h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It seems to me that some were born into families of religious faith, were brought up as children within this faith, but have lost faith somewhere along the line.

Would this represent you? If so what age did you come to the realisation that this religious faith, was not for you? Was it a sudden realisation or a gradual process?

Alternately for those with a religious faith, was there a time when your religious faith suddenly made "sense" to you, when you realised you could commit your heart and soul to it ... a sort of spiritual religious awakening?

Of course, others may not have grown up in a "religiously" minded family or have may never have felt religion to be of any real relevance to them. Maybe you belong to this category?

Good question, Stone Aart.

I was sent to Sunday School each week and accompanied to church moderately often after a certain age. From that I gather that my folks were agnostic but wanted me to have 'the basics'. I don't recall any serious discussion at home, though my father had been an organist (and had a harmonium* at home) and was a fairly regular choir member (a fine, true, choir voice apparently but not strong enough for solo).

Some years after that certain age (and some travel), at a time of youth club badminton and bible discussion group, I argued myself out of Christianity (& by default, religion in general).
I am now an atheist but not, I hope, a rabid evilangelistic one.
Religion is not for me and I feel unsettled in the company of strongly churchgoing people...
But - and this, I feel, is the nub of the matter:
- Some people actually need the reassurance of a god.
- Others have been brought up within a (strongly?) religious aura and can't break away.
- Yet others don't want to break with it (family tradition or whatever).


So there. You did ask...


As a rider: I find myself more disturbed by the rabid evilangelists than by pushy evangelists ... They're both misguided - and the former are cruelly wrong.

* harmonium: I gather this is the term used for the family of such things - that one was probably a reed-organ? upright (parlour) piano sized and powered by two pedals... left-right-left-right... keyboard was piano-like and also had two rows of pull-out stops (vox humana etc).

Whilst my family wasn't particularly religious, the area I grew up in was devoutly Catholic and there was no concept that someone wouldn't be Catholic so I grew up believing by default. I went to church with my nan and I bought it all, learned the saints and all that.

I lost it during my teenage years, with a couple of developments. One was realising I was gay and that Catholic position on homosexuality was utterly incoherent (I remember asking my priest why God kept on making gay people if he hated them so much) and that something had to give. The second development was the abuse I'd suffered since I was a little kid finally came to a head and it all came out. I remember someone telling me that all the stuff I was enduring was part of God's plan for me, to make me stronger, and that was the moment I thought " it, I'm done": I couldn't believe in a God that would do that to a person, and I didn't want to be around those who thought it was an act of love.

After that I looked around the other faiths, to see if they offered something more believable but they didn't, so I abandoned the idea of religion. For a few years afterwards, until I started Uni, I was a deist: I believed in an entity that set the universe running but had long since lost interest but by the time I was 20 I'd realised and accepted there's nothing out there and never was.

My grandmother took me to her church many times - she was the daughter of a Scottish minister I found out only after she died.
My parents sent me to Sunday School for a bit.

We had religious education in school.

Thinking back I never realised anyone believed any of that stuff was true until I was in my teens.

To me it was simply myths, the odd morality play, and something people did...i.e. go to listen to a beardy bloke in a dress saying stuff.

I don't refer to myself as an athiest, I'm me - a human being - since religion/gods are nothing more than myths/legends organised into powerful organisations that for centuries controlled and grew through threats/violence/un-opposed propoganda then why should I have to pin a word onto myself to describe my views on one thing?

Most people, I would assume, do not believe in fairies but they don't describe themselves as afairiest. Yes, LOTS of people believe in many different gods but that doesn't make it anymore of a reason why I need to define myself apart from it all.

And having looked at how religions have developed around the world in similar ways and how specific ones have developed...and being able to see one now that has developed over the past few decades and the methods they are using as other religions have used in the past, one can see how religions evolve through time and hence religions are merely made up.

It's not unusual for people who have been through a severe crisis to become born again. There's something liberating about feeling that you can embrace a faith and leave your old life behind. On a more practical basis, there will come a time in your life [if you live long enough] when it dawns on you that whatever chances of parenthood and romance that you might once have had are now squarely behind you. Do you want to face the future with a sense of no longer mattering, or do you want to have a reason to go on?

If a drunk driver kills your son or daughter, you may be galvanized into creating or joining an organization that crusades against drunk driving. If you've had a narrow brush with death from cancer or a bullet in your brain, you may feel compelled to throw yourself into work on behalf of other cancer or brain-damaged people.

Then there was a Romanian nun named Theresa who felt compelled to provide nursing services to the poorest of the poor in India. She happened to do this within the framework of the Roman Catholic Church.

I've heard that everybody has spiritual needs. You might satisfy those needs in religious or non-religious ways. It's up to you.

Hmmm, I don;t really think using Mother Theresa is a great example of anything apart from describing someone who was a...

People have to remember that to be a saint you have to first be dead. Faith is a gift from GOD! If that gift comes through religion then that is good. But some religions get in the way of using faith, the way it was meant to be used. Some people gain religious faith through someone they see who is religious. Many people lose faith because of something they see done in the name of religion. It is a bit like driving a car, if you drive where other drivers do the right thing, then your driving improves. But if you drive surrounded by road rage and poor driving decisions, your own driving gets worse.

A shame that some of worst drivers I know are Christians.

My parents took me to church every Sunday when I was a kid. Anglican. My mother believes - I think if they had allowed women to become vicars a tad earlier, that's what she would have done. As it is she is high enough up that they let her give sermons. I rather like her sermons. They aren't very practical, but they are very lyrical.

Anyway, I believed. This was quite uncomplicated. I liked church and pretty much everything about it. It was a very liberal church, as churches go. Plus, there's the singing.

Around the age of 16 I found myself mentally arguing with the sermons. My main problem was/is that I found it increasingly hard to believe in Jesus. As Jesus, that is. I tend to suspect that he is an amalgam of various charismatic leaders of the time with lots of oral storytelling and heaps of pinching from other contemporary religions. After a while I simply couldn't sit through another sermon of people assuming that he was real, actually lived and pretty much as described to. So I basically just stopped going.

Anyway. I tend to describe myself as a lapsed Anglican. The church had a large influence on me, positive, and this is one of the reasons I am not fighting my husband's desire for our children to be brought up religious, if not Anglican. Mind you, his reasons are more cultural than due to actual belief.

I miss the singing though. Every year, in the run up to Christmas, I get the urge to go to church regularly for the carols.

I also fall into the "my family are agnostics, but they wanted me to have the basics" category, though thankfully I didn't have to have Sunday school
Though I did have chapel for half an hour 5 times a week for 8 years at secondary school, which means that even though I couldn't tell you where something is in the bible anyone starts off and I can finish it for them (that is not a challenge btw,) but at least our priest was one of the best teachers at school - I'm quite sure he helped quite a few people at school
The faith mission that appeared for a week every year then attempted to undo all his work - only those who were already devout could cope with them, very judging, and very annoying - even those who were religious would frequently avoid them

Coming back to the topic at hand, I myself haven't gone either direction yet
My friends who are religious never suddenly became religious, it either stayed strong from their childhood or grew slowly later
Very few of those who said they were religious when younger suddenly lost when older, most who aren't religious now simply had a slow deprecation over time

I can't really remember *why* I became a godless heathen, but I can remember pretty much when. Like several people here I was brought up as Church of England Christian. Bible stories are fed to you as soon as you go to school (or were in the mid 60s); I went to Sunday School; and I think that the end result was that people just sort of felt, regarding Christianity, that that was how things were. It was the English way. And I suppose because it was so low key it wasn't too difficult to realise, at the age of 11, that it didn't actually make any sense. I didn't have, or don't remember having, any sort of epiphany (or whatver the opposite of epiphany is), I just remember gradually deciding that actually it's perfectly okay to not believe in God. And that made so much more sense, and it still does.

You just reminded me of something there Sol, talking about the singing. I was in Durham Cathedral a few years back. I'd been ringing the bells for the Sunday morning service (yes, I'm a hypocrite, but I do enjoy ringing) and coming down from the tower you end up in a side chancel. We got there just as the choir was processing up the nave and giving it their all. It was one of the most beautiful sounds I've ever heard. So yes, the singing.

dygienichispenser - cunningly disguised for Halloween


Could I proffer the suggestion that you never 'were' a Christian or believer? Much like myself you were fed this stuff before you fully understood your cognitive reasoning and once you did realised it was all made up...you never made a conscious decision that it was all true before you became 'a godless heathen'?

Yep, that makes sense Alfster. I think, up to the age of eight or so, kids just accept everything that they hear, without actually making any value judgements about any of it (believing six impossible things before breakfast). So long as nothing has been forcibly programmed (West Bromwich Albion is the best team ever and if you dare to think otherwise you will burn in hell forever), then it's fairly easy to junk it all and make up your own mind once you start being able to reason, age 10ish.

This all makes a lot of sense to me. I was a cultural Anglican - went to scouts, C of E school, even briefly sunday school. I happily went along with all the rituals, but without ever believing a word of it.

I had one evangelising RE teacher at about 16, and even at that age it was evident what he was doing, poor strawman logic and all. By then I remember thinking that his whole argument was based on very shaky foundations.

sprout

I like Alfster's point about not thinking of himself as an atheist, just a human being.

I went to sunday school at a baptist church as a kid. I think this was purely because that was the closest church. Mum & dad didn't go to church but I think they sent us, as has been said by someone else, so we had the basics.*

When I was ten we moved to Orkney, and my brother & I started going to the baptist church youth club, which was called CE (Christian Endeavour). The meetings were usually quite fun, there was happy-clappy singing and they had people giving interesting lectures or demonstrations, not necessarily religious. They even ran summer camps where you slept in a sleeping bag on a classroom floor in a remote school and did lots of running around games all day.

I remember when I was around 14 attending one of these camps, full of raging hormones and fancying the pants off one of the young men helping out (with no encouragement, I should add). One of the things they wanted you to do was "become a Christian", basically say out loud that you welcomed Jesus into your life, and I remember doing this with tears in my eyes, I was so passionate about it.

I stopped going to the club when I was around 16 and we moved away from the main town, and religion really wasn't a feature in my life again until I was around 25 when I joined the Sokka Gakai International, the Buddhist organisation. I found that quite interesting and liked the way it put responsibility on your own shoulders, you weren't worshipping some vague deity who could grant or deny your happiness. But that fell by the wayside when I moved from London and didn't have access to a group (helped by a very slanted TV documentary which featured a] people who had "escaped" from the "cult" and b] nutters who were still in their thrall).

Nowadays I don't have any religious beliefs. I think children should be taught the religion of their country at school but that's for the community value rather than the religious one. And I would defend a person's right to their own religion, as long as it didn't require them to ignore the rules and customs of their home country.** And as long as they don't shove it down my throat.

Deb


* On another thread somewhere, someone speculated that children were sent to sunday school to give their parents some private time. I asked my mum about this & she pointed out that my nan also lived with us so they still didn't get any

** My husband's sister is a Jehovah's Witness and I still don't understand why I shouldn't send her a Christmas card. It's the custom of the country. But since they celebrate marriage she could send me a massive deep red pot plant, delivered on my 1st wedding anniversary despite the fact my husband had died 4 months earlier. Bitter, me?

For my part when growing up religion never seemed that relevant to me. It was never presented to me as being of absolute important, and there were other things to do and deal with while growing up. Also I seemed to have developed a passion at an early age for the empirical sciences.

Since then however, for many reasons, including meeting people for whom religion is very important, I have a desire to learn about religion ... politics ... social sciences ...