You don't have to take it or leave it like they want you to think. Take from it what you like and explore other things also. Big universe out there....so much to learn.

I know the Feeling...

Yeah! My great tragedy was going born into a Mormon family... that was also rigidly right wing.

I wasn't even aware that I had an Aunt Barbara until i was 16, because she married a black man, and my parents were racists. As it turned out she adn her family were Jehova's Witnesses, so I disliked them for that,but will it would have been nice to know they existed. They are actually nice people... when they take a break from trying to convert you.

I love it when they ask me that. I'm a born and raised atheist. Nothing ever happened to me to make me atheist other than my parents not indoctrinating me with a god.

I went to my religious leaders with questions, they told me to read the Bible, so I did. Once I could safely declare it I declared myself AAA.

Yeah... I got some other stories too. But to keep a long story short.... I agree.

it's all to do with perspective

I agree...I was raised southern Baptist and fed their bullshit doctrine until I was old enough to see for myself that to be a Christian is to truly be blind to the world and how it is.

As a child, I went to church because I had to. Then I became a lost adult, was saved, and have now evolved into an agnostic freethinker.! I was even a missionary for several years, and my family thought that was great. I think I mainly get hung up on the word "God." I don't believe in God like believers do. I believe in the huge magnificent universe.

christianity is one fucked up religion, that is for sure. Talk about causing mental illness. The boogie man God, he's as creepy as the boogie man that lives under your bed when you are a kid. The Koran is worse though....talk about stupid religions. And my daughters are born again. I am satan.....geez.

Me too I lost alot of good friends even a possible love intrest due to that prejudgemental, uncaring religion. Their actions towards a (what they call) unholy person made me realize just what exactlly christianity is. Even today people mimic me in an attempt to make me doubt myself where they'll come and parasytically embed their ideologies in my spiritual wound. It all happens within a shadow of a doubt.

is it good that your 'religious choice' is out of opposition...I don't think that's what you meant, but that's what it made me think of....now I will reflect on whether that is what happened to me...haha

Read the entire bible, that's all it takes.

I’m naturally very skeptical. Once I put religion under my skepticism, it very much failed to make sense.

You don't need tragedy to be an atheist - all you need is a willingness to think, learn and ask questions.

I hope you feel comfortable explaining that to them… Seems to me that such a ‘cocoon of safety,’ if only imagined, is so tightly spun around most religionists that they can’t imagine functioning outside it. And why would anyone ever want to..?

I envision scared and confused people with immature ideas or understandings of life clinging to each other while blindly following the lead of some (semi)-charismatic and manipulative leader… How anyone could question our not wanting to live like that is almost beyond me, though apparently far beyond them.