Although raised in central IN, my parents were from Kentucky and I was raised on that old time religion- very fundamentalist.

In my church, people got "saved." Every sermon became louder and more emotional and more threatening (hellfire and damnation) as time went on, until the preacher ended with a "Call" to the alter. Members who were so moved would go to the alter at the front of the church and kneel and scream and cry and profess their new-found dedication to Jesus. To borrow a biblical phrase, there was gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. These people had been "saved," and in one moment the promise of heaven was theirs. This was one frightening spectacle for a kid.

On the one hand, it all seemed so weird and I had seen hypocrisy in the church members. On the other hand, a part of me was questioning why I did not "hear a voice" when all these other people had heard one. What was wrong with me?

A watershed moment for me was when the Sunday School teacher told us "Some people believe that all these different religions are just different paths to the same goal, but here at the Church of God, we know that just isn't so." I matched this up with the sermons I had been hearing and I realized that he was implying that we are God's chosen people and all others are going to hell. I thought about that all day. Really? If there is a god, and that god has a chosen people, what are the chances that God's chosen people would be this little band of uneducated hillbillies in New Castle, Indiana?

I became a closet Agnostic and it took me many years to get at least partially out of the closet. At college I took a course in Philosophy of Religion, hoping to shed some rational light on the question. I did not find the answer, but it was helpful to find an authority figure, the professor, who considered God’s existence an open question.

Now I'm an atheist who is uncomfortable talking to True Believers. My heroes are Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Michael Shermer. It's been a long and painful journey.

Went to catholic school (real nuns) in Syria.
Then, when I was just 11 years old, my family moved to Soviet Union.
Trying to make an impression on my new classmates at the school there, I started telling them all about the most powerful God and church.
The young history teacher overheard everything, and motioned me to approach her.
She said to me," if you can prove that God exist, if he's real, and if we could see it, then you can talk all about him".
That night I prayed to God to appear to my teacher and classmates.
Well, the next day, I waited and waited...nothing! Of course, the teacher knew the outcome, and paid no attention to me.
In the lesson, that day, she explained that God was the creation of upper classmen, to put fear in the common people so they can obey them.
I believed her, and things started to make sense. I was a convert at the age of 11.

Raised lutheran, my mom still very active and pushy about it. I actually had the highest grade in catechism tests of my age. But even then I had questions and never got any logical answers. I especially remember some section saying women and men should be separated....no answer that really sufficed.

The politics really intensified things for me with the push for the putting church into our government. I just couldn't do it anymore. The more I read, even on history....I feel it's better for me.

Sounds like you have achieved an honest (skeptic) view of the the world.

I was raised a Methodist and figured out religion was BS when I was in early grade school as their bible stories did not reflect reality. I figured religion was just a method old people use to scare children into doing what the older people wanted. I thought all grown-up's were aware of this falacy and played along - - just another variant of make believe Santa Clause. It wasn't until I was in my early 20's when I discovered many children did not grow up and as old people, actually believed in faith (belief without evidence asserted as truth with evidence) based religion over facts fairy tales.

I too was raised Catholic but I did not go to Catholic school at all other than the catechism but I started questioning very early welcome to reality it will be what you make of it. Time is our companion, May you have a safe and prosperous journey.

I grew up in the church as well.

I was devout until 2002 which the whole Boston archdiocese story breaking out.

I have stated this several times here.

I had family members say it was not true and the devil was behind this whole scandal.

That is when I started to "slide"

I was brought up in a Greek Orthodox household where the head of the womans club was a man. Repression at its finest. Later I started going to different churches in college as I was a singer and went where they paid me. After a very serious bought with depression in my 30s, I had doubts. After doing my own research, I came to conclusion that religion was created to control people and also to explain phenomenon that was not explainable. We are so much smarter now and know just about everything. I can't believe in a deity that brings so much fear and awards those who kneel before them. If i did meet God, I'd punch him in the face.

Love your honesty mostly with yourself. You really seem to be educated on the subject and in touch with your inner most intuition and most of all your heart.
It took me a while to get real with my feelings and when I began to get honest and educated on religious ignorance and how they used fear and superstition to indoctrinate the masses my mind was liberated! Aloha from Hawaii!

Mazikeen, Your "spiritual" journey sounds similar to mine. I even spent eight years studying to be a priest! A homosexual expeiience with a fellow classmate after I left the seminary ended my belief in just about everything for a while. I did get married and went through a hippie phase in which I also became interested in eastern religions . During a second marriage, I became an Episcopalian, mostly of social reasons although I did still like the liturgy. Now I am a confirmed atheist. I think that man created God, and that it is an unnecessary artifice to living a good life.

I was raised Presbyterian. In the 70’s, my mother left my father because he was mentally and physically abusive to her and he never hid it from us, the children. A wife leaving the husband was unheard of then. We were relying on the assistance of the church where my sister and I were baptized, my mother spending a lot of her free time helping them in kind. Then, out of nowhere, we were told they could no longer help us and asked to leave the church. We found out later that a letter from my paternal grandfather, along with a large donation, asking them to see the “sin” my mom had committed in leaving. From that point on, I knew that religion was nothing but people controlling people for money (tithing, dues, donations) and power. And with that, I started questioning everything about religion.

In 8th grade. You ask a question in religion class and he response was, "It's a miracle, sit down Mr. Vance! LOL 12 years of catholic schooling. Now I must admit an extra hour of reading didnt hurt as far as education but it made us too smart for the Church's own good!

At 16 and at the time of confirmation I decided to put God to the test and see if instructions for confirmation would make a difference to my uneasy feelings . They did not. This approach proved to be inherent in me and lead to my career as a science teacher (ages 11 to 18) and my subsequent campaign to everyone to enjoy science and use it at EVERY opportunity . See my Science teachers group on this site. NB you do not have to be a science teacher to join.

Growing up as one of three children raised by a single mother, I was always angry at god for making my mom suffer at the hands of several men who mistreated her. I would literally go outside at night and scream into the sky. As I grew older, my anger only increased as I realized that countless others suffered as well. I was always into math, science and philosophy, but I tried christianity for awhile, sure that I was missing something and that the christian bible had the answers if I only took the time to read. It did not, and the twisted attempts at logic that it and other christians tried to use to explain the problem of evil, causation and other deep questions only made it worse. When I finally let go of god, it was such a relief. My anger soon dissipated and my life truly improved.

When I was in first grade, my teacher (Sister Mary Whatever) and the Mother Superior came into the classroom and told us that we were going to have a special visitor. They told us to put our heads down, and that when we looked up, the visitor would have miraculously appeared.

We put our heads down, and they snuck her in the classroom door (I peeked). She was a nun, but her headgear was a little different, and she had a sash around her waist. She talked to us about how she was married to Jesus, that she had to endure a great deal of suffering, and that we should pray for her. She might as well have been crawling through thorns wearing a hair shirt.

When she was finished, they told us to put our heads down, and that when we looked up, she would have miraculously left us. So, we put our heads down, and they snuck her out the classroom door (I peeked).

Fortunately, I only had to endure Catholic school through the second grade, because from that moment on, I knew that the Catholics were lying to me.

The rest is history.

Most all of my family choose to believe, they are too invested at this point to change or even consider the possibility that it may not be real. You probably have a lifetime of your family trying to bring you back into the fold. Mine find it impossible to accept that I do not see any evidence for the God that they rely upon. I think it just festers inside them and undermines their comfort level.. Ive had to basically threaten to break off relations with them to get them to simply accept that I don't believe and to mind their own business.. loads of fun

my observation is that a lot of people who escape religious thinking go through the phase of "if god is all-powerful why does evil exist" and similar thinking, which in and of itself isn't about evidence that there is no god, only evidence that there is no good god or no all-powerful god. HOWEVER, that seems to be a good steppingstone to realizing there is no evidence for the existence of any gods at all, and a necessary step for many. i was not raised religious and the god in whom i vaguely and casually believed wasn't a very active god at all, he was more like an invisible friend, a pretty quiet one at that. so i didn't expect anything from him other than just an eye and an ear. it wasn't particularly traumatic to discover he was like the invisible rabbit i had as a toddler. i understand that this is not everyone's experience. being jewish, i also didn't have to dump jesus too; he was already a nonentity. i had it easy in that regard!

g

I was raised under a Lutheran label in West Germany.

While writing this I just wanted to check the demographics as Germany has two major religious providers of the Christian kind: Catholics and the Lutherans, in Germany referred to as Evangelical church.

So I just read on Wikipedia that some reject grapejuice on theological considerations ...

I was schooled by such idiots because the state did not provide primary education.

Unreal ...

You mentioned the one most important word in understanding faith; "comforting." It is comforting to think that somehow we will never really die. That we will see our dead relatives and friends again. But no one knows for sure, and the reasons for doubt are many. "Live as if you were to die tomorrow, learn as if you were to live forever." (Mohandas Gandhi)

One of my response to believers to make them think is, I sleep like god during the holocaust. In spite of religious upbringing by the time I WAS 14, I had decided that I was unsure if there was a god, and that if there was did he care. I was raised in a retail/political family so I new how to fain belief. When I was 16, I told my mother I was agnostic, she almost disowned me. I realized that as long as I pretended to believe I was OK. When I joined the Air Force, I stopped going to church and always had a reason not to go. When I got married, my wife was a very religious Lutheran, when I was refuse communion I was able to use that as an excuse to not take part. After my enlistment was up we moved to my old hometown, she demanded that I go to my old church(a liberal Methodist church). My competitiveness and desire to be the best at everything I get involved in led me to several leadership roles, I took a job with the world largest weekly religious newspaper, I dealt with our multitude of different religious customers much as I would have dealt political customers or tax clients. Nothing will turn you in to a true cynic as working for the church. The validation I needed came from the very clergy I had to interact with. Many did not believe in what they preached, but it was pure politics. I operated at a business level with the church at the national/world level and I realized more and more that it was a business. The last time I attended a church service was the Sunday before my divorce. My son is an atheist, my ex-wife is a UU now, I am still an Agnostic, I don't have the answers, and no one ever will until we are dead.

I became Atheist by time I was 12.... I guess.... not afraid of steppin' on a church for a Ceremony..... Not at War with Religion of any kind.

The combination of learning about the history of the early Christian church (in confirmation class, ironically) and geology did it for me. Declared my athiest in a screaming family argument at around 16.

Welcome!!

I was raised Lutheran, Missouri synod, and went through that confirmation thing. I then went to one of its colleges for my first degree. I also took 5 of the religion classes while there, still have 3 of the papers I had to write in those classes. Despite that, I some how ignored the contradictions, atrocities and indoctrination things of the book and LCMS things. Because of that, I also taught a couple of the adult bible study classes at the last LCMS church I was a member of. While doing that I was also working on my second college degree at a public U. Also while doing all of those things I was also struggling with the immoral, delusional, nasty, prudish and more behavior of the believers I was associating with. Despite that I decided that it was time to read that book from beginning to end for my third time and while doing that all of the contradictions, atrocites and more finally showed. I also looked at my college notes and some other apologetic things to try and reconcile them but ultimately couldn't do that.

I totally agree with you, but I never went through the Buddhist phase. Just a skeptic, but I'm a humanist in philosophy and practice.