Religious Background

[Astonished]

Good for you (although I can't see how you could have liked GND even if you were brainwashed at the time...LOL.) Not sure why you would want to label yourself Buddhist if you're just going to cherry-pick the same kind of things that Xtians do, seems illogical so perhaps think about it first?

I was in a fairweather nondenominational Xtian household growing up. Only child of a single mother, who was stigmatized by the neighborhood for being a Hester Prynne in their midst. Grandma spoke in tongues at church and scared the shit out of me on the rare occasions we ever did attend (mom made excuses like grandma's health was making it too difficult to get her out of the house but I knew better). Since the only thing that could have made her sin of an out-of-wedlock child worse was the result that I might happen to be gay when I started developing sexually, homophobia was instilled (didn't take much to break out of that, and it wasn't even based on sex or what the bible said for that matter). But the straw that broke the camel's back was my uncle, a pretty warped zealot but not exactly a fundamentalist; yes, everything about everything revolved around Jesus but he didn't take the bible literally (fortunately; I may have seen he was full of shit but he was a big, strong dude even when I got to be an adult and was catching up to him.) But one thing he said to me, I was still very young, and had something of a Christopher Hitchens moment where one of his religious instructors misspoke and dispelled the entire illusion. He told me that we were all 'evil'. Well, that did it. No loving god would have such a lowly opinion of his creation, especially not its innocent little children. This was an unbreakable paradox and the fact that no one had even attempted to answer how dinosaurs didn't conflict with creation and other such inconsistencies made going back impossible. The family degenerated after that; grandma got dementia for a few years and died, mom had a massive stroke and I ended up in the foster care system. I don't regret it; they got progressively worse as I got older and I never told them I was an atheist the entire time. I did call my uncle one last time a few years after I turned 18 and told him, just to stick it in his face for being such a huge dick about it. You can imagine his response; "Oh, you'll come around to the truth one day, I just know it." Classy, Uncle D-bag.

The thing is I'm more scared that my family would judge me if I didn't have a religion at all rather than changing my religion. And I find Buddhism better than other religions, I'm not planning to follow every single rule of it.
And about GND, not only was I brainwashed but I also didn't understand that the acting was bad. And I'l give the movie a little credit, The proffesor became an atheist and a bad guy because he has lost his mother even though he praied. Yes, people can become atheists without suffering but at the very least they didn't make him entirely bad. And the fact that a God would allow such bad things to happen is a good argument for atheism, I do think that he had a good reason to become an atheist. How I said, he had a good reason to become an atheist, so he shouldn't have been put in the wrong.

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I have a religious grandmother, and lived right across the street from a church during my childhood, so you bet I was raised christian. They were a friendly, liberal bunch, though. More loving thy neighbor than fire and brimstone. It wasn't too bad, but I eventually grew out of it, the more I really thought about things, and talked to people over the internet.

I was a baptist in Alabama, though I went to a methodist church sometimes too.

Yeah, I also had a nanny who was religious, she used to take me to church sometimes and teach me about christianity. She was a good woman.
My parents only go to church because they say the idea of a loving God makes you happy and because they are around other people so they get positive energy from them.
But think it's the same like saying "The reallity is scary so we imagine it as we like".
What bothers me is that they didn't tell me that untill I asked them and they trusted religion in school. At their time Romania was communist and religion wasn't taught in schools. My mom told me that because of that they didn't expect it to have negative effects on me.
My parents aren't stupid in general, but they trust religion too much. Considering where they came from, I can understand it.