Insanity Laughs...

Atheist Challenge Day 2

What religion did you grow up with? Did you have positive or negative experiences with religion?

I was born into a Lutheran family, and starting at a very young age, I went to Sunday School  every Sunday. There was no questioning that. When the time came, I was confirmed, and I even taught Sunday School for four years. My beliefs had changed to that of an agnostic by the time I started spewing it out to the young ones. I would have more of a guilty conscience about it if it wasn’t for the fact that I only taught the pre-school class and all we did was make crafts and do coloring pages of Bible-related things, without teaching much of a lesson, beyond a few sentence introduction. It also got me my community hours for high school.

I didn’t mind going to church/Sunday School because I had friends from school in my SS class too, so we got to hang out with each other for a few hours outside of school once a week. I also didn’t mind going to the actual service, because I love singing, and the hymns were just another chance for me to sing.

I do remember finding my one SS teacher to be very critical of me questioning things, so I stopped asking, although I didn’t stop questioning in my head. I also remember for my confirmation present the SS teachers gave me a book about a girl who goes to a new school where they teach evolution, and how she handled it. I read it but didn’t absorb anything from it.

We had a fun youth group that didn’t really get into religion very much, we’d get together for non-religious movie nights, and stuff like that. I liked being around the little ones I taught in SS. It all boiled down to “I live in the country, there’s hardly anything for me to do…so why not.”