GTKY: What brings you here? (Intros?)

[sewfie2]

As I said it .'s chopping block check-in, everything I wrote was practically a novel. So then I thought "I wonder where other people are coming from?" Y'all were able to give much more concise background information than I was able to formulate, but I thought it'd be nice to have a sort of intro thread to give more information, if you'd like.

[sewfie2]

Currently, I pretty much identify as atheist, though it's a little hard to say that. I still have what I refer to as residual childhood belief. It's hard to drop that!
Growing up, my father was super into Jesus and used to tell me about how he was SOOOO involved in the church (Church of Christ) until he met my mom, and then (basically) she led him astray or some such nonsense. Anyway, they went to church together, got married, had my brother and I (2 yrs apart), and so we all went to church until I was in kindergarten or something? I don't really remember the first church. Basically, it was more of a social club, so my parents (being working/lower class-therefore, not part of the "in crowd") stopped going for years. They found a new Church of Christ when I was about 8, and we started going there. My brother didn't though. He was adverse to church at a very young age, and incredibly stubborn and spoiled, so he got to stay home every week.
For a while I wanted to stay home too, but then I got SUPER into it. Like, ran a "bible study" with my friend and her little siblings when I was 11. I tried to convert an atheist friend when I was 14. I thankfully had enough sense to not be a total dick, I never tried to full on force it, and only brought it up a couple of times. I later apologized to him-while I was still identifying as Christian- and he was very kind about it.

I stopped going to that church when I was 15, after an event of such clear hypocrisy it seems like a set up.*
I went to different churches off and on, and then around 26 or 27 really started questioning the whole thing. I had started working in a lab around 24, and I as I got more into different areas of science and really thinking about it, it just didn't make any sense. The way the Christian churches are ran, the way the bible is so often seen as infallible, even though a bunch of dudes wrote it, years after the events were said to occur. The way women are treated, the bizarre rules that Paul declared. It's all too much to me.

We now live in a relatively conservative southern town where people just assume you are Christian. Most people I now don't go to church, so the fact that we don't go isn't on anybody's radar. I just don't bring it up, because I don't know how people are going to react, kwim? On one hand, I don't want them to think that I think they're stupid (thanks Bill Maher, for making atheists look like aholes), and I also don't want to be proselytized to.




*A youth leader was talking about "turning the other cheek" and I made a little joke that the youth leader's adopted son (M, also 15) laughed at. He told M to leave if he couldn't contain himself, so M started to and the youth leader yanked his arm and tried to force him to sit down. I lost it, grabbed M and spit out something to the effect of "Good way to turn your other cheek" at the youth leader as I left the room with M. The friends that I brought followed and we ended up going to the bowling alley next door. That youth leader and his wife always treated M differently from their bio kids and I just had it.

[namastebiotches]

DH & I are Agnostic, both raised Roman Catholic.
We met as teenagers & shared the same views as "adults" not really being big believers like our families are & as we've grown figured out we closely identify as agnostic. I won't discredit a person's belief system but don't drag it down my throat to try & get us to think the same way, you know?
My parents are sporadic church goes, usually on holidays. DH's dad & grandma go every week. We live in a different state so it's been easy to dodge these types of conversations but in the past we have had awkward questions/inquiries on when we would baptize DS when he was younger.
Our town is pretty liberal so we have not had any weird religious convos or anything. I'm grateful for that, I don't think I can live in an area that is all jesus this & god that.

[sewfie2]

randomosity, there's few things that get my goat more than religious hypocrisy. Like those mega churches- how much money do they put into the building and everything that could be going to actually help people!

namastebiotches, I'm the same wrt to not pushing my non-belief onto others, and I appreciate being given the same respect.

[cavewmn]

I was raised baptist. Dh was raised nondenominational for the most part.

I lost most of my faith when I couldn't even fit in around the kids of the same religion. I found them to judge people the most. The pastors daughter went up to a few friends and said they were going to hell because they were Mormon and that also my sister in laws brother who had died in a crash was going to hell because he was Mormon. I stopped going to church after that.

Overall religion caused me a ton of emotional stress in high school.

Long story short I lost my faith after bad things kept happening and I consider myself a good person. And yet seeing bad a lot of bad people make it easy in life.

DH was never religious.

We aren't getting DS baptised. We don't care if DH's parents take him every so often to church, we will tell him about different beliefs and if he wants to choose one that is fine. But if I ever hear anyone has told him he is going to hell then we will put a complete stop to it. Also if you know any kid books with just basic beliefs around the world please let me know!

It will be a fun convo when he tell DH's family we aren't even circumcising.

I'm sorry, I do talk a lot and ramble. lol

[sewfie2]

May 5, 2016 9:56:19 GMT -5 cavewmn said:

I was raised baptist. Dh was raised nondenominational for the most part.

I lost most of my faith when I couldn't even fit in around the kids of the same religion. I found them to judge people the most. The pastors daughter went up to a few friends and said they were going to hell because they were Mormon and that also my sister in laws brother who had died in a crash was going to hell because he was Mormon. I stopped going to church after that.

Overall religion caused me a ton of emotional stress in high school.

Long story short I lost my faith after bad things kept happening and I consider myself a good person. And yet seeing bad a lot of bad people make it easy in life.

DH was never religious.

We aren't getting DS baptised. We don't care if DH's parents take him every so often to church, we will tell him about different beliefs and if he wants to choose one that is fine. But if I ever hear anyone has told him he is going to hell then we will put a complete stop to it. Also if you know any kid books with just basic beliefs around the world please let me know!

It will be a fun convo when he tell DH's family we aren't even circumcising.

I'm sorry, I do talk a lot and ramble. lol

Some of the more popular kids in my (public) high school were adamant about being Christian. They'd talk about the weird goth (obv. witches and Satanists), but would talk about the messed up parties they'd go to over the weekend without any hint of cognitive dissonance. Youths.

[ovenrack]

Hello! May I join in too?

I was raised... nothing, and my husband was raised Catholic but his mother had a break with the church when he was a kid, so he didn't go to church after that.

Don't believe in god. Roll my eyes about most organized religion stuff. Deep down, I respect others' beliefs, but day to day it is hard to stomach some of the stuff I read and see and hear.

I'm part of a facebook secular families group, but it is mostly screenshots of facebook "'like' this post for your prayers to be heard" posts, and people scoffing. Which is amusing but not very... interesting.

[beardpapa]

So my interest in secularism comes from that disconnect between my outward and inward spiritual identities.

Outwardly, I've always been the Super-Jew. I became Bar Mitzvah at my Reform synagogue but I was attending a Jewish elementary school, so in my synagogue's community I was more well-read liturgically and more capable linguistically with the Hebrew. I was an outsider in high school (secular private prep-school) due to my nerd status and what I would later learn was common on-the-spectrum behavior for someone coming from (and heading into) a scientific community. I got tokened harshly as Jewish there because of all of the time I gave to and, honestly, popularity I garnered from my Jewish youth group. Like, "he's cool in his Jew group". In college I was Jewish because of my upbringing and my theological interests, and also because of my nose and, later, my long beard. As an adult, I keep my lazy beard long and my LO gets to pull on it and use it for support and I love it and it also garners questions: "Hey are you a Rabbi?" I definitely look like a typical Jew of Ashkenazi heritage, and my family, until confronting my actual beliefs as I have become a parent, could easily ignore what are my clear secular attitudes and actions because I looked the part and my actions didn't affect them yet.

Inwardly, I was never on board with God as a _real_ actor in this world. I followed along with the Torah portions in my synagogue as poetry and literary for as long as I can remember. (Maybe age 5?) It wasn't actually until I was quite old that I realized this was not the way everyone thought in my community. Sure the Orthodox _did_ more things from the tradition, sure the Conservatives _did_ less than them but more than us, but it didn't occur to me that Orthodox, and Conservative, and _even_ Reform Jews legitimately believed that there was a God out there _doing_ things to us, in the world. But, without knowing, I was curious and paid attention in class and was clearly trying to figure it all out. I latched onto the literature courses in high school and college that focused on religious people and ideas: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Brother's Karamazov, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, The Divine Comedy, Survival in Auschwitz, and The Shawl. This only perpetuated my outward identity as a religious one rather than that of a secular, budding theologian.

So when it came to starting a family, and my SO and I had to affirm our secular identities in front of our families, we realized that we don't want to raise our children as anti-semitic Jews. (This is a real problem.) Rather, we're trying to find secular ways to celebrate Jewish traditions: traditions that are cultural, have pagan or polytheistic roots anyway, but have evolved into something we are familiar with or even have an affinity too. We are trying to find a way to embrace our Jewish heritage without embracing God.

Secular Humanist Jews exist, and there's even a group in our area that we just haven't been home to meet up with them. However, I think a part of that is that we aren't sure that their goals are the same as ours. For example, I'd like to include Hebrew in our new traditions, and many secular groups reject that, furnishing only transliterations or no Hebrew at all. Additionally, we like the traditional songs, just not everything they are saying. Many groups create new Hebrew text to be grateful for various parts of a meal or ceremony, but the old text was beautiful and thoughtful except for the part of about "Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe" commanding us to do stuff.

So, that's where we are. Secular people of Jewish heritage looking for traditional ways to celebrate life events that are humanistic but not at the expense of looking like a Judaism that's too unfamiliar. I guess we're pretty picky but we're just getting started here.

[serenla]

I would like to join in.

My own experience is a little different since I was raised as nothing essentially. My Mother was raised Catholic and my Father a Protestant but neither of them is religious anymore. It was through my other family that I became distrustful of religious doctrine and eventually explored other options but landed on Atheist. I just never felt anything was missing from my life because I was not spiritual.

DH on the other hand was raised in a church and he is vehemently against organized religion, he is agnostic but also feels that nothing is missing from his life and we are happy with a secular lifestyle.

We do run into the issues most of us face with extended family and some other social circles, my favorite was my nanny trying to tell me that we all need spirituality in our life or we are unfulfilled and some other crap, but we manage as all of us do.

[Deleted]

Hi there,

I grew up secular, consider myself an atheist and get my spirituality, in the sense of 'being connected to a bigger whole' from the philosophy of Spinoza and Buddhism and yoga.

The thing that bothers me most about some religious attitudes is that some assume that you can only be a good person if you believe a god tells you how to.

[Deleted]

I'll add my intro here 'cause I'm too chicken to start my own thread.

Anyway, hi! I'm Alyllyra. I live in Sweden and have a DD who is almost 16 months.
I'm an atheist, and have been since I was about 12. My whole family is pretty secular and none of us except my father are baptized. My mom, however, loves churches and has probably draged me into every single one in Europe I think she likes the arcitechture and the ambience.
As for me, I don't mind visiting churches or other religious buildings, as long as I'm not expected to participate in a service or anything.

For me, the major turnoff about religion is that we as humans have believed in deities for thousands of years, religions come and go, but despite all of this, all this history, many religious people are totally, a 100 % convinced that their version is the RIGHT ONE. It just blows my mind that so many people cannot see the flaw in this logic.
I am actually pretty interested in religious history and have read a lot of articles and books about the origins of judaeism and christianity. I find it interesting from a historic view, but I would never adopt it as my basic belief system.

Anyway, that's my (not so) short intro. I'm glad I found this board!