Overcoming Religion

[SilverWingedSeraph]

I wasn't sure which board to post this on, but I figured this would be about the best one. Anyway, the purpose of this thread, I suppose is to share your personal experiences or stories about how you may have overcome or otherwise moved away from the religion you were raised in, or any other sort of belief that you may have had forced on you by your parents or figures of authority.

Maybe I just want an excuse to tell my own history and hear if anyone else has similar ones to offer. Anyway, that's what I'll do.

For the last year or so, I've been waffling about with how I feel about my religious beliefs. Am I agnostic? Am I a god-hating christian? Or am I just suffering from a crisis of faith? Well, a few months ago, I decided that I am indeed an atheist, and that was no easy realisation to come to. I'm twenty-two years old now, and if you'd asked me what I believe when I was eighteen, I'd have told you that the world was created in six days, some six thousand odd years ago, that the global flood really happened, and that homosexuality is a sin and that gays would go to hell.

After all, that's what I was raised to believe, amoung other unpleasant things. I grew up going to a Pentacostal Church with my father and his parents, with all the corny singing and praising, and other seemingly harmless and friendly forms of worship, but whenever anyone actually spoke to me about God and Religion, it was always to tell me that the Bible was right, and all the other people, even the really smart people, were wrong. So, growing up I was spoonfeed this nonsense, growing up on racism, sexism, homophobia, and a general distrust of science. Atheists were devil worshippers, Catholics were vile cultists and pedophiles, and the bible was not to be questioned.

And what really pisses me off the most is that I didn't question it. Not once. Not ever. Growing up, if I'd even thought to think "How could that possibly have happened? That doesn't make sense!", I would have saved myself a lot of trouble. But it never happened. Although, I think the first thing that started to steer me away from religion happened when I was really young. I was in Sunday school, playing around with my younger brother, taunting him harmlessly and generally just being a kid, and the Sunday School teacher, a Phillipino woman who was the Pastor's wife, grabbed my by the shoulders, and started yelling that I was possessed by a demon, and that it had to get out, and kept on doing so until I broke down into tears.

It might not seem like much, but I was like, seven or eight, and it was pretty traumatic experience at the time. And yet, for about a decade afterwards, I was still the good little Christian. When I actually started questioning my faith, it was because I started reading the Bible again, and also because I finally accepted my own sexuality, that I am bisexual and that I'm not entirely comfortable with the gender I was born into. So, for a year or two, I waffled about, trying to tell myself that if I was good and if I prayed hard, God would make me a better person, but more and more I realised it was bullshit.

It started as "If a God exists, why the hell would he make me this way, and then punish me for it?" And then it went from there. I explored some neo-pagan religions for a while, experiencing the same "religious experiences" I did as a Christian, before I finally realised them for what they were --- the fanciful and hopeful delusions of an imaginitive young person who didn't want to feel alone in the world.

In large part, however, I credit my complete deconversion to Wong and his website, and this forum. Even as a Christian, I liked to look at things logically, but I'd never even considered doing so with my religion, simply because it was taboo to do so. When I did, I realised I honestly couldn't believe that there is a God.

There's a lot more to it, than that, and my story was probably all over the place, due in no small part to the fact I've been awake for 36 hours now, but there you have it. Does anyone else have any similar stories to share?

[haard]

Nothing as dramatic, but perhaps similar.
Raised quite secular but as a child was believing protestant, prayed to god and believed I was always watched, all that.

At confirmation, I started to read the bible, and then I started to doubt the church, because the church did not reflect the bible, and turned towards a more personal faith.
Then I started to doubt in christianity - or rather, disagree with it, since the god of the bible is not a very nice god. I also realized that I believed in christianity only because of accident of birth, and turned into some kind of theist.
Then, I noticed a certain lack of demand for a god to explain things (duh!), and turned agnostic around 18-20ish.
I found creationtheory.org a couple of years later, realized that I had put a politically correct filter on my skepticism, and turned religion-bashing atheist.

[Darth Ruinus]

Wow, that Sunday school teacher sounds crazy.

I think I have always been an atheist, as even though I was raised up in a Catholic family, I never really bought it, and went to church because I had no choice, and said I was Catholic to not anger my family. But I'm older now so my family can't do shit to convert me now.

I still remember when I revealed my atheism to my parents. It was a month ago, and my mom was talking to me and my little brother about something (forgot the actual topic) and she said something about god, it was at this point that I said "I don't know, I don't believe in that. God and spirits." At which point my mom gave me the usual "But the world is evidence for His existance!" "How can you deny the miracles that happen every day?" "You're just young, and don't know any better" and "I'll pray you find God again." Luckily, she couldn't see my face (my back was turned to her) so she couldn't see me at every single one of her comments.

I finally just said "You know, I don't want to start this argument with you, I'm atheist, you can't change that. I don't know why you are making such a big deal out of this, you know I'm a good person, so what is the big deal?" She then asked my brother what he believe and he said "Well, there probably is a God, but my brother is right, there is no real evidence for its existance."

My mom was not pleased. She started crying!

My dad came in and asked what was happening, and when he found out he said something like "No don't say that. You know God exists, you are smart." I told him the same thing I did with my mom, there is no evidence, no reason to believe in any dieties. He got pissed and said "No, you're getting stupid ideas from the computer and your friends and TV, read your books again (I guess he meant my philosophy books?) Hundreds of smart minds believe in God."

I simply stood up and said "I don't want to do this with you guys, I want to go to my room and relax, I have a test in a few days, I don't want to sit here and argue with you two all day."

Good times all around.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

What really surprised me was, when I "came out" to my dad and told him I was an atheist, he wasn't all that bothered by it. After years of being with his church, and seeing all the hypocrisy that went on there, and he himself being far from the perfect Christian, having slept with two of his friends wives, he'd become fairly disillusioned with God and Christianity in general. He still believes, and I have no doubt he always will. I can't change that, and I really have no interest in try. But what I can do is help him change in simpler ways. The homophobia... that's the trickiest part, really. Which makes coming out to him on the other issue more difficult. I mean, I've said as much, acting like I was joking, and he seemed okay with it, but some of the stuff he says just bugs me, though I suspect much of it is tough-guy macho posturing.

So, yeah, despite being fucked up by my religious upbringing, my Dad's actually not so bad. And my mom was never very religious anyway, so... no pressure. I occasionally get into debates with my dad. Nothing serious. I've gotten him to at least mostly realise that creationism is bullshit. I've fully convinced him that Noah's arc is complete nonsense. And he's admited that there are flaws with the Bible and to consider it the absolute authoritive word of God is ridiculous.

So, I like to think I've had a positive effect on him.

[CaptJodan]

Pretty sure I've posted something like this before, but what the hell.... I'm sad to say that I didn't have the mental fortitude to fend off the indoctrination like a lot of people here did.

I was raised in the Seventh Day Adventist variety of Christiandom. Both of my parents were also raised in the same religion, and met going to the same religious school (Bass Memorial Academy). They hated their experience at that school, so their religious convictions were light to moderate at best. They believe in god and most of the "historical" tenants of the SDA church, though don't tend to practice their more extreme real world applications (no jewelry, no lipstick, no work or any play unrelated to god from dusk Friday to dusk Saturday, etc). Both my parents had strongly religious grandparents, however, who were certainly more traditional in their views.

Most of my youth was spent with going through the motions of religion. My dad would take me to church, not necessarily out of any burning desire to go, but in part because he felt guilty not doing it. He didn't want me to be raised without the experience, no doubt in part because of pressure from his dad. My mom never went to church unless it was a forced family function with the grandparents, and later even stopped going then. Still, my grandparents (and some from my parents) were enough of an influence in my early life to instill a strong sense that god existed, science as it related to evolution was flat wrong, and other fun-filled facts that had my head spinning. I would read the bible as a child, be horrified by the OT, ask questions, and be shot down for asking them. This was beginning of my mental block designed to cut any kind of rational thought from impeding on my beliefs. As a grew older (around 10-12), the church goings stopped, since dad didn't really want to go anyway, but I was by then fully afraid of god. One of my more illogical qualities that I kept until I got into college was a fear of cursing, fearing that god would ban me from heaven just for uttering a curse word (I can actually remember the conversation from my grandmother that actually got me believing that). When I would slip up, which was rare, I would immediately go off on a "please forgive me, I didn't mean it" tyrant and pray excessively to be forgiven.

At the same time, of course, I had figured out pretty early on (puberty) that I wasn't into girls. My religion forced me to try and "change" myself. I prayed nightly to overcome what I was, and dated several girls in high school to try and force a change. Ultimately, though, the overwhelming desire to change myself began to affect my mental stability. I became angry at almost everything, depressed, and pushed many people away. I was in constant fear of being discovered for what I was (I don't fit much of the stereotype of "gay"), and even more afraid that I would go to hell for it. Finally, one day while I was 16 I just broke down alone on my own. I realized that I couldn't live trying to force myself to be this something I wasn't. The only choices I could come up with were either to kill myself, or accept who I was, and damned be the consequences in the afterlife. Either solution would have me end up in hell, I reasoned, but at least the struggle with myself would be silent. Obviously I chose the latter.

Despite all that, I still believed in god, and rationalized that god may not really mean what other people say about him. I had not gotten past reading the OT, since it had scared the shit out of me as a child, and lets face it the Bible isn't a page turner. I started to focus on the more positive messages that I heard people say about religion, choosing to believe in the more benevolent god. I stayed in that state for a while longer. The questions I had had as a child and those I had come up with later still nagged at me, but I pushed them away almost instinctively. Looking back, I'm always amazed at how effective such indoctrination was. I was not a part of the most religious of families, at least with my parents, yet many of the hard core beliefs stuck. Every time evolution was brought up in school, a mental barrier would raise itself up and say "this isn't real, ignore this part". And since my parents are YECs, long time periods went in one ear and out the other.

I didn't really start to question my beliefs in a practical way until I started lurking at SDN. Despite all the shit above, I was still an inquisitive person, it was just that that inquisitiveness in questioning "how" as it related to things that were supposed to be reserved for god was squashed when I was young. The arguments here on many other issues made a lot of sense, particularly Mike's, but I quickly learned to avoid reading evolution or anti-religion topics, justifying it with "he's just an angry atheist". But I'd wander into a topic that talked about human rights or gay rights, and those generally would contain those messages I was trying to avoid. Over time, I just couldn't deny the logic of the damned arguments, so I went reading more about evolution, listened to more of the science topics. Science began to answer those questions that religion said were unanswerable until we met up with god. I still resisted for a while from the fear that I would simply cease to exist some day, that no part of me would be around 1,000 years from now, but eventually the "grow a backbone" arguments made me realize that denying reality just because you didn't like it was foolish as well.

In short, my conversion was ultimately a combination of my sexual preferences flying in the face of my religion, and (moreso) this board.

[Darth Ruinus]

So, I like to think I've had a positive effect on him.

That's great. I think when I revealed myself as a filthy Satan worshipping atheist to my parents it pushed them a bit more into Catholicism, at least for my mom. One of the effects of this, that I see at least, is the homophobia. On election day my parents had just gotten home and I heard my mom said she voted Yes on Prop. 8. I was very confused as to why she did that, and her reply was "Because God says that is wrong." My dad's reasons for voting Yes were the same thing!

My parents are smarter than this, I just know it, but here they are, acting like idiots. At the very least I find some comfort in the fact that they don't show this type of behaviour out in the world, they keep it mostly to themselves. Also luckily is that whenever my mom says something stupid like that me and my little brother (who I suspect is Agnostic) flat out ignore her, seeing bullshit for what it is. Sometimes we call her on it too.

[Rahvin]

I wasn't sure which board to post this on, but I figured this would be about the best one. Anyway, the purpose of this thread, I suppose is to share your personal experiences or stories about how you may have overcome or otherwise moved away from the religion you were raised in, or any other sort of belief that you may have had forced on you by your parents or figures of authority.

Maybe I just want an excuse to tell my own history and hear if anyone else has similar ones to offer. Anyway, that's what I'll do.

For the last year or so, I've been waffling about with how I feel about my religious beliefs. Am I agnostic? Am I a god-hating christian? Or am I just suffering from a crisis of faith? Well, a few months ago, I decided that I am indeed an atheist, and that was no easy realisation to come to. I'm twenty-two years old now, and if you'd asked me what I believe when I was eighteen, I'd have told you that the world was created in six days, some six thousand odd years ago, that the global flood really happened, and that homosexuality is a sin and that gays would go to hell.

After all, that's what I was raised to believe, amoung other unpleasant things. I grew up going to a Pentacostal Church with my father and his parents, with all the corny singing and praising, and other seemingly harmless and friendly forms of worship, but whenever anyone actually spoke to me about God and Religion, it was always to tell me that the Bible was right, and all the other people, even the really smart people, were wrong. So, growing up I was spoonfeed this nonsense, growing up on racism, sexism, homophobia, and a general distrust of science. Atheists were devil worshippers, Catholics were vile cultists and pedophiles, and the bible was not to be questioned.

And what really pisses me off the most is that I didn't question it. Not once. Not ever. Growing up, if I'd even thought to think "How could that possibly have happened? That doesn't make sense!", I would have saved myself a lot of trouble. But it never happened. Although, I think the first thing that started to steer me away from religion happened when I was really young. I was in Sunday school, playing around with my younger brother, taunting him harmlessly and generally just being a kid, and the Sunday School teacher, a Phillipino woman who was the Pastor's wife, grabbed my by the shoulders, and started yelling that I was possessed by a demon, and that it had to get out, and kept on doing so until I broke down into tears.

It might not seem like much, but I was like, seven or eight, and it was pretty traumatic experience at the time. And yet, for about a decade afterwards, I was still the good little Christian. When I actually started questioning my faith, it was because I started reading the Bible again, and also because I finally accepted my own sexuality, that I am bisexual and that I'm not entirely comfortable with the gender I was born into. So, for a year or two, I waffled about, trying to tell myself that if I was good and if I prayed hard, God would make me a better person, but more and more I realised it was bullshit.

It started as "If a God exists, why the hell would he make me this way, and then punish me for it?" And then it went from there. I explored some neo-pagan religions for a while, experiencing the same "religious experiences" I did as a Christian, before I finally realised them for what they were --- the fanciful and hopeful delusions of an imaginitive young person who didn't want to feel alone in the world.

In large part, however, I credit my complete deconversion to Wong and his website, and this forum. Even as a Christian, I liked to look at things logically, but I'd never even considered doing so with my religion, simply because it was taboo to do so. When I did, I realised I honestly couldn't believe that there is a God.

There's a lot more to it, than that, and my story was probably all over the place, due in no small part to the fact I've been awake for 36 hours now, but there you have it. Does anyone else have any similar stories to share?

My experience was remarkably similar to yours, at least so far as not questioning beliefs.

My parents are Presbyterian, not Pentecostal, so I didn't grow up with any speaking in tongues or demons nonsense. My parents raised me to be extremely religious, but they also stressed the importance of respecting others' beliefs. My environment was filled with Biblical instruction, but not racism, homophobia, and bigotry.

But the immoral and scientifically bullshit protions of the Bible were basically ignored. I was never taught specifically that evolution was false or that modern geology was wrong. I was taught that teh Earth was created in 6 days by God, and the remainder was never even mentioned. No consideration as to the ethical concerns of slaughtering the firstborn of Egypt or the conquest of Canaan were ever spoken of. And so I compartamentalized. I was extremely rational in normal thionking, with a massive intellectual blind spot concerning my religion. If you asked me how I rationalized evolution with 6-day Creation, I would have come up with an addlebrained apologetic response and tried to hammer the square peg into the round hole. I never questioned my religious beliefs at all.

I did have a few experiences that primed me for my eventual application of critical thought to Christianity. In 8th grade on a class trip to Boston, we were approached by several missionaries from different religions. My friends and I purchased a book from a Buddhist because we were all curious about other belief systems. Immediately after the Buddhist walked away, a Christian immediately came over, shoved Chick tracts in our hands, and said "you boys know you're wasting your time with that garbage, right?" His blatant intolerance of other people's belief systems and total disregard of our right and ability to determine our own deeply offended me. A few years later, my own grandfather (a former educator at a midwestern Christian school) began to grow ever more zealous, and started telling family members that they were going to Hell, and yelled at me and my cousins for playing D&D because it was a "devil's game." His intolerance and fanaticism over the next few years as I started attenging college and eventually left home actually caused me to not speak with him until he died.

In the past 5 years or so, I began visiting sites like this one and EvCforum.net. I read Mike's main site as well as generally lurking in the forums. I finally applied critical thinking and tested the Bible against what science has determined, and decided that the more supernatural events in the Bible like 6-day creation and the Flood couldn't possibly have happened as stated. At this point I was an apologetic Christian, still maintaining belief but not taking the Bible as literally true.

This site and a bit of debate with Creationists eventually led me to question my reasons for believing at all. I already rejected the Bible as the literal word of God, and I took the immoral acts carried out in God's name in the Bible to be just the actions of immoral men using God as a justification, no different from Phelps or Hitler or Bush or any other religious monster from history. Then I started to consider the bits like Revelation, or the slaughter of the firstborn, or the real ethical meaning of Soddom and Gamorrah and the Flood. These weren't people performing evil acts in God's name, they were stories of evil actions taken directly by God. I also learned a bit more about Occam's Razor and logic. I realized that I didn't really have any reason to believe aside from my own wishful thinking and my parents instruction.

The combination of the two allowed me to finally say that there likely is not any such thing as God, and even if there were, I'd rather spend eternity in hell than worship a monster like the Biblical deity. I now put all gods in the same group with invisible unicorns and fairies - I can't disprove them, but the likelihood of their existence in the absence of any evidence approaches zero.

I'm also rather bitter about having been brainwashed for so many years by my family, though I also understand that they're victims of the same brainwashing (and more) in their childhoods. I'm still rather ashamed and angry with myself for having proclaimed belief for all those years without ever having so much as thought about why I believed, or testing my beliefs against reality to determine their accuracy.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

This site has convinced me more and more that, religiously, I lucked out, despite being from rural area that is full of fundies. I think my family is nominally methodist, but you have to go back to my grandparents to see any evidence of it. My parents were hippies, and the subject of religion never really came up when I was young. I can count on one hand the total number of times I've even been in a church, early on it was because my parents simply didn't want to get up early on sunday, if they didn't have to, and later the lack of early indoctrination allowed me to take a rationalist view of things. I was an atheist before I knew what the word meant. The few times I have been to a church were, with the exception of my sister's wedding, the result of having been invited by friends. None of those experiences left me with more respect for Christianity than I had before, being told you're going to hell on a one way ticket unless you reject rational thought will do that, I guess.

On further reflection, I would have to say that I have religion in much the same way as Discworld dwarves, in that it does indeed take a very strong minded atheist to yell something like "irrational and outmoded superstition on a crutch," after hitting your thumb with a hammer.

[Havok]

Quite honestly, I can't remember when it was that I was first conscious of not believing in God. I'm not sure if I ever did. On the other hand, I can't remember when I was first conscious of not believing in Santa Clause either, so maybe the fact that I have a bad memory means that those moments are lost to time.

I do know when I realized that religion is, IMO a crutch for weak people that can't cope with the reality that we as a species and individuals aren't really anything special, and people that just can't deal with everyday life on their own. That was when I was in 5th grade. I remember that because I got sent to the office for voicing that opinion.

Interestingly, although I am Catholic technically, my mom never had a problem with my nit being religious. She does get upset when I say I don't believe in God, but sometimes it almost seems like a "just in case" thing.

I can also say when it was that I started condemning religion, instead of just not believing in any of it. My freshman year of High School I decide to read the Bible, which I had never done, cover to cover. My Uncle had given it to me a year or so before for a birthday present or something. What a load of horse shit. I could not believe the hypocrisy in that fucking thing, the straight up contradiction of itself, but mostly I was ASTOUNDED by how much of a FUCKING PRICK God was. I mean wow.

Other than helping in religious arguments, it added to my already formed belief of religion being a crutch, that people are religious and believe in God only out of fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of never seeing loved ones again, fear of death, and well... fear of fucking God being a goddamned prick!

[charlemagne]

My father's a protestant, my mother's a catholic, and my brother and me both were kinda brought up catholic, with my mother at the helm. Catholic is also what's put down in my passport in the religion field. But religion never really played a role in everyday life. It's not like my mother/parents ever talked about god, the bible or anything about us, no prayers or so. Religion just wasn't a topic, except for one thing - my mother took my brother and me to church every Sunday. And like havokeff I can't really remember when I first consciously thought "what a load of crap", but I can't remember ever really believing in anything church/bible-related.

The bible/the stories in the bible never sounded true to me. For example, I never could imagine god really giving Moses the 10 commandments. My thoughts were a bit like "God never talked to me, why should I believe that he talked to people over 2000 years ago?" I also never got the whole trinity thing, one being split into three entities while still being one, that always was just impossible to me. How can god be also Jesus when Jesus on the cross talked to god? Humbug, I shouted in my head.

Also, the priest's sermons always struck me as really stupid, because I never experienced the whole "with god's help everything will be alright" thing to be true. Bad things happened to people wether they went to church every Sunday or not, I got the hang of that pretty early I think, although never really bad stuff happened to me or my immediate family before an uncle of mine killed himself when I was 13 or 14.

Sometimes I felt a bit... guilty maybe for not believing. Mostly during mass, when as a child I thought things like "I really don't believe that this ever happened, but what if god is there after all, watching me right now, he'd be pissed because I don't believe this." But I never lost any sleep over it, and those stupid thoughts just went away without any conscious effort I can remember.

That didn't keep me from becoming an altar boy, though. But it wasn't because I wanted to "serve god" or anything, it was because all my friends did it, too, and our whole group met every Friday, and we played games and had great fun. We practised the whole mass service then, too, but it really never was about the religious stuff supposedly happening then, it was a purely mechanical thing of "priest says this, you do that, priest says that, you ring this bell". By the way, now-pope Benedikt held a memorial at our church once a year because his late sister is buried there, and I several times gave wine to and washed the hands of Joseph Ratzinger, which was pretty funny in retrospect when he became pope I'll never forget the nervousness of our priest every time the Cardinal came to visit

Anyways, since I never was really brought up in the spirit of "you have to have faith", it really wasn't a big deal when I stopped going to church, it kinda just happened at age 15 or 16. Nowadays, I only go to church with the whole family on Christmas Eve, which is purely a tradition thing, because it ain't no Christmas without a dark church with lit Christmas treets and everyone singing Oh du Fröhliche. Oh, and the odd wedding and funeral will see me in church, because I'm not like "I don't believe so I shun mass", nowadays I just don't care. Whoever wants to believe, by all means, do so - luckily you won't be lectured by crazy fundies around here if you don't believe in god or don't go to church.

[Darth Wong]

It's funny, I came from the opposite direction. I actually tried to join the Christian faith when I was in university, because Rebecca wanted me to. I would focus on the good parts of the religion (which is actually really easy to do because that message is bombarded at you from every direction in our society) and ignore the bad parts (which is also really easy to do).

But there were always those parts that just didn't make sense to me. And while I won't bore you with yet another list of examples, let's just say that once I left university, I kept running into Christians who (for whatever reason) emphasized all of the parts that just didn't make any sense. Forced to confront the most illogical parts of the Bible, I gave up my efforts to adopt this faith. Eventually, it ended up going the other way: Rebecca abandoned her own faith. She posted her deconversion story at http://www.stardestroyer.net/Mike/RantM ... rsion.html

[DaveJB]

In the UK, the school system very forcefully pushes Christianity on students (or at least used to; the EU might have forced them to tone it down) and quite often has daily prayer. The final year students even got subjected to an evangelism week at the school I went to, and there were disproportionately severe punishments for either not taking part or being overly "disrespectful" to the visiting Christians.

Despite all that, I never really took it in very much; the most I ever was would probably have been agnostic with slight Christian leanings. Once I was out of school however, it fell away and I became fully atheistic after getting some more life and scientific experience (even with my eventual university degree being one in digital animation). I guess the reason for that was that my parents never bothered forcing any religion on me, and that I've always been a fairly sceptical person.

Strangely enough, my early interest in dinosaurs - which later got rekindled by Jurassic Park - might actually have been a driving factor in me never really accepting Christianity, since I couldn't work out how the dinosaurs were meant to fit into the bible, and no-one could ever give me a convincing answer, making me suspicious of the Bible's accuracy at an early age. I guess UK fundies must lack the imagination of their US counterparts.

[FSTargetDrone]

I've posted on this before, but what the hell...

My parents were raised Catholic. I wasmsent to Catholic grade and high school. My parents took my sister and I to church every Sunday for while we were in grade school.

But my experiences in Catholic school, as far as religion goes, were not particularly odious. Even in actual religion classes, I remember very little in the way of dogma and more of history. I never thought much about religion outside of school, aside from occasionally saying "Goodnight" to God for awhile when I was younger. But I don't remember praying much on my own. Even in Mass, I would be thinking about other things, generally being bored with the mass. High school religion classes were as much about Catholic philosophy and teachings, but even the Hungarian Piarist priests we had never beat us over the heads with it.

My parents were never particularly religious. They took us and we went through the motions, but it never went beyond that. Someone here once described it as being "Holiday Catholics." We attended Christmas and Easter masses regularly for awhile, but even that stopped as my sister and I got older. I've never once had any sort of deep (or even shallow) conversation about religion or "God" or anything like that with my parents that didn't relate to religion class homework or getting help memorizing prayers for the occasional Sacrament I was studying to "receive."

I remember, back in early grade school, maybe between 3rd and 5th grades, it occurred to me how absurd the story of the creation of Adam and Eve was. I sort of drifted away from all kinds of belief over the years until it disappeared entirely.

Unlike many people here (at least, so it seems), I was never exposed to any kind of preachy relatives or Bible studies at home or talk of damnation. None of my immediate relatives are particularly religious. Some of my dad's siblings may still attend mass on Sundays, but it doesn't go beyond that. Maybe I've been strangely fortunate, but religion has been such a small part of my life in so many ways (despite being raised in the USA), I am still somewhat surprised to hear how pervasive it has been for others here.

Outside of this forum, I rarely think about, let alone discuss religion with anyone. Most of my friends are atheists, or at least agnostic. I don't interact with anyone who is overtly religious. It's just not part of my life in any appreciable way.

[Havok]

It's just not part of my life in any appreciable way.

I call bullshit! You had to do some praying to get the Phillies a World Series Championship.

[Metatwaddle]

It's funny, I came from the opposite direction. I actually tried to join the Christian faith when I was in university, because Rebecca wanted me to. I would focus on the good parts of the religion (which is actually really easy to do because that message is bombarded at you from every direction in our society) and ignore the bad parts (which is also really easy to do).

But there were always those parts that just didn't make sense to me. And while I won't bore you with yet another list of examples, let's just say that once I left university, I kept running into Christians who (for whatever reason) emphasized all of the parts that just didn't make any sense. Forced to confront the most illogical parts of the Bible, I gave up my efforts to adopt this faith. Eventually, it ended up going the other way: Rebecca abandoned her own faith. She posted her deconversion story at http://www.stardestroyer.net/Mike/RantM ... rsion.html

I sort of did both: tried to adopt religion seriously, and later left it. I was raised in the Episcopal church, which is liberal and sort of lukewarm (although we had a really cool priest when I was in high school). I would have said I believed in God, but I was never very sure about it. I think I viewed the Bible stories mostly as stories, and didn't really take a position on their truth or falsehood.

Then when I was a teenager, my grandmother subscribed me to a teen Christian magazine and I met some evangelical Christians online. I realized I wasn't taking the whole Jesus thing very seriously, and decided I would have to Believe (with a capital B) if I really wanted to call myself Christian. For a year or two, I fishtailed a bit, oscillating between atheist-leaning agnosticism and trying really, really hard to believe in evangelical Christianity. At one point I even got "saved" and prayed for God to make me less doubtful. (It didn't work.) Like Mike, I kept running into people who told me to believe the parts of the Bible that made the least sense. I never believed in the parts that went contrary to empirical evidence, like creationism. I spent most of my effort trying to swallow the ideas that prayer worked, that humans actually deserved to be punished eternally if they didn't accept Jesus, and that faith was a necessary and sufficient criterion for getting to heaven. I lurked at some Christian web boards to try and see what Christians my age believed. One of the forums got invaded by SDN's "Anti-Idiot Invasion Force". I think I remember Alyrium being there, along with Admiral Valdemar (though he wasn't going by AIIF at the time). I remember that they impressed me at the time, though I didn't realize exactly how easy it was for them to answer all the arguments thrown at them by the board denizens.

And then when I was going into eleventh grade, I went on a trip with my church youth group. They were normally pretty quiet and the youth group was more a social thing with charity work and largely uninformative sociological and ethical discussions - but when we went on that trip and were surrounded by other evangelical youth groups, everyone except me Got Jesus. Including my friends. I was pretty upset for most of the trip, because some of my friends had basically said that doubts were not welcome in the discussions. Normally that wasn't their style, but this time they got pissy when I said I didn't want to drink the Kool-Aid.

So I called my dad, who is culturally Christian but is probably agnostic or atheist. He told me on the phone that he had finally had a crisis of faith in grad school, when he went to a Bible study and found that his doubts and questions were not welcome, even among the best students of medicine in the world. He eventually ended up concluding on his own that the Bible's account of humanity - both its origins and the idea of the "soul" - didn't make sense given what he had learned about science. It was oddly comforting to hear an intelligent adult tell me I didn't have to believe any of that crap. Of course I knew intellectually that there were plenty of adults who didn't believe, but when you are an impressionable 15-year-old away from home, school and the internet, it's easy to forget.

On that trip, I decided I was finished with Christianity and decided to call myself "agnostic" instead. (I think I was really an atheist, but didn't know it yet.) I returned from the trip angry, disillusioned, and ready to find some fellow rationalists. I got back from the trip on a Sunday. On Monday, I traced the AIIF back here and signed up at the forum. The really fun part is that when I was trying to figure out which forum member Alyrium was, I originally thought it was RedImperator.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Overcoming religion was easy for me. I was never really raised to be religious (apart from the general Christian background noise,) as my poor benighted parents figured us kids would choose our own faiths. So right from the beginning, I had my head filled with all the particulars of astronomy, geology, biology . . . all the natural sciences, and anything I could read (and up to the age of about twelve or so, I had an aversion to anything that wasn't non-fiction and published before my birth year. At twelve, I started reading Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Harrison.)

I got somewhat closer to Christianity in high school (my strong agnosticism became a somewhat weaker agnosticism,) as I had a brother in Scouts who was starting to attend Sunday School and go to church, and I tagged along (going to church, not Sunday School,) mostly because my father would buy breakfast for us kids, and there were usually free goodies at the church after services (like my Bible. Yes, I boosted a Bible. From a church Sunday School. If there was a Hell, I'd be going to it for that. But hey, it's a good Bible. It is filled with documentation on the translation from the source materials.) I also took a Bible as Literature class in high school to satisfy my senior year English requirement. (Don't laugh, I took an in-depth course in the works of Shakespeare for my junior year, and my senior year choice was driven by the realization that regular senior year English would be incredibly dull and tedious, especially as I'd started high school as one of those AP brats.) In taking the class, I learned to treat the Bible as a work of literature, and for my senior year research paper I, naturally, chose to study the conflict between science and the Church.

By that point, I was agnostic (and very likely a weak atheist, only I'd also spent my formative years with Rush Limbaugh on the radio, and with conservative parents . . . so thinking of myself in that context wasn't possible.) In college, I gained more access to the Internet than I ever had in high school. On the internet, I encountered creationist cretins and found I could comfortably debunk them using their own self-contradicting holy book and my own science knowledge. I further sharpened my Sword of Logic on Usenet, and in the wild and wooly early days of this board, and in running with atheists in atheist chats.

By then, I'd become quite comfortable with atheism, and am satisfied with my complete lack of anything resembling spirituality. So really, my tale is not so much one of overcoming religion. It's more one of starting out as a naturalist and an atheist at heart and growing up to fully embrace it.

[ray245]

For me, the burden of religion and all the rules imposed bored me. As a four year old kid in a christian nursery, when we are told to close our eyes and pray, I thought it was supposed to be a sleeping session.

I am a spiritual person, but I choose to ignore the rules set up by others.

[ArcturusMengsk]

I began my life as an extremely devoted Southern Baptist; by the age of ten, when I was officially baptized into the Church, I could recite entire chapters and verses out of the Bible by memory. I had even taken to transcribing books of the Bible by hand as a mnemonic aid, so that I could impress my highly religious grandparents (who had, I believed, prodded me in the direction of becoming a pastor) and get in good standing with them.

It is perhaps stereotypical to say that I began to question my faith on the event of my father's death, but I believe it to be reasonable from a psychological vantage point to begin to wonder, if one father figure had passed away, might it not also be true that the other Father on which I had relied were dead as well? Certainly He had done nothing for me in my darker moments, and as I studied my own psychological reactions in Church afterwards it occurred to me that what had attracted me initially to Christianity wasn't the doctrinaire, intellectual notions supposedly espoused by the religion - that through grace are ye saved through faith; to live is Christ and to die is gain; and so forth - none of that mattered, because none of it made sense from a purely analytical perspective. I had begun to grow self-aware, and as I studied myself I began to realize that the psychological appeal of Christianity comes not from the doctrines it promotes, but the hidden emotional symbology of the religion: Christianity is Buddhism for the unenlightened, so to speak. It teaches self-denial, self-renunciation and self-abnegation, but it's far easier to accept it than Buddhism (for example) because, rather than relying on ponderous and weighty metaphysical explanations for these emotional states and their usages, it instead simplifies them, makes them divine commandments rather than the goal of individual discipline and self-discovery.

This point of view was reinforced in me when I began to read about philosophy, and I came across the works of authors like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Both of them understood that the basic message of Christianity was life-denial, just as in many Eastern religions, but that it was made comprehensible through symbolic sleight-of-hand to ease consumption for the masses. The end-goal of Christianity is not some literal otherworldly Heaven, as I think most Christians understand on a guttural, instinctual level, but instead a purely passive nothingness (in this the Kabbalistic Jews are more honest with themselves about their theology), a state of deindividuation. And in realizing this, it finally made sense to me, that the fatal flaw of Christian theology lies not in its conflicts with empirical science, but its inner contradictions: Christianity professes the belief in the individual soul, and yet its theological conclusion is 'Oneness with God'. Christianity defeats itself.

And so I 'overcame' Christianity, not by learning the scientific arguments against it - I am still nigh-illiterate in that regard - but by working through the problems that Christian theology contained within itself, and realizing that it is a fundamentally flawed metaphysical system.

[Bilbo]

No story here to share. My family was never religious. We went to churches for weddings and funerals.

What does astound me is the number of things like your encounter with the Asian whackjob that is accepted for religious reasons but in any other situation would be considered child abuse.

[Modax]

No story here to share. My family was never religious. We went to churches for weddings and funerals.

Same here. My parents are both atheists, and I've been an atheist for almost as long as I can remember. My parents were forced to send me to a catholic primary school, because we lived on an acreage and it was the only school in our area, but I was never fully converted, even though they forced religion down our throats. I think this is because my father taught me to think critically at a young age. I have a strong memory of asking my grade 2 teacher why God didn't answer the prayers we made in class, and she was unable to give an answer that satisfied me.

Up until recently, I never appreciated how lucky I was to grow up in such a secular family. I feel inspired by stories about how people have had to fight to overcome religion, but it makes me wonder how I would have turned out had I been raised in a religious background. I don't think I'd be remotely the same person I am today.

[Junghalli]

I was never a part of an organized church but my mom was religious so I kind of got it by osmosis from her. I'm embarassed to say I actually went through a bit of a fundie phase during my teenage years (I think it was mostly teenage rebellion: I live in Berkeley so spouting fundie rhetoric was the best way to get the looks of horror from the percieved conformists that every wangsty teenager craves). Later on, I started looking at the issue logically, and I gradually came to the conclusion that I just didn't actually buy all this religion stuff. The alternatives seemed much more plausible, and gradually I came to the conclusion that yeah, it probably was all made up by Bronze Age primitives. It took a while (a couple of years) for me to finally admit to myself I'd become an atheist though. Honestly though, I think I'm actually a happier, better adjusted, and probably more compassionate person without the religious baggage.

Eventually, it ended up going the other way: Rebecca abandoned her own faith. She posted her deconversion story at http://www.stardestroyer.net/Mike/RantM ... rsion.html

I found reading that bit about her first Christmas as an atheist rather similar to my own experience. One of the downsides of my deconversion is I just can't enjoy Christmas the same way anymore; without the spiritual dimension it just feels so much like nothing more than a giant commercialism-fest. I keep thinking to myself "err, exactly what am I supposed to be celebrating?"

[Morilore]

Wow, that Sunday school teacher sounds crazy.

Sunday school teachers are always crazy. It's a job prerequisite.

One day when I was a little kid one of my Sunday school teachers told me: "If you believe in Jesus Christ, you go to heaven when you die. If you don't, you go to hell when you die." From that point forward the entire religion of Christianity for me was one big attempt to convince myself that I really, truly, honestly believed in an invisible man in the sky who was my only way out of burning and suffering forever. I was constantly preoccupied with the thought that I didn't believe enough, that my immortal soul wasn't up to scratch. Eventually, around the age of 16, I realized that 1) I didn't actually believe that horseshit, I was just scared, and 2) there was nothing else to it for me. Everything - the music, the chanting, the sunday mornings, the crackers, the artificial social groups and bullshit adulthood rituals, all of it, was just means to an end that I no longer cared about.

[Sky Captain]

I never took religion seriously although in school we had some bible lessons, but they never convinced me to seriously believe in all that nonsense. My attitude against bible was and is - it`s just a collection of ancient legends and myths, nothing more special than ancient Egyptian or Greek myths.
Perhaps that`s because my parents also wasn`t religious and I early learned to think critically.

[FSTargetDrone]

It's just not part of my life in any appreciable way.

I call bullshit! You had to do some praying to get the Phillies a World Series Championship.

(hides St. Lidge statue)

Anyway, I always find it amazing, these stories of people who've actually discuss religion with family members. It's just so alien to me, even with the 12 years of Catholic schooling and such. I can't recall ever having a discussion with anyone in my family, (especially grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc.), remotely involving religion.

[EarthScorpion]

Well, I'm British, so there's a lot less overt religion around. My mother is basically the kind of post-Christian that's really common in the UK; she follows the bits that secular culture does, and ignores the rest. I've asked her if she really believes, and from what I gather, she has vaguely deist ideas about something starting the universe, but no belief in a personal god. My father is more religion; he used to suggest frequently that he have us (I and my two siblings) baptised, made me go to choir practice, and him and I have had several rows about the subject of religion (although in part they're him trying to persuade me to "respect their rights to believe what they want", and stop calling raising children to be biblical literalists a form of child abuse.) In practice, though, he isn't that religious, and only ever goes to church (the local CoE) in the major festivals, when he can be bothered.

I went to the local school, which was a Church of England Primary, from age four all the way to secondary school. I don't think it really worked on me, in fact sort of the opposite. I think I stopped believing in God about the same time as I stopped believing in Father Christmas, and I actually suspect the former may have come first; after all, there is concrete proof that presents appear over Christmas Eve's night, while there's a lot less evidence for God. I've always been interested in science and history, and it just contradicted with what I knew. When you read the Horrible Science and Horrible History books, it's a lot more interesting than church, which is a place where you have to go which takes up an hour on Thursdays when you could get to go home earlier. The ancient Greek mythology always seemed a lot more interesting, anyway. Also, I did suffer from low blood sugar as a child, and so tended to get rather tetchy and irritable by the time we had to go to church, anyway, which didn't help indoctrination attempts.

Plus, and I think this may have been a big factor, science had dinosaurs! And when you're the kind of child that memorises all their names, and can describe why their teeth are like they are, and the Bible fails to mention them, despite claiming to cover the creation of the world, well... that's just a massive flaw.

I seriously believe that dinosaurs are the greatest weapon that science has over religion when it comes to small children.