I will try to make this short and sweet.

I was raised NOT going to church, but my parents were both raised in a Christian background (my mother was raised Catholic and my father Methodist). Even though we never attended church as a family, they still talked mildly of their belief in God and church. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, but never Ash Wednesday or any other minor holidays.

As a kid, I still believed there was a God and I would pray when I was scared or needed something. However, it never felt right. It always felt fake, no matter how much I wanted to believe.... it didn't feel “Real”.

When I had my first child, I decided to start going to church, because I felt the need to have something spiritual and loving in my life. It still didn’t feel right. My visits to church didn’t last long. The first time the pastor started preaching that we HAD to be baptized in order to go to Heaven and NOT go to Hell, was when it suddenly hit me. The ALL LOVING GOD I was looking for was not here. The BULLSH*T meter suddenly went off and I never set foot in church ever again.

However, I still felt a need to have something spiritual in my life, but not religion. The world we live it is amazing and beautiful and I will not “pretend” to know how the world, in all it’s complexities, became that way. I think science explains things better, even though there is so much we don’t know and are still learning about the world around us. However, I just find that I am content with the mind-set that I “Just don’t know, the unknown”..... and that’s ok. Does that make me a full out Atheist? I don’t know. What I do know and feel in my heart is that, religion is man-made. It was created to control the masses.

Is there life after death? Do we go on when we die? I hope so, but I don’t know. Nobody knows. So, I will keep asking questions, reading books and keep an open mind. Maybe, some day I will know.... or just cease to exist.

When I was young, round Primary School age, my school at the time and still does now require you to be a christian, despite how I did not like it, it was a requirement, after reaching through the bible in the church next to school, I slowly started to realize the many flaws in all the passages, I started to doubt God's existence .. then over the course of months, years, I repeated the cycle of reading the bible, and learning the flaws of it, until one day, I realized that all things told, was nothing but lies, something to subjugate the masses, I denounced my belief in Christianity and became an Atheist, as I was firmly convinced, that no divine being that would care for his/her own creations would allow such misery to be inflicted upon the world.

I grew up in a fundamentalist baptist household, and the only advantage to that was the food that was served up every Sunday. I have always been skeptical and tried to be rational in our thinking, but sometimes we realize what is being told to us Wasn't scientifically possible or proven to be so.

I read the other stories here and I felt the same way when it came to praying. I prayed but it never felt like anyone was there. I prayed when I needed something severely important or if I was scared. Nothing ever happened even though I put all my faith in God or whatever I believed to be the case.

Like many others, we tend to be an aftermath if religious indoctrination. This is and should be considered child abuse. I was scared all the time of going to hell, I couldn't develop my own personality until the last few years because of having to give yourself and time to God, and above all my families unacceptable to questioning of any sort. You will see it in every religious institution. They don't take too kindly to logical questions and will condemn you to hell fit said questions.

I had extreme doubts in myself for a period of four years until I educated myself, the way I never did before because I never had access to the Internet or books, went back to the default position of humanity. Atheism.

I now operate a highschool Secular Humanist Alliance at my local highschool. Reason is available for everyone and no one should ever have to hide who they are or the questions they want to ask.

I was raised in a Church of Christ environment. I attended a private Church of Christ school 1st through the 8th grade. I’m glad my parents let me leave that school for family budget reasons. I quit attending church about the same time. To be honest, I never liked attending church. At the age of five I remember thinking the story of the talking snake was bizarre. I never walked down the isle to be baptized. From eighth grade till college I was on the fence concerning religion. When I took geology in college, I can remember staring at a box of fossils millions of years old and fell off the fence. The earth’s estimated age is 4.5 billion years old. Subtract six to ten thousand years and that is a big difference religion can’t account for. I trust radiometric dating much more than a conglomeration of superstitious writings from bronze-age sheep herders. Every angle I investigated from other areas of knowledge such as secular history, evolution etc., the biblical fairy tales became more and more ridiculous. I'm happy to be free of the burden of mind-control religion tried to enslave me with.

There was no alternative. 13 billion years and I get a whole 3 score and ten, and I have to share that with politicians and theists.