Dad called himself an agnostic but I think he actually was an atheist and used the other term to avoid futile conflicts. As a young woman Mom rejected the Baptist religion of her parents and remains at most a vague deist today. They took me to church twice I think just as an experiment but they raised me to think for myself and to look into everything and question everything. As a teen I dabbled in some odd new age stuff to please my girlfriend but when she was gone that nonsense evaporated. As an adult I spent a few years practicing Zen Buddhism but that was the atheist version. The whole rebirth thing made no sense to me so I eventually drifted away from that too.

I think there may be a genetic factor involved because my brother, who strongly resembles my Mom’s more religious family became a Baptist entirely on his own. I strongly resemble my Dad’s far less religious family and have always been naturally skeptical.

Now I worship Lord Hemant. May his blog and his book prosper.

Also, is there a way to translate Simone’s Italian on this blog? Or can someone do it? I understood a little of what she said (I know some Spanish), but not all.

Even now, none of my parents identify as atheist, agnostic, or even as secular humanist. Labels have never been very important to them. My dad grew up in a vaguely apathetic-theist/deist household and was encouraged to join the Mormon youth-groups and church so that he would “fit it”. He did so and went along with is for a few years, but he just couldn’t turn off the critical thinking part of his brain, so he ended up abandoning it. He still lives in Mormom-land, he’s still critical of it (and I can detect some resentment and anger in his voice when he talks of his experience leaving the Mormon church), but he doesn’t let it bother him so much. My mom gladly moved away from the area (from the culture and from her family) with my step-dad and me. Spiritual topics never really come up when my mom and I visi. I never heard stories about my mom’s family attending any church when she and her sisters were growing up, so I’ve always assumed that it was all a non-issue with them as well.

When I was very young, we celebrated Christmas (http://www.krismas.org), but we did have a nativity set and I loved singing the religious Christmas carols set, so I understood that most other people celebrated Christmas as the birth of Jesus. In the spring, we celebrated Easter. I loved Easter, and I thought it was a general spring-time celebration. In later elementary school I heard the Jesus-Easter story and I was, like another poster above, amazed that they could believe such an odd story.

My parents never took me to church, unless it was to see a cathedral, temple, or mission while on a day-trip or other vacation. I was taught to appreciated the history, art, music, and architecture of the places. I was allowed to go to church services, etc. with my friends, but my parents never took me to any of those things. I ended up going to a couple of Catholic masses with my friends because their mom took us out for frozen-yogurt afterwards . At about the same age, I went to a sort of youth-group activity day at her Mormon church. I had fun and I don’t recall any overt prosteletyzing, but even at that age I could recognize the propaganda they were using, and I didn’t like it.

I don’t recall heavily discussing “the big questions” with my parents. Maybe death…it was treated as a natural thing that happens eventually to all living things. I was told that when we die, our bodies decompose into the ground, and that nobody really knows what, if anything, happens after that. I was always encouraged to “find out/think for myself”. As for the “meaning of life, the universe, and everything” — let’s just say that my parents sat me down and watched “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life” with me when my mind was young and impressionable. I frequently heard the following when I was a kid, “I don’t know, but I’ll take you to the library and we can find out”. I’m not aware of having any movie or tv-show censored from my viewing, and I was encouraged to read anything I wanted. I was, and am, especially fond of learning about other people’s mythologies.

In my late-teens and early-twenties, I tried really hard to believe in fairies, magic and Wicca, and then in transcendental meditation, but, thankfully, neither of them rooted into my brain. My parents raised me to ask questions, to be skeptical, and to refuse to believe in things that failed to be supported by evidence.

Now, I would identify myself as an atheist, if anyone bothers to ask. I don’t belong to any active atheist/humanist/freethought groups; although, I do love reading up on the topic by myself. I married a man who is an apathetic-atheist ex-confirmed Catholic. No kiddos yet, but when they come, we will bring them up with the same philosophy that my parents brought me up with.

In my first 9 years of life in China, I had been taught about various religious beliefs – just vague outlines – plus some myths of gods, nymphs, mortals-turned-goddesses living on the moon, etc. These beliefs and stories were always presented as fictional, in a “people used to tell these stories to explain natural phenomena (like the shadowy shapes on the surface of the moon) and used to do all these rituals/hold these superstitious beliefs, but now we have science, which works much better, so we don’t need them anymore” way. It was not until I came to New Zealand, and struggled for roughly a year and a half to gain enough proficiency in English, that I realised that there are people on this planet who believe, seriously, in supernatural interventions. It was extremely shocking for me at the time, since I had thought, naively, that as science was so awesome and useful, people would disregard all this superstitious nonsense pretty quickly. I expected people to talk about “god” and “angels” only in metaphorical terms, to invoke religious imagery as a tool of language, a culturally-embedded method of expression, or a vehicle for moral instruction, yes, but to seriously believe in them as literally true?

You can probably all guess that I was naive and sheltered in my barely teenage years – probably in the opposite way to a sheltered fundy teenager, actually. I suffered a lot in those years from initial language difficulties, bullying at school, and various insecurities, which caused me to attempt, in my own naive way, to convert to Christianity – not to fit in, exactly, but to seek comfort in this sense of community, which is something I really missed from my childhood days in China. A lot of new immigrants gravitate towards church groups for this reason – to try and find the sort of social support network that they had at home (particularly in Asian countries where social networking is, if not obligatory, then at least very, very important, and always very beneficial).

But I could never quite believe Christianity wholeheartly, because I had always loved science and all things logical, so I always felt a tingle of doubt whenever something in the doctrine contradicted science, or when something just seemed too obviously parable or poetry to be completely factually true (e.g. genesis as literal). And due to my upbringing in honesty, I had never quite managed to learn the art of compartmentisation or self-delusion, so it was hard to hide the doubt for any length of time. I even tried to (half-heartedly) empirically test prayer – it didn’t work, as mean kids don’t cease to be mean just because you have an invisible friend to talk to. Change in my life for the better didn’t come from prayer, it came almost exclusively from hard work (particularly by my mother), so I eventually gave up on religion and fell into a vague kind of agnosticism.

Long story short, I eventually grew up, became more confident in who I am and my own abilities, and also learnt a whole bunch about critical thinking from school and outside reading (Internet, mainly). So eventually, I ended up drawing the conclusion of atheism once again, but this time round it’s a much more solidly informed conclusion than simply being born into that kind of society.

I came to atheism through being left mostly free from religious influence. I only thought about it when schoolmates would shun me for not attending church (yes, in my area of the south this happens as early as elementary school). That didn’t give me a good opinion of incredibly religious people, and living in a secular home might have nourished that opinion in a strange way. It’s good to see there are other freethinking families out there.