Reflection About Religion

I think the first clue that I would never be religious was when I started falling asleep during Sunday school. I remember being seven and not understanding how you could pray to some invisible dude in the sky. I was baptized Methodist, but my family stopped attending our church after a change in reverends when I was 8. After that, my flimsy connection to Methodism disappeared entirely. Our family had been pretty lax about religion, saying a brief grace at dinner the only religious act we performed outside of attending church. I’ve always viewed religion as having a belief in God or gods which have influence in the goings on of Earth and everything in it. If I had to label my relation with religion nowadays, agnostic would be the most accurate term. I can’t bring myself to deny the existence of deities, as there is so much about the universe that we know nothing about. That’s how I deal with the fact that some people are religious- we can’t prove that there are deities, but we also can’t prove that they don’t exist. It wouldn’t be fair to invalidate someone else’s beliefs to justify mine when even my own could be proven wrong. I can be correct and so can someone of another view because our beliefs are just our perceptions of the world- they don’t actually govern how the world really works, at least those things outside of human control. If I think that the universe formed from the Big Bang and my friend thinks that God created the universe, we’re both right because we have no

As a child, I grew up going to Catholic School, from Kindergarten, until eighth grade. My mother thought private school was best for my brother and I, as there’s a misconception that since you’re paying a tuition, the education is better. My mother was also Catholic at the time, so she was more comfortable with us growing up being taught religion, which should inevitably cause us to be Christians and believe in God. Years went by of me being educated on religion, and by the age of twelve, I felt guilty that I couldn’t process or accept the idea of there being a God. I came to this reality due to the fact that I didn’t feel the connection to God that our teachers taught us we should have; I didn’t feel loved by an alternate being, I felt alone, and I didn’t grasp how such a thing could be possible.

I was blessed to be able to go through such a good school system. Some people complained about going to a private, Christian school, but I really enjoyed it. I do wonder sometimes though what it would have been like to go through public schooling and if that would have changed how I am today. I think the strong morals and values I hold today were largely created by my upbringing. But, I do think I used to simply claim to be a Christian because of my family. If my parents are Christian that must mean I’m a Christian, right? Going to college made me realize that my faith is something that I have to make my own. My faith is not necessarily my parents’ faith. I have to make a decision on what I believe and what I stand for, separate from my family. I remember that around the age of 14 I started to feel distant from God and was not very strong in my faith. Throughout high school I think I had different points of feeling “spiritual highs,” but felt like my faith was lukewarm. Today, I think I am starting to separate my parent’s faith from my own, and starting to make it mine. I feel like this is something everyone has to do at some point in their life. In the past year, and in the past couple months especially, I have had a stronger relationship with God. I definitely don’t feel “strong” in my faith, but I feel like I am growing spiritually. I think being here and the

Growing up I was always told religion was false and that I was above my friends who were Christians because I believed in science. My mom was raised by Catholics, but when she graduated High School, she vowed to never be religious again. My father enjoyed feeling more elite over the “religious plebeians” that worked for him. I remember having an argument with Victoria Henderson in 3rd grade because I believed in The Big Bang and she was a creationist. Everyone took Victoria’s side, and I learned it was better to just not talk about religion. In high school, I began reaching out of my comfort zone, and also questioning what my parents had ingrained on me as a person. My first religious experience was dating a boy named Luis who was Catholic, as my mother was raised. He was only allowed to date Catholic girls, so I

I am an atheist, but it wasn't always that way. My entire life there was a constant pressure on me to accept that there was a supreme being that created all. Even at a young age I couldn’t bring myself to fully believe this. I continued grasping for straws because, just like every other religious person, I was scared of the “consequences” that would come with not believing. My Non-Denominational Christian Church promoted telling this to everyone, even children.

As a child I was forced into a religion I knew absolutely nothing about. My mother woke me up early every Sunday and got me ready for mass. I hated it. I didn’t comprehend why I was being forced to attend and listen to some stranger talk for hours, about something I did not understand. This continued for a couple years until I was around 8 years old and my family became inactive. Although we became inactive, our faith still lingered and we continued to pray every night, and not leave our homes without a blessing. A couple years later I felt as if something was calling me to attend the church. I started

As someone who is himself in a short period of life considered an atheist, I wanted to briefly look back on this phenomenon. Atheism is a term that has many different definitions, and these definitions are often correspond to a similar worldview. This article is to generally encompass the following systems of beliefs (atheists apologize in advance if their specific form of atheism these definitions is not included):

Since youth I was always taught that there is only one god and that Jesus had died on the cross for my sins. If I did not accept these teachings and Jesus Christ as my lord and savior I would be condemned to hell. I went to a Catholic school for a period of time and I never questioned any of the religious aspects of my life. Since I was a child I was told that this is what I needed to believe, and a good child does so without question. This became a struggle the older I had become. I had developed a much more inquisitive mind and had begun to question the things around me. The more enlightened I became the more I questioned not only my own faith, but all

Growing up in a Christian Orthodox religion I went to church every sunday and attended sunday school as well as all church related festivals. Going to college and working became an excuse on why I stopped attending church regularly. When college came along I absolutely hated the idea of taking a religion class as a required course. I was so close minded and complained relentlessly about taking this course. As time went on in class I told myself, “there is no way this professor is going to turn me into a Lutheran.” Little did I know my professor was trying to open the doors of knowledge and expand my views in both science and religion. I came into theology one hundred and one believing I knew everything there was to be known about God. I was arrogant and foolish. My perspectives were so narrow, like my mind. I did not allow my professor to enlighten me with his knowledge. I believed that since I passed my tenth grade Sunday School exam there was no more to learn, or no mind great

I used to belong to a specific domination within the Christian community because of my family and my ex husband. Those beliefs were very strict and somewhat rigid that if you didn’t do X then you wouldn’t be saved. Due to certain circumstances, I started to challenge those beliefs. I started to understand that I did not fully understand what they meant, I was just going along with what I was told. Therefore, through some personal self exploration I have learned that my own beliefs do not align exactly with what I was taught or rather told how it was. I have learned more now to appreciate different belief systems and it can be more of a personal experience than what is socially acceptable by certain

Even at an extremely young age I was always on the fence about what I truly believed in. There was never a religion forced down my throat, opening my mind to a lot

I am an agnostic, meaning I am open to the existence of god or gods but I don’t affiliate with any religions. I haven’t always been though. I was born into a Christian family and raised going to church and being taught the Bible. But recently, I’ve gotten to thinking and just stepped outside the box to look at Christianity and what I’ve been taught. I found that the only real reason that I was a Christian and probably the only reason my parents and their parents were Christian was that they were born into that belief as part of their culture.

If someone had asked me that day about my religious beliefs, I would have probably quietly said that I am a hindu. In my own mind I would consider myself an agnostic, in the way that I will never know if God exists or not, but leaning towards atheism, as the concept of God sounds a bit illogical to me.

The number of atheist and agnostic has been expanding there have long been predictions that religion would fade from relevance as the world modernizes, but all the recent surveys are finding that it’s happening startlingly fast. An atheist is a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings along with an agnostic, an agnostic person is a person who holds that the existence of an ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human

The relentless urge to see the world as it truly is was always in me, but religion is a particularly effective antidote. It's especially effective on the young and the uneducated. Hence, during my journey to becoming less young and less uneducated I was forced by my inner urge for truth to spend many sleepless nights pondering Christianity, and I was forced by society to spend many hours listening to the same poorly thought out arguments for god/religion/Christianity. The only conclusion I could ultimately reach is that they're all untrue or non-existent. I can't be intellectually honest unless I declare that god doesn't exist. Unlike apatheists, that conclusion significantly shapes who I am.