My journey to enlightenment (long-ish)

[srqhivemind]

I was born into a Congregationalist household. i was NOT a normal child, however.
I was born at 26 weeks gestation in 1985, and spent the following 4 months in the hospital fighting for my life. I suffered 2 strokes that left my right side weak.
I have been living my entire life with one fully-usable hand and one sorta-usable hand, to say nothing of the damage done to my legs. I can walk and run, but not well.
What's that got to do with my religion?

From a young age I had to adapt to do anything of substance, I questioned everything, challenged the status quo on everything by sheer virtue of it being part of the way I was forced to think not by my parents but by my environment. My mother insisted on calling me a "miracle baby", even as a young kid I knew better. I was (and still am) a hard-headded, stubborn sonofabitch and could not come to terms with how a so-called "Loving, merciful God" would give an innocent child a disability that caused nothing but hardship. My attention turned to science fiction, as I transitioned from PBS children's television to Star Trek at the age of 4.

From then on, when faced with religious dogma I immediately questioned it, the logical fallacies that make up Christian beliefs showed their true colors and refused to compute (If the Earth was created by God 6K years ago, why are the dinosaurs 65 million years old?" the answer "God did it" didn't sit well with me because I never took anything at face value without at least some shred of hard evidence (I don't care how big, but it's gotta be something that makes logical sense and that most certainly didn't).

However, being a disabled, developmentally-offtrack oddball fat kid the only social environment that accepted me for who and what I was was my family's church (being in SW Florida that meant lots and lots
of old folk, lots of veterans, grandparents and retired clergy from almost every christian sect. The church was liberal as far as accepting other interpretations of God goes, so long as they were Abrahamic (they held a joint service once a year with the neighboring Synagogue, everyone saw it as rather enlightening).

Friction came when Confirmation was upon me at 14. For the first time my beliefs were called into question by my peers and my parents. I tried to leave then and there but my parents wouldn't let me. I
sucked it up and did what was one of the most difficult things I've had to do: Write a complete lie for a 'statement of faith' and deliver it to the congregation with a straight face, it worked almost too well.

After that my involvement in the church started to fade as my parents stopped caring if I actually went on Sundays. I lent a hand at holiday dinners, ran the sound system at services when asked, that sort of
thing, keeping the fact that I was skeptical about the whole Jesus thing hidden behind a well-polished mask. Then 9/11 happened, and any doubt I had left about there being a god vanished.

I considered myself a 'free-agent agnostic' for many years. Then in the space of two years
I lost two relatives to treatable forms of cancer, they refused treatment on religious grounds (being "Christian Scientists" -- an oxymoron if ever there was one), being the big proponent of modern
medicine that I am that pushed me further away from religion knowing my family tree was poisoned by idiots.

Three years ago I left home, my Agnosticism fully in place. I met a girl raised in a Mormon household who had recently gotten out of an abusive relationship with an extremely hypocritical Jehovah's witness (and she still believes some of their crap) and got romantically involved, keeping her infant son at arm's length as the father was still lurking about. We've been apart now for 5 months, mutually having cited idealogical differences. She believes in supernatual abilities like telepathy, prognostication and "healing", and of course states that she can do all these things.

I live and work in a place where most everyone is a devout Jesus-praising bible thumper. I've been approached at work to come to various churches (all of them are the new-agey "non denominational" BS types.) I politely decline, there's all of 2 people in my office who's religious affiliations are ambiguous (as they, like me don't mention their religion at work and we don't ask).

I'm a minority in more ways then one