Family was Catholic. We went to church for a brief time, up until my first communion, and then we simply stopped attending. Religion or reading the bible was not something in which we actively participated in the household, though there was religious paraphernalia, pictures of Jesus and crosses, on the walls. The only religious experience I remember is reciting nightly prayers until at some point I just did not anymore.
When I was a teenager, I fell into the wrong crowd and converted to Pentecostal Christianity. I understand now that I did it because I wanted to fit into some sort of group, and they were the most welcome at the time. It did not take me long to see the vileness they hid behind their religious fervor.
Through my early and mid-twenties, I got into Wicca. Solitary practitioning, which probably derived from my blossoming introverted personality. Granted, pagan and new age religions are much more inclusive than the unholy Judeo-Christian trifecta claim to be, yet something in me kept insisting that relying upon fictional religious concepts was no way to live.
Between Pentecostal Christianity and Wicca, I had done extensive reading on the Agnostic works of Robert Green Ingersoll, but at that time in my life I simply had not been ready to make that leap away from religious fantasy. I cannot pinpoint the general time that I finally shed all the religious nonsense, freeing myself to properly enjoy reality for what it is instead of what I wanted it to be, but I have enough years of being an atheist under my proverbial belt to know the only thing that will bring me back to religion is dementia in my old age. And that hardly counts, now does it not? Especially since from my perspective the mind of an elderly person with dementia is hardly much different than the delusional mind of the religious believer.
When I was a teenager, I fell into the wrong crowd and converted to Pentecostal Christianity. I understand now that I did it because I wanted to fit into some sort of group, and they were the most welcome at the time. It did not take me long to see the vileness they hid behind their religious fervor.
Through my early and mid-twenties, I got into Wicca. Solitary practitioning, which probably derived from my blossoming introverted personality. Granted, pagan and new age religions are much more inclusive than the unholy Judeo-Christian trifecta claim to be, yet something in me kept insisting that relying upon fictional religious concepts was no way to live.
Between Pentecostal Christianity and Wicca, I had done extensive reading on the Agnostic works of Robert Green Ingersoll, but at that time in my life I simply had not been ready to make that leap away from religious fantasy. I cannot pinpoint the general time that I finally shed all the religious nonsense, freeing myself to properly enjoy reality for what it is instead of what I wanted it to be, but I have enough years of being an atheist under my proverbial belt to know the only thing that will bring me back to religion is dementia in my old age. And that hardly counts, now does it not? Especially since from my perspective the mind of an elderly person with dementia is hardly much different than the delusional mind of the religious believer.
