I'm a Catholic atheist.

[John_fi_Skye]

I'm an atheist. End of. My mum was episcopalian and my dad was presbyterian. As soon as I was old enough to wonder what I was (13), I was an atheist.

I was 10

Ma heid wis jist fu o fitba.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Raised in the Merkin Midwest, but none of the Bible Belt ever took. Last time voluntarily in a church was at age seven, and I was asked not to return.

[John_fi_Skye]

We're all late developers here. Took us till the sixteenth century to start thinking about the Renaissance.

[Tero]

Lutheran. Makes me have to repair flat bicycle inner tubes and keep them forever. Other features of frugality pop up now and then.

[Faithfree]

Lutheran, baptised, confirmed and dropped like a hot potato as soon as I left home at 18.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Lutheran, baptised, confirmed and dropped like a hot potato as soon as I left home at 18.

Did you ever "feel" it? Or just went through the motions to keep the peace? (General question to everyone, in fact.)

[tattuchu]

Catholic when I was very young. Never felt it. Then Methodist as a teen. Was even an altar boy for a short period. And, since I had long hair and a beard when I was teen, I was selected to play Jesus in a Christmas play! Never felt it then, either.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I am often at a handicap when talking to believers because I never believed. I can't get into their mindset.

[Faithfree]

Lutheran, baptised, confirmed and dropped like a hot potato as soon as I left home at 18.

Did you ever "feel" it? Or just went through the motions to keep the peace? (General question to everyone, in fact.)

Don't think I ever really fealt it; mostly a case of going through the motions to keep the family peace.

[tattuchu]

I am often at a handicap when talking to believers because I never believed. I can't get into their mindset.

It's a complete mystery to me as well. I just can't help but think, "ARE YOU FUCKING RETARDED?!" I don't understand it. I completely don't understand how anyone could believe in it.

Raised in the Merkin Midwest, but none of the Bible Belt ever took. Last time voluntarily in a church was at age seven, and I was asked not to return.

So are you gonna tell the story or what?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I am often at a handicap when talking to believers because I never believed. I can't get into their mindset.

It's a complete mystery to me as well. I just can't help but think, "ARE YOU FUCKING RETARDED?!" I don't understand it. I completely don't understand how anyone could believe in it.

Same here. Santa, tooth fairy, god, all in the same bucket.

Raised in the Merkin Midwest, but none of the Bible Belt ever took. Last time voluntarily in a church was at age seven, and I was asked not to return.

So are you gonna tell the story or what?

Told it before. I was asking questions about the Ark that the Sunday School teacher and the preacher couldn't answer. So the rev. sent me home with a note for my mom, saying please don't send him back here, he's disrupting Sunday School.


Win.

My mother demonstrated the hypocrisy of the situation when she insisted me and my brother get up on Sunday morning and go to church, while she stayed in bed.

[tattuchu]

If all the bollocks they spout is true, you'd think they'd welcome questions. You'd think they'd be excited to explain things to a child's eager ears. You have to wonder if, deep down, they know it's all bullshit.

[Bella Fortuna]

I'm Irish. I don't get hangovers. Just a state between not drunk and drunk

I call bullshit. There is no Irish 'not drunk' state.

[Tero]

The meme was strongest in me at 15-16. At confirmation. Then found my antenna for receiving messages from god was broken.

[John_fi_Skye]

Lutheran, baptised, confirmed and dropped like a hot potato as soon as I left home at 18.

Did you ever "feel" it? Or just went through the motions to keep the peace? (General question to everyone, in fact.)

Never felt it. As soon as the fitba and the model aeroplanes moved over a wee bit inside my head, making room for an idea, I was an atheist. It all just seemed so clear, right away. And then for a long time, I had a youthful intolerance of agnostics: I used to say that having faith or not was like having a coin in your pocket or not: agnostics, I would say, just hadn't bothered to stick their hand in their pocket, to see whether or not there was a coin there. I became less intolerant as I got older, and now I'm happy to regard agnosticism as a valid position. And I stopped using the "coin" analogy when people took it that I was implying that just as a coin has value, so having a faith has greater value than being an atheist. I mean, I could have said, "a dead mouse in your pocket", or "a lump of dried shit in your pocket", but people do on an everyday basis have coins in their pockets, or not, and it would have seemed churlish to use any other item in the analogy. So, as I say, I gave up using it.