Recent convert - My story
January 6, 2015 at 9:24 pm
(This post was last modified: January 6, 2015 at 9:37 pm by Regina.)
I was raised Catholic and now officially consider myself Atheist. I say "officially" because this isn't sudden, really it's been coming on for years and I've only started embracing it recently.
My parents were never particularly strict Catholics, but I was baptised out of tradition from my Grandparents (who are Maltese and Irish, so from very Catholic backgrounds). While my parents never really took me to Church often or had any religious stuff in our house, I did (again from pressure from le grandparents) go to a Catholic school and had a Catholic education.
I was never really into it.
Even as a young child I was skeptical, I saw the miracles and stories like Noah's ark as very fantasy-ish. "It's a miracle" was never a good enough answer for me, I always wondered how it happened, which nobody could ever give a good answer for. I was taught just to accept that Jesus walked on water, which even a child can recognise is a ridiculous claim.
When I got older (teen years) I wanted to believe in it because death scared me, but I recognised a lot of shitty things strict religious people do, and didn't like it. I am also gay, although I never felt this was an issue personally, I always felt it was perfectly possible to be both gay and religious. So for a long time I identified as a "soft" Catholic (words like "secular" hadn't entered my lexicon at this point). I wanted to believe, but I interpreted the Bible critically and saw it as a symbolic work of fiction, rather than fact. I was comfortable in this for a while until I finished at my Catholic school went to university.
At university, I met my good friend named Christian, who is a militant atheist (the irony, right...). As I was still in secular Catholic mode, we did have some friendly debates about religion and atheism. He slowly brought me around to outright atheism through showing me more shitty things religious people have done that I did not know initially, and explaining his views on death and the meaning of life in a way I could feel comfortable with. Over the course of my time at university so far, I have became more comfortable identifying as an atheist.
I also started looking toward high-profile atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and found a lot of what they were saying to be very similar opinions to my own newly forming atheist views. It gave me more confidence to speak up about it. That said, telling my parents was never hard, they're so lax it's a stretch to call them "practicing Catholics" so it hardly makes a difference to them. I'll spare my grandparents the news though, not out of fear (despite being conservative they are good people, not nasty WBC types) but because I know religion means a lot to them and I don't want to make them uncomfortable.
So yeah, that's it in a nutshell. Here I am, a young budding 20 year old gaytheist.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading!
My parents were never particularly strict Catholics, but I was baptised out of tradition from my Grandparents (who are Maltese and Irish, so from very Catholic backgrounds). While my parents never really took me to Church often or had any religious stuff in our house, I did (again from pressure from le grandparents) go to a Catholic school and had a Catholic education.
I was never really into it.
Even as a young child I was skeptical, I saw the miracles and stories like Noah's ark as very fantasy-ish. "It's a miracle" was never a good enough answer for me, I always wondered how it happened, which nobody could ever give a good answer for. I was taught just to accept that Jesus walked on water, which even a child can recognise is a ridiculous claim.
When I got older (teen years) I wanted to believe in it because death scared me, but I recognised a lot of shitty things strict religious people do, and didn't like it. I am also gay, although I never felt this was an issue personally, I always felt it was perfectly possible to be both gay and religious. So for a long time I identified as a "soft" Catholic (words like "secular" hadn't entered my lexicon at this point). I wanted to believe, but I interpreted the Bible critically and saw it as a symbolic work of fiction, rather than fact. I was comfortable in this for a while until I finished at my Catholic school went to university.
At university, I met my good friend named Christian, who is a militant atheist (the irony, right...). As I was still in secular Catholic mode, we did have some friendly debates about religion and atheism. He slowly brought me around to outright atheism through showing me more shitty things religious people have done that I did not know initially, and explaining his views on death and the meaning of life in a way I could feel comfortable with. Over the course of my time at university so far, I have became more comfortable identifying as an atheist.
I also started looking toward high-profile atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and found a lot of what they were saying to be very similar opinions to my own newly forming atheist views. It gave me more confidence to speak up about it. That said, telling my parents was never hard, they're so lax it's a stretch to call them "practicing Catholics" so it hardly makes a difference to them. I'll spare my grandparents the news though, not out of fear (despite being conservative they are good people, not nasty WBC types) but because I know religion means a lot to them and I don't want to make them uncomfortable.
So yeah, that's it in a nutshell. Here I am, a young budding 20 year old gaytheist.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading!
"Adulthood is like looking both ways before you cross the road, and then getting hit by an airplane" - sarcasm_only
"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie
"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie
It sounds like your critical thinking was too strong even as a child for the absurd stories to take hold. It's really good your parents are cool about it, that's so often a huge problem.
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