Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I figure most of us turned out OK, if you consider our childhood, some of us really do have some horror stories.
Have to agree. Kids are pretty tough; I survived and came out of it relatively sane (I think? LOL). A lot of it made me the no-nonsense person I am today.
I went to church in my early teens because my friends were going and my Mother has always been religious although she's never been pushy about it. I realized at some point I just didn't believe in any of it and I've been an atheist all of my adult life.
As a youngster I was forced to attend church, and I made an effort to follow the crowd and believe those Middle Eastern myths. But the truth is that I never did. I'm not Middle Eastern and it never made a bit of sense to me that anyone who isn't should put any stock in those stories.
I felt that way too, old gringo and it seemed so out of place and alien to me...but as a kid you don't have a choice. You get baptized when you're just born, and first communion...at age 7 or so. How much say do you have in all that? None, you're a kid and follow your parents or whomever is in charge. And when you go to catholic school, forget it...crosses everywhere...
I was raised in a Lutheran household (I think, shows how much I know...), my parents were the borderline fundamentalist types. For a few years I even tried to follow along, going to church, attending bible study classes and all that wonderful jazz.
But eventually, the more they tried to shove their beliefs down my throat, the more flaws I saw with those beliefs, I just drifted away. I wouldn't say I'm an atheist, I'm more of an agnostic.
I was raised an RC and forced to go to church every sunday as well as having to go through catholic high schools until i was sixteen. I've always lacked faith in a personal god, i never understood why a single supernatural deity would have the same feelings as us and soon i concluded that this will almost definitely NOT be the case so i became a deist.
Then i went on to higher education and after being immersed in the sciences(biology, chemistry, physics) and maths, my perception of the world(and my philosophies) slowly began to change. The beauty of it was that science never claimed to know everything. The world as far as i could tell worked purely through naturalistic means. I would also find that anyone who stated otherwise, when asked to show substance to their otherwise baseless assertions, would instead proclaim himself the victorious holder of every answer or truth<sup>tm<sup/> and then proceed to disappear in a puff of obsfucation only for me to find that person a week later making the same claims to a group of other(mostly younger) people.
Statements regarding the supernatural and all other sorts of unfalsifiable claims simply became a(rather large) collection of "what ifs". What if the world was made by a god? or 2? or even an infinite number of deities? What if there is a part of us that survives physical death? What if the wicked have to spend a year waiting before living through all eternity on some otherworldly plane?
At that time I referred to myself as Agnostic but the problem this caused was the implication that I believed the "god" and "no god" scenarios we equally likely. Worse still it created the false dichotomy of the "MY GOD" vs "no god", that is to say:
"If god actually exists then Yec is right" or "If a god is real then it is allah".
I did eventually find the perfect denomination that encompases my beliefs after reading about the spectrum of theistic probability. Turns out that i am a 6 on Dawkins formulation which can be summed up as:
'I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.'
Which is great for me because anyone convinced 100% that their god is real has the great risk of falling into delusion and anyone who is also 100% sure that any type of deity is impossible couldn't have arrived at it logically(key word here~unfalsifiable)
Never have been a believer, even though I went to Sunday school and I still go to church with my wife/kid. I don't discuss it too much, but it has always just seemed like nonsense. I still identify myself as a xian b/c it is my culture, but I definitely don't believe.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
