How can it not have?
But like all the adversity we all face, it made us better. Show me the guy/gal who never learned anything the hard way, and I'll show you someone who does not fully understand, to the core of their being, anything...

They may posses a great deal of intelligence, but they will lack the wisdom that should go with it.

My formative years were not impacted by religion in either a positive or negative way because the whole Christian Saga in my mind defied logic and common sense. It started with the Virgin Birth.

teaches you lie and create rumors..... to talk about things like it is a fact even though you have no evidence.

Excellent question.

I was lucky in that I figured out religion was BS when I was in early elementary school. Aside from being forced to sit in smelly church pews and listen to a fictional story tellers yarn fables that seemed to amuse the sea of blue and gray haired sheeple every Sunday wasn't to bad an experience for me. Conformation class was actually kind of fun. We were assigned to use our bibles to find answers to moral questions. I always seem to find things that contradicted everybody else. The last day before the ceremony when our instructor introduced the trinity I noted, "Oh for stupid, that's complete and utter nonsense." His reply was, a reluctant, "I know but that's what they want us to tell you."

However, I have witnessed many suffer dire consequences when young at the hands of the faith over facts to determine insidious truth death cults.

Faith impeded my perception of reality and how the world actually works. Praying really hard will not make something true or real. I was told that faith would actually do something but it is nothing but wishful thinking.

When I was around seven years old I asked my father, "Santa Claus is not real. Right?" He said no. I asked about the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy and he said no. Then I asked about God and he said, "Yes, he's real." Even at my young age that didn't make sense. They were all suspiciously similar, invisible, had magical powers, knew which boy or girl was good or bad but they were all pretend except one!

I know that religion impacted negatively on me during my formative years. That is exactly why I am the raging anti-theist that I am.

nothing that couldn't be overcome

not me. i was raised quite secularly, with a strong sense of jewish identity but very little actual religion. i think my folks were rebelling against their upbringing(s). i never even knew whether they believed in god (you know which god) until i was adult and had moved three thousand miles away. (turns out mom wasn't sure but thought she did, and dad wasn't sure but thought he didn't. they'd never mentioned it, at least to me or in front of me, one way or the other.) so i never had a chance to be brainwashed and my realization at age 15 that there were no gods was quite untraumatic.

g

No. I was lucky. I had to go to Sunday school but it was just something boring I had to do. All the god stuff just went right over my head

Imagine a plantation slave, offered a future as a free man, choosing to remain a slave.

That was my grandfather, enslaved to Catholicism. It was his son, my father, also enslaved. And it was I when a war started. I was 19, in the Naval Reserve, and sent into that war. The G.I. Bill made college possible. I was 27, in my third year, and my mother told me I was going to college because I was too lazy to get a job. She did not intend a trauma that would enable me to choose freedom, but it had that effect. An agnostic and happy, I graduated and decades of healing started. Briefly married to a woman who for similar reasons wanted no children, I retired and at 89 have written the details into a memoir.

What’s not in the memoir? Diderot wrote of strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest. Call me when the last person who wants a king has been strangled with the entrails of the last person who wants a priest.

Formative years? LOL. Religion negatively impacted every day of my life. LOL

I’ve realized the main problems with all these religions and “spiritual” organizations is half of it does teach love, patience, and tolerance while the other half is completely nuts and dangerous.

It’s better to get rid of all of it and learn humanism.

I think religion had a negative impact on my childhood but in a positive way. I learned to question authority when it became clear that people made asinine and false claims just because of religious beliefs so always question everything, no matter the source. I also learned that life is unfair and that people will change the rules when beliefs are in play and I should try to walk away from a fight if possible but expect a third man to jump into the fight if I can't walk away. (a couple of Catholic kids taught me that one in a fist fight after school) I also learned to not follow the herd and to stand by my principles even if everyone was against me, something I learned when I had to stand up each morning and leave the room while everyone else sang the national anthem by my parents religion forbade me from singing along.
Lots of negativity thanks to religion but you get positive lessons from having to go through the negative stuff and it made me the Atheist I am today.

Not really, despite nine years of Catholic school. Eight of those years were at a really good, humanely run school which gave me a wonderful, quality education. The religious components, including “catechism” in the early years, didn’t have much of an impact, and I easily shed that baggage at around age 12. I look back at those ideas as being part of a childish way of looking at the world, easily left behind as I grew up and began to explore more widely. Maybe the lasting impact is my constant amazement at otherwise intelligent adults hanging on to the old myths.

Almost married too early she was a Catholic too

I sure as hell did...Religion in my opinion messes peoples minds up pretty well...

When I was about 7 years old my uncle gave me a toy revolver. It was very realistic looking. My mother took me to church and I brought the gun with me....it was nested in the waistband of my pants. Of course I wasn't paying attention and there was a time when everyone was supposed to kneel. My mother grabbed my wrist and yanked me forward to the kneeling bench....the abrupt yanking made the gun slip out onto the floor.....the gun was metal and it made a lot of noise as it fell....everyone nearby looked to see what was happening. My mother grabbed the gun and put it in her purse. Many times I asked her to return the gun but I never saw it again. When I was 12 my mother died of Cancer. On her deathbed I asked where she had hidden my gun. She told me to shut up. When my father was at work I searched all her belongings....I never found the gun.

Although I do resent the fear factor, as a child I otherwise really enjoyed Sunday school, church, and VBS. I raised my two daughters without religion. Although they are not religious they have some regrets about that, and I understand that.They didn't have a religion to rebel against, and they missed out on those "fantastic" Bible stories.

No it didn't. But then I had the good fortune to have a family that moved halfway across the country when I was very young and who's parents being of different faiths weren't in a rush to join any church after we got settled down. The fact is by the time my mother told my dad it was time my younger brother and I needed to learn about religion and joined a church I was just old enough to question (though not openly) a lot of what the church was trying to indoctrinate me into. Having that little bit of time to learn about the world and the little bits of religion that my parents displayed day to day before joining a church allowed me to keep a skeptics distance from the religious dogmas trying to make me into one of the nonthinking faithful so many become,

My best friend was turned into a stupid idiot. He was almost insufferable thereafter.

Yes, but not as badly as the emotional and physical abuse I got from my parents. I guess in some ways it even gave me some strength to know that an imaginary God might love me and understand that I wasn’t evil!

I was brought up Catholic. I distinctly remember being 6 and looking through these old, massive bibles with beautiful images that my grandmother owned. My mom was reading me the stories and we got to the one with Abraham and Isaac. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son, and he willingly does it only to be stopped by God right before killing the boy. I had this sinking feeling in my stomach and felt terrified. I asked my mom if she would ever do that to me, and of course she said she could never hurt her children. My 6 year old mind thought about that story for weeks after that.
A few years ago I heard Richard Dawkins saying that religion is somewhat child abuse and I first dismissed this as ridiculous. But then I thought back to my upbringing and this experience in particular. If not disguised under the cloak of religion, would we allow telling these kinds of stories to children? Would it be acceptable to paint human sacrifice (infanticide) as a show of love and obedience to God?
This is just one example of how religion impacted my formative years. I wasn't all negative, but I believe I could have been spared many distressing experiences.

I think it hampered me from standing up for myself at certain times.

It also had a negative impact on sexuality-making me feel bad about it

Definitely me. Note: I am an ex Catholic too.

I think religion did not help me mature at all. I was in for a rude awakening when I joined the army right out of high school I didnt date until I was 26 and didnt have an actual girlfriend until I was 28.

I feel like I wasted so much time waiting for "God" to bless me with a partner instead of actually trying.

Here I am. 44 years old. Divorced and never got to have children.

I hate religion for how it brainwashed me

Me. I grew up ostracized in SLC. It was actually pleasant to move elsewhere.