblies Of God and Foursquare. Also some Pentecostal and Non-Denominational churches.
Unfortunately, eveyrone in these churches happens to be fundies, republicans, and think halloween is evil.
Oh well, you can’t have everything.
God, please forgive me my horrendous spelling errors. will type s.l.o.w.e.r, in the future.:o
Lets hear from the Mormons out there.
Were you brought up in the faith?
Libertarian-
heck, Jesus was almost slain a bit early for making that construct!G
John 8:58-59.
Can you be more specific? Saying that it was a long, drawn out process doesn’t really say anything about how reasonable your conclusions were.
Besides, it seems to me that happiness and morality are often at odds with each other – and surely the Creator would be concerned with matters of right and wrong, in addition to mere happiness.
For census purposes, I’m more a Buddhist than anything else.
The attraction had a few aspects. By and large, it tends to avoid dogma; the core teachings don’t fall back on Mysterious Ways; it’s built right in that the teachings are a means and not an end in themselves; and as faiths go, most formulations of it are very inclusive. There is no “Problem of Suffering” in Buddhism, but simply the truth of it–it doesn’t spend nearly as much time trying to argue with the reality of the world. No insistence on a theistic metaphysics, but no insistence that there not be one, either.
All in all, the narratives of Buddhism resonated much more strongly with both the experiences that killed my atheism and my skepticism than competing faiths did. So here I am for the foreseeable kalpa or two.
Drastic, I admit I don’t know much about buddhism, but the little bit that I did read doesn’t really speak in terms of god, but more in terms of living a good (or right) life. Which appeals to me! Am I right or wrong about that? If I’m right, I guess I don’t understand why they call it a religion. Can you elaborate a bit for me?