Question for DU Atheists...

Were you raised in a faith tradition, and if so which one was it?

My parents were Unitarian (for social rather than theological reasons); I walked out of Sunday School at age 8 and they never tried to convince me otherwise.

My parents decided they'd let my brother and me decide whether we wanted to go to church, and neither of us ever showed any interest in it.

Roman Catholic.

We got us a bunch of mackerel snappers here.

and asking for "seconds" was not frowned upon...

I spent about 11 months per year with my mother, who raised me Roman Catholic, and I spent about one month per year with my father, who is an Occultist.

Glasses are sexy. A plain woman with glasses is sexier than a pretty woman without glasses.

8-)

I believed in God when I was a child, but I only went to church with my mom's family. My parents never took me.

I used to believe all the stuff in the bible literally, but as I learned more about science I found out that a lot of the stuff had been disproved. From there, I started to question why 98% (or whatever) of the people in the world simply believe the religion they were born into.

As I got older and learned more about the history of religion, it all seemed less and less likely. I stopped believing in God around the time I was twelve.

Jewish and Christian. I was permitted to choose. I chose disbelief.

If you don't mind me asking.

My mother's church.

She won't step foot inside the church anymore......long story.

i had an episcopal boyfriend in hs, went to church with his family a few times and felt so weird to get on my knees. we just never did that ever. i guess people really get into ritual. christian scientists don't have ritual, no weddings, christenings, funerals or any thing like that. no central aisle usually in their churches. no choirs either.

so quite possibly it could honestly be both! Some parishes go very big for vestments and other high church trappings - others tend to be much more touchy feely in pastoral attitude.

Yes, Jewish, and attending services sort of brought me here, very early questioned WHY anyone would say/believe things in the prayer books.

Both parents technically Jewish.

Father Jewish because he never considered not being Jewish but not "faithful" to the tenets or even knew the traditions of his faith.

Mother Jewish by birth but really a third generation freethinker. She wanted to raise the kids Unitarian but our father nixed it. When I showed some interest in Judaism and wanted to study for a bas mitzvah, I was discouraged by my parents from pursuing it.

And you probably guessed the result. I'm an atheistic freethinking humanist and my brother converted to Islam.

Baptized Methodist as a child; raised Methodist until age 12; Fundy until the age of 17... Assembly of God.

The hypocrisy I found in the AOG turned me agnostic... I'm leaning atheist now as I see it getting worse in my family.

although she didn't go. When I was nine, I got in trouble for asking who created god & I didn't have to go anymore. A few years later, though, she made me go through something called 'confirmation.' I'm still not sure what that was about, but at least the minister teaching the course wasn't offended by my questions - which mostly challenged the whole 'belief based on faith only' thing. He was also very open minded when I asked why we refer to god in the masculine when we were taught that god is neither.

The best thing I ever got out of church was learning to sing harmony. In a congregation, you can belt it out & if you hit the wrong note, no one knows who it was. ;)

& the confirmation was at a Faith United Church of Christ.

I have no idea the difference between the two. :)

relatives who were Russian Orthodox. I had to attend some bullshit Bible study thing once a week and some nun told us that God was ONLY in the Catholic church. I knew right then that somebody was bullshitting me.

We moved around a bit so it was on and off, and which denomination just depended on what minister my mother liked in whatever our location was.

I still have my Bible that I earned by memorizing all the books of both testaments!

:wow:

You know, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and on and on, and Genesis, Exodus, etc. It was a feat I was very proud of at age 9.

high school. I got a sticker. It was pretty cool. The teacher of the teener's Sunday school class had a contest to see who could memorize the most verses. So I memorized Matthew. After I recited it through Chapter 6, she told me I could take my seat.

and tell my mother I had to use the restroom. I would then spit the Holy Wafer into the toilet or urinal and either go to the bathroom on it or do something a little more naughty on it. I could only do this when we used the thicker wafers, as the thin wafers would dissolve very quickly.

At home, I enjoyed molesting my Rosary. Fun times.

I highly suggest these activities for any recovering Roman Catholic.

Catholic so I was exposed to lots of their ceremonies and rules.

Christian Science.....does make you tolerant of pain and discomfort, but also makes you feel guilty whenever you have p and d, because you are taught that it is your fault....bad thoughts.

My parents believed but they weren't church goes. They also thought it was up to us if we wanted to believe in something so they didn't push anything on us. I flirted with religious belief for a couple of years, mainly so I could get out of school to go to church school on Wednesday afternoons. It was great. We were fourth graders and got to walk to the church (all of five blocks away) and then hit the mom and pop store on the way back to buy candy. But it didn't take me very long before I decided that everything they were telling us was just crazy* and I stopped going. Besides, I had discovered science fiction by then and since almost everyone went to church school there weren't any classes on Wednesday afternoons which meant I got a whole afternoon to myself just to read.

*Don't mean to offend believers, but that's the way I saw all those Bible stories. That doesn't mean I think believers are crazy. I just don't see how anyone can believe in any of it.

my mother's family has a long history of being ministers (there are 3 living Lutheran ministers right now).

But my mother and father never really forced it on me. When I told them I didn't like sunday school or youth group anymore (it had become too much of a "close your eyes and wave your hands while listening to squeaky clean white 20-somethings sing about jesus" kind of thing), they said, no problem. We just came later (as my little sister didn't want to go anymore either).

I don't know if they really know I'm an atheist (though I'm pretty sure my dad is at least a deist), but I really don't think they would care. Even Mom, who does go to church, would frown maybe, but leave it at that.

I honestly had zero problems with my church experience. I liked my church, liked my minister (and we even had a lesbian associate pastor for years). My schism was intellectually based, not experience based

Fairly liberal, reasonably laid-back Lutheran. No abuse, no wild fundie doctrine, none of the traditional stereotypes that religionists assume atheists must have come out of.

I get that one a lot. I DON'T, you idiots, I just don't believe in him

:toast:

Lutheran. Too much did not make sense when I was young and no one could adequately answer my questions, so I started on my own quest which brought me to a non-believer status. I have been happy ever since.

but I recovered nicely.

Somehow I ended up in Catholic school. Figured out it was all a bunch of make-believe in my early teens.

More specifically, Reform Judaism. As a result, I got used to dealing with Christian bigotry years before I became an atheist.

My parents didn't go to church but made us kids go. However, they knew that once we got older (9 or so), we went to the donut shop instead of Mass.

I knew I was an atheist before I was 12. I don't know why it took me so long.

I've always been an atheist. Oddly enough, though, I've been baptized. That's a story for another day.

But I got better. :)

Graduated from a high school seminary. Considered the priesthood. It's been a wild ride.

I'm so glad that I'm not a member of that asshole church anymore.

I think my Asperger's Syndrome had a lot to do with it, even when I was a kid I was ruthlessly Spock-like and came to the conclusion that "God" was Santa for grown-ups.

Tip for believers, NEVER try to argue the facts with a science-obsessed high-functioning autistic kid, you will always lose. :evilgrin:

I was raised in a very strange "non-denominational" church. But even though it was supposed to be open to any and all Christians, it was actually a blend of Southern Baptist, Assembly of God, and Pentecostal. Our pastor always liked to refer to it as a "down-home, bible-believin' church," whatever that means...

When people ask me about my history, I like to tell them that I have probably changed more on the religious and political spectrum than anyone they've ever known. I was born and bred to be a member of the "moral majority"...I was a teenage Promise Keeper for cryin' out loud (shudder)...I once argued with one of my high school science teachers about the validity of the Theory of Evolution...wow I was a stupid kid...

I find it incredibly ironic that one of the most profound statements I can make about my current disbelief can be found in the bible itself:
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
-That's right, KJV, bitches. Because in my hometown, you either read it in the king's english (which was good enough for Aryan Jesus), or you burned in hell. :)

Edit: spelling.

:toast:

:toast:

but rarely practiced it

Sunday school as children. I asked them about that later, and they said they wanted us to be exposed to the dominant religion and didn't want to influence us. Of the three kids they had, none of us ended up being churchgoers, but I'm the only strong atheist.

a really fundy school in 1st and 2nd grade, made QUITE the impression on me:


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=263&topic_id=16817


Eventually, in my early teens, we were going to a UU church, before I stopped going.


The parents ended up at a presbyterian church...

My dad later joined Jehovah's Witnesses and we all had to tag along.

EDITED TO ADD: Catholic school was the ever lovin' shit, though. When I transfered to public school, I was lightyears ahead of my classmates. This was in the mid- to late 1960's.

Though no one ever pressured me to restore my faith.

Father stayed home.

We were lured to church with Mom
by promises of breakfast out.

Lasted until I learned how to make
hashed browns all by myself.

For the first 15 years of my life. It didn't help that most of the sermons were in Greek, with the same ritual chanting over and over again. My first seeds of doubt began in Sunday School when I questioned the logistics of Noah fitting every single kind of animal in his Ark -- not to mention the dinosaurs! Later, the holy water that was supposed to cast away demons simply by virtue of it sitting on the altar for so many days. I didn't buy it. Eventually I just grew out of it, realized that not all tradition is necessarily a good thing, and that sometimes the truth is stranger than belief. That damn secular public school education didn't help much either, with all its evolution teachings and what not...

Christian>Catholic>Christian Identity.

Unlike most theists who claim they were once die hard atheists I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt I was a true blue christian.

And even after I turned 15 we stopped going on Christmas Eve.

And no, we didn't talk in tongues or handle snakes. We must have been the denomination of Laid-Back Southern Baptists.

We went to Sunday School, where we mostly socialized with other kids. Then to "preachin'" for a (usually) short sermon. Once a month we had the Lord's Supper, a/k/a Communion in most other churches. Grape juice and what tasted like uncooked dough. Yuk.

I grew up about 40 miles from the infamous Bob Jones University. Even my devout relatives call it "Jesus Tech" and don't much care for it. In fact, they seem to consider most Evangelical shenanigans as just showing off.

Speaking of that, a relative often took me to her church when I was very young - The Fire-Baptized Pentecostal Holiness Church. They made the Baptists look like High Church Episcopalians.

I didn't become an atheist because of traumatic church experiences as a child, or because I was mad at God (any more than I am mad at Bugs Bunny), or any of the bizarre reasons I often see slung around in here when people are assuming things about atheists.

Most all of my church memories are pleasant. One exception was some nightmares about Hell, probably due to somebody's sermonizing at a revival meeting. I got baptized ASAP. I was 9 yrs. old.

I also didn't de-convert suddenly, though I started suspecting quite young that God and Jesus had a close resemblance to Santa Claus - besides the beards, I mean.

I really resent people assuming that I just woke up one morning and decided religion was a load of crap. It took years of reading, reflection and analysis before I decided it was a load of crap.

to a Baptist church. I went there until junior high school and then switched to the Episcopalian church. And in the 80s, I decided that religion is all a bunch of crap and became an atheist, which I still am at the age of 70.

Emphasis on secular cause I've never been to Shule (temple). Raised to believe its a heritage more than a religion. Though my mother did take us to UU Sunday School to get some different religious exposure so we could choose for ourselves if we wished to have religion in our life or not.

with me, religion never took.

I went to church as a kid. Never really bought it though. Once I was old enough to start thinking about it, religion made little sense. I slipped from Baptists to non-demominational to UU to nothing.

need a church background of sorts to look good when voting time comes. In a political family, church was one more thing to do. I always thought the entire church thing was nonsense from the beginning. None convinced me of that or coerced me. I just listened to it as a little kid and always thought WTF. My parents were exceptionally well educated and open minded. I will forever be grateful. I feel so sorry for kids that get religion and/or fundie thinking heaped on them from birth.

Grandparents, parents, all my siblings and my nieces -- we are all without a belief in an externalized, anthropomorphic creator god.