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[craterchest]

Discovered this link after looking around on how to tell your parents you've dropped the religion they raised you on.

First of all, I don't know who wrote this, but it's a very adolescent response to someone who did just that. Dropping a philosophy or a belief that you were raised on and surrounded by during your whole developmental period is not

Comments

[justatailor]

i grew up a catholic in a very ethnically & religiously diverse state where my family were among the very few republicans. and when i say republicans, i mean the traditional view--people with money that want to keep their money (even though they didn't really have money at the time it was never really a religious issue like the current republicans). i was not "raised in the church" and my only ties to catholocism/christianity were my ultra-religious grandma and my mom/step-dad.

for most of high school, while i considered myself a republican (fiscal, not social), i would say i was actually on the agnostic end of the religious spectrum. except when a wild baptist came along and i felt i needed to defend catholocism (it was very jarring when i moved down south, for someone that moved from a town that was founded to be utopia). i never understood discriminating against people just because a book told you to and i always felt like it was important to have a personal relationship with god rather than proselytize to others. also i was super into the movie dogma which made me feel like it was ok to be the sort of agnostic catholic that i was.

and i was totally fine believing in this personal god without the ritual of organized religion. i had read some of the bible (the good bits--the book of revelation in particular) but didn't find it particularly moving. my political views started to change in college because--like you said--getting out of that microcosm leads to some self-evaluation. i met some atheists for the first time and was terrified. i spent a summer with my mom & step-dad and was guilted into religious fervor (oh what monetary dependence does to a kid) and became a judgmental bigot with no actual platform to stand on.

and then i realized that wasn't me. and i took some time to evaluate my nightly ritual of saying prayers: what if i just stopped? was anyone actually listening? why am i praying? why am i content to just believe things are the way they are...just because? so i just...stopped praying. and i stopped trying to attribute things to some dude in the sky that lived in some fantasy land.

i think i was lucky that i never got first communion or confirmation and i think i was lucky that i never went to sunday school on a regular basis. i think i was lucky that i was jealous of the kids who played with dreidels and didn't realize they were actually a minority. i was lucky that i only hated the muslim kid because he was kind of a dick and drew muscles on everything and not because i was afraid his people were going to crash a plane into the pentagon where our other friends' parents worked. and i don't get why people aren't curious and why they're so content to attribute a nice day to some dude in the sky, but even when i was a believer i knew that you needed to let other people believe what they believe.

and now that i'm a non-believer, i understand why: mortality is a tough prospect to face. if you need the dogma of religion to distract you from this fact, i get it. it's terrifying. but i'll never understand the discrimination. or the christians that think they're martyrs when they're better represented than any other religious group (i mean, if you're looking for martyrs people hate atheists more than they hate gays or muslims in this country). but no one has the right to deny anyone else that little bit of happiness. because while you might believe in eternal life somewhere else, you only get one life here. and no one deserves for that life to be a life of misery and abuse.

(and now i'll step down from my 2am soapbox. you're on a slightly different road than i went down [and i'm absolutely not encouraging you to be an atheist unless that's a path you have an interest in], but i understand it and i think it's important to address the failings of man-made belief systems)

[craterchest]

I had similar questions when I started to lose my religion. For me it was "Why do we pray to God if He already has a plan for us? Is there really a point to have Satan around if God is always in charge, which means it's Him that's setting up 'trials' for us, or allowing humans to act horribly to one another?" And I just never got the answers from anyone that were supposedly "in the know," and that seemed to kind of snatch the veil away, so to speak. I realized a lot of ministers are just as clueless as everyone else is about some aspects of Christianity.

I feel like religion in general is more than just dealing with the fact that you're going to bite it one day, and that'll be the end of you. A lot of it is how to live.

But yeah, I'd just like to ask those North Carolinians who were for Amendment 1 to tell me how many gays they brought to Jesus by passing this law.

Also "a wild baptist came along" makes me think of Pokemon.

[justatailor]

a wild baptist uses proselytize! it's not very effective.

I don't really see the how to live aspect of religion. Does religion prepare anyone for living in the world today? I mean, I guess some religions have dietary constraints (which are usually stupid and not at all grounded in actual nutrition) but if you're going for the morality thing...primates have morality without religion. several other animal species do too: http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals.html

I have yet to find evidence of a religious person being a more moral person than an agnostic or atheist in the people I know. The religious people may be 'charitable' but typically they're either donating to their church or they're donating to religious charitable organizations, which sometimes have catches for helping people out (you know like, can't be gay or have to convert--stuff like that).

Really, the only thing I can see that religion does effectively is form tight knit communities. But there are plenty of other ways you could sit around with a bunch of neighbors & sing (if you want) without the whole god thing.

[craterchest]

What I mean by "how to live" is not specifically a moral thing when it comes down to it. More like just an organized form of living.

I don't believe that religious people are any more moral than nonreligious people, but being a part of a religion is essentially adhering to a certain lifestyle with guidelines and rules (well, in theory at least). It's just more organized I feel. But I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing - just different.

[chibimaryn]

I've pondered about these issues myself, and I've been asked the same question about prayer; what's the point if God has a plan and knows what's best for us anyway?

I believe the purpose for prayer is to develop a stronger relationship with Him. Over time, we can look back and see how God has worked in our lives and provided for our needs, and it builds our trust in Him. He doesn't want us to accept salvation and then go "hey, great!" and wander through the rest of our lives without bothering to talk/listen to Him again(which is pretty much what happened with me in college). It doesn't make sense to accept His ultimate sacrifice for mankind and then ignore Him for the rest of our lives on Earth. He's supposed to be our Best Friend, our Confidant, who we can go to whenever we feel the need.

And yes, if He knows our every need intimately(more so than we know it ourselves), prayer may seem to have no purpose. However, scripture also says "You have not because you ask not." He knows what we hope for, but He wants us to maintain our relationship with Him, be dependent on Him, and watch Him work.

In response to the Satan thing...I've asked my mom about that before, though maybe not the same exact question. Her answer was basically that Satan, whether we like the idea or not, is the ruler of this world. Not all trials laid before us are something God plans for/wants us to walk through; they're there because we live in a fallen world.

Some trials are God ordained, but when we look back from the other side it's easy to see that He was trying to teach us something/build our character. It's only through experiencing said trials that we know how to reach out and help others who are suffering through the same thing.

I don't know if these answers will be satisfactory for you, but it's food for thought at least.