I was abused in catholic school as a child and for some reason recently I can't get the memories out of my mind. I stopped believing in god at the age of 5 and stopped believing in anything spiritual whatsoever at the age of 11(which actually did help my mental health a lot, I remember around that time people used to walk up to me and ask why I was suddenly so happy and giddy all the time but this was in the bible belt so I couldn't tell them). For most of my life ignoring religion and spirituality as much as possible has worked to help me avoid these horrible feelings but now for some reason I can't, it has become too much. Maybe its Trump, people and society have got more religious recently I fear, which makes me wanna throw up. A part of me wants to become baptist or evangelical protestant maybe because those people seem really sweet and happy, even when they talk about their religion, which is so weird to me. How can religion make you happy? It seems like such a disgusting horrible thing, I don't understand it. Sometimes I try to believe in god or spirituality and I'll be ok for a little bit but then something reminds me of my past and I feel so ashamed and angry and horrible and sad all at once that I feel like my body can't handle it and I'm going to vomit. Have any of you ever felt nauseous or afraid because of your religion? I heard once that some kinds of buddhism don't have any gods, I feel like that sounds really nice, but I don't think buddhism lets you be lesbian so IDK if I wanna do that. I feel like such a reddit atheist when I try to talk about my feelings on religion and how much it hurts people sometimes, I wish it was more socially acceptable to talk about that. I think if I could talk about how religion made me feel to people more openly I wouldn't feel like this all the time right now. It probably sounds silly to the mostly very spiritual people in this thread but being an obnoxious reddit atheist who hates on religion all the time and calls jesus "sky daddy" and shit like that is the only sort of thing that has ever given me any sense of peace in life. There are entire industries dedicated to promoting religion and saying that it is awesome and making a million christian movies and nobody cares, but you can't ever talk about how religion hurt people or makes people do bad things sometimes without adding a million disclaimers and saying "Noooooo, this person is a bad person for a different reason, its not their religion nooooooooooo" o
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