Religion Born Into: Christianity. Denomination: Mennonite
Church: Attended a Mennonite Church from 0-17 years of age
Current View: Undecided with a strong tendency towards atheism, agnosticism
I've effectively lost my religion. Though I live in a world of science, medicine, and reality, thoughts of philosophy and religion constantly weigh on my mind as I seek to understand the world around me. I spend a great deal of time seeking out what I believe, what others believe, and why both believers and non-believers hold the convictions they do.
It's a very charged subject, and I have a lot of strong feelings about it that trace back to my early childhood. My experience with the church has always been very negative. At every turn, I have only ever found church to constantly repel me like two like-poles of a magnet. I spent a year at a Christian High School and it nearly drove me to madness. Were I a more violent person, I am sure I would have loved to lash out physically against a majority of my terribly disrespectful classmates. I attended a small, Christian College where I learned to "tune out" all things religious and spiritual. Once I managed to do that after my first semester, the remainder of my stay there was very enjoyable, as I ran with a very secular crowd.
I now find myself at the conclusion that Christianity and its claims are very hard to believe in. I realized that faith means something that is believed by one to be true in the absence of direct evidence.
If you tell me that a purple unicorn exists on the other side of a wall, I can choose to have faith in your claim or not. If I confirmed the existence of this unicorn by direct observation (scientifically, if you will) then I can no longer have faith, and the very principle of faith in this case has been rendered useless. Alternatively, if I choose to believe your claim (to have faith), then I, like a Christian believing in God, have faith. However, to have faith means to believe in the absence of evidence, so I open myself up to a host of claims that are not provable. This is why I believe that religious people are in many ways "backward", easily scammed, gullible, and contradictory.
Oh, please. Hard physical evidence proves the existence of dinosaurs, a 4 billion year-old earth, and a far older universe. How can you accept both these facts and the biblical "facts" of creation, a 10,000 year old earth, and an omnipotent God? For the longest time, I kept believing, thinking that I was being tested and that I needed to have this "faith." But after awhile, I just couldn't keep doing that to myself. I've grown up in the Christian theology, gone to Christian schools, and have taken theological classes in college. I can no longer stand this "universe" that they profess, and am on a mission to seek out my own way of living.
[A work in progress, updates frequent]
