Topic: Your religous history? (Read 3853 times)

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What is your history concerning your viewpoint on religion? It seems that a lot of people here are some kind of religous skeptic, so I felt this topic was appropriate.

As for me, well when I was young, like 6 and younger my family used to attend church. It was a Baptist Church, and I never payed attention or studied Christianity at all. I guess I was too young to care? Well, I never thought about religion, and things such as why the universe is here or why life exists. When I was 8, I was a deist. My parents told me a few times we came from monkeys(*sigh*, I didn't know this was called "evolution", and they butchered what it was). I believed a god created the universe, but had no intervention from that point forward. I thought this for a while until I was about 14, when I became an atheist. I still believed in ghosts and spirits until I became like 17 or so. Now I am pretty devout to what I believe. I don't believe in a deity, ghosts, and I believe that everything happened naturally such as abiogenesis and the evolution of life. What about you?
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Oh I think I've got a pretty good story about this.

My parents aren't very religious. I'm not absolutely sure about my Dad's beliefs but I guess he considers himself Catholic (after his mother, whom I never went to church with, but I knew to be a very faithful and yet  spiritually/intellectually balanced) although he doesn't practice it. My mother is an opportunist when it comes to religion, she wont go to church or even talk about religion for a few years but every once in awhile she feels compelled to involve herself with it in some form or another for a very short period of time. She considers herself Pentecostal, although, like my father she doesn't really practice it. Except for her bi-annual bouts of religious epiphany or whatever the hell you want to call it.

Just in case no-one knows what the Pentecostal sect of Christianity is, this is the wikipedia definition of it:


My definition, in layman's terms and my own experience is that these people take the bible very literally and are pseudo-evangelists. They speak in tongues frequently and if you do not believe, or are very young and do not understand what they are doing (this is important) it can be pretty frightening.

When I was young I went to church with my grandmother, whom is Pentecostal. At first I didn't really have a problem going because I was very very young and just thought I was going to hang out with my grandma. (I think the earliest I can remember going was at like 4 years old). But as I got older and became aware of where I was, I started liking it less and less. When I went to church at first the people would act normal and sing hymns and stuff but near the middle of the sermon they would all start freaking out and talking in tongues. I didn't like this at all and asked my grandma why those people were doing that, she tried explaining it to me but I still didn't understand and thought it was bizarre (I'm about 7 at this stage I think).

After awhile I got to thinking about the whole church experience and decided I didn't like it at all, so I tried to stop going. But my Mom thought I needed some "Moral showmanship" or some stupid shit so I still had to go, but I tried to find ways out of it whenever I could.

Eventually I just stopped going completely, except for like holidays and stuff because my grandma wanted us all to go.

After I turned about 11 or 12 I decided that I didn't believe in their god. I wasn't exactly sure if there was a god, but I knew that I didn't believe in the traditional christian one.

Then I went into some stage where I really got into paranormal stuff like alien abductions, ghost stories, etc...
I think my mom thought I was turning into a satanist or something (I don't know what the hell her problem was) but she tried forcing me to go to church again and I remember being PISSED OFF about it and fought every inch of the way into the damn building.


Looking back though I remember a few instances of the preachers at the churches my grandma went to being complete bigots. They weren't all FUCK THE NIGGERS AND THE JEWS but you could see an underlying racism in the message that a few of them were spreading.

I also remember the last time I went to church with my grandmother, (I was like 14 I believe) all these people got up out of the pews and started shaking and talking in tongues and stuff (this was pretty normal in the churches she frequented) and I saw these two little albino kids in the pews across from my brothers and I rolling their heads around with their eyes in the back of their heads, they looked like some "The Hills Have Eyes" mongoloid spawn or something, (they seriously looked pretty unhealthy like their family had had an extensive past of inbreeding) sitting in the pews imitating their parents' that were in front of the alter rolling on the floor and jabbering in some stupid gibberish you could tell they were making up and it scared the shit out of me. It must've been one of the saddest/most disturbing things I've seen in my life and I think its partially that and my natural lack of faith that have completely put me off of religion.
Last Edit: June 24, 2008, 03:52:28 am by Harry Manback
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I was never fond of religion; I had great disdain for attending church as a kid, and grew to hate it more as I grew older. My parents are Lutherans; they had me in Sunday School, put me through First Communion, made me attend stupid retreats and stuff, eventually forced me through confirmation (where I would ask questions like "what created god?" without even knowing that this was a popular rebuttal to first cause myths... I also was very skeptical of the concept of heaven because perfection would get boring after an eternity… or so I speculated). Around the age of 13 my dog died and I was pretty shaken up by it. It led me to think about things like death and the nature of existence and I started becoming more interested in philosophy. I began frequenting atheist websites and forums in the quest for truth and things became increasingly obvious to me: the Christian god is a lie. I had a few lapses of doubt in which I called myself agnostic (I was gullible enough to be thrown off by the bible codes but I eventually realized they were bullshit). I was finally permanently settled in my atheist belief around the age of 15. Ever since I’ve had a greater appreciation for life, so I’m glad I was disillusioned, even though it put me through a bit of turmoil when I was still trying to reconcile my beliefs ("buh… but what if I’m wrong and I go to hell?").
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I am more and more curious if you all are atheists out of rejection of organized religion or because you truly believe there is no and has never been a supernatural force in the universe. How does one fathom the beginning of the universe without such a belief to fall back on? That things just...happened? I suppose that is all fine and stuff but I don't really see how that is all that much different from using the supernatural explain the inexplicable.

I am technically a Catholic, but out of rebellion to organized religion I became an atheist until I became overwhelmed with the bleakness of that belief and the inability to answer questions like the one I mentioned above. Plus I just find it hard to believe that something as beautiful as the world and the universe just happened to come together out of chaos with no shaping force. So I called myself agnostic because I was unsure of the existence of or nature of a supernatural being. This too, I could not help but view as a temporary state, since it was only the status of indecision about something and not a real belief in anything. So finally I settled on Deism. I cannot believe, with all of the horrible things that happen, that god really cares, but at the same time I cannot help but think there must have been something there at the start to set it all in motion or to apply some divine insight to the order of things.
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So finally I settled on Deism. I cannot believe, with all of the horrible things that happen, that god really cares, but at the same time I cannot help but think there must have been something there at the start to set it all in motion or to apply some divine insight to the order of things.

this is more or less what I believe. i think that if there is a supreme being, he really doesn't give a shit about us.
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Started out in a family of very lazy catholics. (We rarely if ever went to church). and I had some belief in it even. then after merely thinking about it deeply for a while I began to doubt. That doubt grew, to the point were I became an agnostic. And my own logic points out that god can't be proven to exist, nor can he be proven to not exist. And to just guess would be stupid. so I'm pretty sure I'll be agnostic for the rest of my life. I also want to be immortal. If I was offered immortality I take it with out batting an eye, rather then let myself die and gamble with my existence.
Last Edit: June 24, 2008, 07:46:24 am by warpped655
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grandparents are catholic, both my parents are atheist, i go from atheist to agnostic 50 times a day.
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0-12   christistan (lutheran)
13-16 DEVOUT atheist
17-18 who could give a shit??
19+    idk maybe, who knows

I didn't have too many remarkable experiences with religion. there were some funny times in catechism (chemical W, holy water) and some fucking horrible people who are nonetheless SAVED how couldn't they be they're in the choir, that's it

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I am more and more curious if you all are atheists out of rejection of organized religion or because you truly believe there is no and has never been a supernatural force in the universe. How does one fathom the beginning of the universe without such a belief to fall back on? That things just...happened? I suppose that is all fine and stuff but I don't really see how that is all that much different from using the supernatural explain the inexplicable.
not knowing > believing in something that's maybe made up, basically

also I'm making a pretty banal statement here I know, but how is saying 'god did it' any better? how's saying god was always around easier
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how's saying god was always around easier
Because both statements are just as intangible and unknowable. That is why it is a belief and not an objective truth.
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I am more and more curious if you all are atheists out of rejection of organized religion or because you truly believe there is no and has never been a supernatural force in the universe. How does one fathom the beginning of the universe without such a belief to fall back on? That things just...happened? I suppose that is all fine and stuff but I don't really see how that is all that much different from using the supernatural explain the inexplicable.

i am atheist because i truly believe there is no god.

you dont have to "fathom" the beginning of the universe to be an atheist. besides we cannot talk about  a beginning of time before the big bang because before the big bang there was no movement and time is movement, anyway, even religious people cannot fathom the beginning of the universe because they would have to look for the origin of their god.



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I had only just stopped being religious around when I was 17, but before then I had juggled around many religious ideas. My family had never been very religious, only to the point where if either my mother or father felt guilty enough they'd be motivated to finally drag everyone to a local baptist church. My father's family was very religious and in fact they were Pentecostal, so I know what that discomfort feels like having experienced several of those worship services. I could remember walking to the car in the parking lot thinking "I wonder what Martians would think if they saw my grandmother flail her arms around like that on the ground." I just couldn't get over the silliness and meaninglessness of it... but of course that was my experience with Pentecostalism, not Baptism.

Baptist churches were a lot more relaxing, and in fact I was baptized at a really big one a few miles from where I am now. Unfortunately I guess, I did not remain Christian and finally became agnostic before eventually becoming an atheist. I didn't believe in a god because there was no evidence for him.

And I did spend a lot of time thinking about the beginning of the universe question, but for the time being I'm going to wait for some evidence to come out that will explain why it even happened at all. It really just comes down to God being the filler answer again, and again, like it was when he was used to explain how life came about, why the sea is so tumultuous, and why thunder strikes the ground.
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I come from a big Catholic family and so did my dad. We were pretty much the average church going family for the early part of my life. Go every Sunday, don't sleep but not necessarily terribly observant either. All the major holidays, and hitting up church when visiting uncles and grandparents in other parts of the state. For the most part our faith was 'required' by my dad (my mom came along but wasn't the least bit forceful and if dad wasn't around we'd probably skip mass and sleep in). We all got the early sacraments; first communion baptism and confession (never regularly though because that's some bonk stuff and you hear stories about how people make stuff up for it when they were too good for the week [blessed ][/blessed] but the truth was you'd never tell your priest you wanted to punch your brother for being an asshole nintendo hog, and I think my parents realized what a dumb one it was).

Then shit really changed. It began with my older siblings. My sister got into going to church with friends who were I dunno Lutheran? So we ceized FAMILY MASS and whatever appeal to church there was as a uniting experience was gone. We had all had to have religious education 1 night week until then but our parents stopped making us go once we could make our own decisions on religion. Then the other big shift came but it wasn't felt right away. My older brother (also the oldest) came out when I was in middle school and uh our church is fairly progressive but I think he caught on to how the Catholic church typically perceived gay people and wanted no part.

The rest of us carried on as normal until when I was a little older (maybe freshmen year) and I started to question stuff and of course religion comes with the territory. Me and my dad would go for runs and talks about stuff, usually science (he's a scientist) but also current events. Well before one run I saw some latest decision about some priest who couldn't be a priest cause he was gay and of course at that time it got me all fired up. And I kind of really went after my dad on how he could still support the Catholic church despite my older brother, that none of my extended family knew that he was gay because no one knew how they'd react, and how he reconciled his science with his faith. He gave his reasons and I fired back and it was uh probably the longest I've ever talked with my dad on a single issue (we never did the birds and the bees). And it continued past the run until after dinner and we started agreeing I guess but he left it mostly at ignoring the institution and faith and I thought it was done.

I was actually really surprised then when my dad released everyone still living in the house from having to go to church no questions asked and then even more so when soon after he said he planned to take a break. Before this my dad and I were the most active Catholics and I had decided to take the steps to be confirmed. Part of it had been not finding the answers in other religions like Daosim and Atheism also not being something I could get behind, and another part was that I could tell that the amount of freedom he'd give us in deciding our religion would mean none of my brothers and sisters would be confirmed, something I think mattered to him. I dunno now I look back and dunno if I would have done it again. My dad was also my classes teacher but then stepped down. I decided to go ahead with the process until the very end and then decide then if I was actually going to be confirmed. My dad still supported me and over time he began going to mass again with me but uh we don't have crosses and shit on the walls anymore and it isn't as big a part of his life. I did get confirmed and I mostly made the final decision because I think it is what my dad wanted and to me it was just a title and I could live with myself if uh I didn't believe in it down the road.

But I stuck with church going into college, and my dad slowly picked it back up but like I said not with the same enthusiasm as when we were kids. A side note but he is really supportive of my older brother and there was a time he was MARRIAGE IS BETWEEN A MAN AND WOMAN and was very unresponsive to boyfriends or relationship news related to my brother; but he's 180'd for sure, encouraged my brother to come out to the grandparents, was very supportive when my older brother was helping raise his boyfriends son and I dunno I'm proud I guess.

Anyway that brings me to my more recent days as I guess an agnostic. Basically in my first semester I tried to be a good Catholic since I had some friends who went it, that made it easy but then Wisconsin had the amendment to ban gay marriage vote and the Sunday beforehand, we not only got these terrible pamphlets on why to VOTE YES and PROTECT THE SACRAMENT OF MARRIAGE but we also got a sermon on it. I remember being really angry and embarrassing my friends because I was just whispering 'bullshit under my breathe and tore up some pamphlets. I left and uh my Catholic faith ended that day I guess. I took a class on Daoism thinking ILL LEARN SOMETHING NEW but it turned out to not really be that great and I kind of just see organized religion as a waste of time now probably should have learned that sooner.

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  Being Irish, my whole family is Catholic on both sides (even the Ukranian chunk of my dad's family is Catholic). As a kid, when we were closer as a family and more involved in the community, we would go to church more. As the years went on, I went through the rites, not really understanding what was going on or why it was important. I never really doubted God. When we went into philosophy class in high school. I explored intellectually the argumentation of theology. Accepting God as an unconditional in an argument allowed a fairly good basis for argumentation: if I could relate something back to God and have it make sense, and the other person accepted the theistic premise, I could probably win the argument. I didn't understand how or why this worked.

When I started working at the photo lab, I met a girl who was to become a good friend of mine. She claimed to be an athesit. We would have civil philosophical arguments about the nature of the universe and the nature of ethics, the composition of the self and the validity of Christianity. These inquiries allowed me to further explore, but the idea of what God was or how Christianity made sense to me was still a bunch of airy things I didn't have a complete grasp on.

It was out there plugging trees into the Canadian Shield, where you have nothing to do for eleven hours a day but walk, plant, and think, that I realized that God is Truth. And what is the (capital T) Truth? The truth is what we can understand but cannot realize, what we can reason but not know. The Truth is the reality which is skewed by our perception. The Truth is the moral which is skewed by our accustomed or legitimated ethics.

To me, the world then consists of an absolute truth, the actual, and then the billions of individuals who occupy it, attempting to understand it in thier own way, including myself. So how would I come to understand this world? Well, I'm Catholic, so let's see what this Christ guy had to say, I thought. As I read the Gospels, and learned more about the most fundamental aspects of Christ's message, the things he described: reciprocal altruism, unconditional compassion, humility, patience, a desire to become better people, an enjoyment of life and of each other that can exist without worldly things. If I accepted Jesus's teachings as the Truth, then maybe things would begin to make more moral sense, and I could learn to be a better person.

My background in history helped me understand that cultural things like cannibalism, sacrifice, maybe even warfare, are not morally relative in thier context, but then present of the desperation that leads men and societies away from the moral into their most expedient or un-novel solutions to ensure survival and dominance. For me, there's no two ways about it: people killing and then eating other people is bad, and although the extermination of many American indigenous people was a very sorrowful thing, it is a good thing that institutions like sacrifice and cannibalism and self mutilation (all popular in the pre-industrial Pacific Northwest) were brought to an end.

But was I so different? Everyone does bad things. I do really bad things. I'm proud, pretentious, arrogant, vain, I've got the worst of it all. Things began to happen in my life where I could see that I could be a better person, and instilling some of that unconditional compassion and humility that Christ was talking about should be something I try to take to heart everyday.

I began to think of Christianity in new ways. Being a historian, the Bible could only ever be that to me, a history. It could convey a message, but as far as it was directly representative of the Truth was to always be in question, but it may contain within it elements of the Truth, as all things do. What's important then?, I asked myself.

  I'd come to try and wrap my head around how to be a Christian, and I thought of a symbolic model that was representative of how I had come to understand things, if I needed to explain it to someone else. God the Father as the metaphysical God, a first cause, the source of The Absolute Truth of the universe, the thing that makes the stuff of the universe work, the most perfect of the Platonic Formes, how I won those arguments in high school (by practicing involuntary exegesis) etc, etc.
  Jesus would then be what? The son of God? Well, I can't reason that. What I can reason though, is that Jesus's ethic is something that I accept as true and good. Could Jesus then be the source of all moral truth?, I thought. Well, this is the way I want to try and live my life, this is the ethic by which I have come to understand what is right and wrong, and even though I may never reach it, I can understand how it incorperates into everything.
  What about the Holy Spirit? Well, maybe that's just the idea that there is something more to all of us, that we all contain in us some Truth, some bit of us that is more that what we can observe, the Self in each of us, which cannot be reasoned away.
  Of course, I would still try to further understand what God is, what the Truth is, and how to live my life in a way that lets me try to be a better person.
  In as far as understanding Catholocism, the Church as an institution is something I have been grappling with, being a historical skeptic, and not completely being able to accept the premise of an Abrahamic God, and of course being a little sour at the millenia of hypocrasy, the ritualism, the rites, etc. If I could come to understand how these things fit into what Jesus was talking about and not just being part of the socio-political quasi-monarchical institution that led these things to be, I might be able to eventually become more accepting of Catholicism, and probably start going to church again.

So yeah. The most wholehearted reason why I believe in God today, is because I have chosen to believe in Truth, and I have come to understand that Truth as many things, including the teachings of Jesus. All the while, I've considered the alternatives and have the counteraguments presented to me by my family, friends, classmates, co-workers, internet forum goers, and I've weighed the counter arguments, but the completeness of the theological and theistic model has helped me make sense of the world and understand how I can be a better person in such a complete way that the alternative never look complete.

I have a hard time finding people who think the same way.
Last Edit: June 24, 2008, 06:53:14 am by Blitzen
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Religious inspiration and growth by my paps

Man, I REALLY like your story and I think the relationship you have with your dad, where you can just talk with him like that is fantastic. I've never really had that sort of relationship with my family (especially my dad), you both seem like really reasonable/level headed people to just come to a consensus like that.
Last Edit: June 24, 2008, 07:20:00 am by Harry Manback
DEUCE: MEETING THE URINE UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL AND REALIZING IT'S JUST LIKE ME AND MY PREJUDICES  THIS WHOLE TIME WERE COMPLETELY FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF PTTTTHTHTHH GOD IT'S EVERYWHERE<br />DEUCE: FUCK THIS TASTES LIKE PISS<br />PANTS: WHERE IT SHOULD TASTE LIKE COTTON CANDY OR PICKLES<br />DEUCE: OR AT LEAST LIKE URINE NOT PISS
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The only contact I had with a church in my early years was in school, usally around christmas. I never thought a lot about spiritual stuff. I never asked my parents about any god/gods from what I can remeber, I guess both were athiests, and I still think they are. There was just so much more interesting things to think about. And now when I think about religions I just think of them as fairytales that have brought some really bad people and some interesting culture to our world.
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I used to be an athiest until last year I had something of a breakdown and now I'm like "maybe there's some cool dude or woman or floating-badger-face up there making UNIVERSE MUSIC(the sound of everything)" or some shit, but I don't know.
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Well, I was "born" a Baptist and I still am and I plan to remain one. I believe in some parts of the Bible (God, Jesus, all that) but I'm not a huge fan of the whole going to church thing. Maybe it's because I'm young and I was forced to go a lot during my teens so I'm just "rebelling" now, but my church is so dry, and as if late, it just seems like a cult.

I like church school, though. But in terms of actually attending the real service...I can't do that. I'll go every once in a while, but I'm content with just reading my Bible every Sunday.

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Used to be a christian (go to a christian school, etc) but eventually thought of it as stupid (I don't exactly remember why). Just recently I started reading about philosophy on wikipedia and it turns out I'm an agnostic existentalist. Or something similar.
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Long story short, I was born into a Muslim family and I studied in an "Islamist" school in Saudi Arabia for 3 years (from the age of 8), but after I moved again I started growing out of my faith.

Now I'm agnostic. The whole idea of religion is pretty far-fetched to me but I do believe in a higher power that is neither "good" nor "evil".
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i am atheist because i truly believe there is no god.

you dont have to "fathom" the beginning of the universe to be an atheist. besides we cannot talk about  a beginning of time before the big bang because before the big bang there was no movement and time is movement, anyway, even religious people cannot fathom the beginning of the universe because they would have to look for the origin of their god.

ya this



i'd be called an atheist because i don't believe in any gods, though the term seems kinda dumb since it's describing what i DON'T do. oh well who cares.

come from a fairly non-religious family i think. both my parents had Christian upbringings (and met on some church camp) but aren't religious now. my mother calls herself an atheist; not sure about my dad. his family was particularly more religious than my mother's (his brother and mother are all churchy, still) but he deos nothing now.
through pretty much all of my childhood i didn't believe in anything. we had religious studies in one of my schools (only there for a year and a half though) but i just looked at it all as stories. i even remember back then (when i was 6 or 7 or so) some classmates trying to tell me i came from god and i was just going "nuh-uh" (that said, my knowledge then was basically "from my mother's stomach" becasue HEY i was just a kid).
don't remember going to church any times back then. maybe through school or something on a trip. i think i also went to some activity day with religious undertones during the holidays, but didn't take anything from it. i just went because it sounded like fun, not even knowing that god wuld come into it (and ignored him when he did).
so yeah i've just gone through life with no interest in religion for the most part. never had it put in my life, and i felt no need to take it to myself. i only go to church for weddings and baptisms and such.