/ot/ - off-topic

No one in my family has ever been particularly religious but I was involved with it a lot as a child anyway because I went to a Catholic school, youth camps, and had daycare at a church because most of these programs were cheaper or free. I went along with things without any attachment or thinking too much about it and treated it like school. I don't know if I ever believed because I don't remember coming to a conclusion that I didn't believe in God anymore. Religion has always felt like a tiny blip on my radar tbh, no one I know irl is religious either.

I'm an atheist and always was (raised commie). Religious stuff, including any vaguely spiritual stuff, all seems so utterly nonsensical and needless to me. It's just not a reflection of reality.

I can't bring myself to believe in anything. I was raised by my very moderate Muslim parents and my mother wouldn't stop saying that anything that happens to us happens for a reason so if we're bad children then bad things will happen to us to punish us. You know, like when you have a bad grade or when you argue with your teacher at school. Then it turns out that my mother was born with a disorder that was triggered in her late 20s or earmy 30s, she suffered a lot and is still suffering but she never deserved anything this bad, and not before she was even born. Same shit with me, I was bullied hard at primary school for looking a bit shorter than everyone else because of a congenital disorder (I received treatment and I don't have any symptoms at all now), I thought that was unfair, so if god is supposed to be fair then he doesn't exist or he's incompetent and useless.

My grandmother died not because of breast cancer but because of the treatment for it because she need to drink a lot of water but she didn't dare it because of ramadan so her organs got burnt from the inside. That was the last straw for me. Practicing anything like ramadan or praying is too much effort anyway.

>>924501
same here, commie parents, all of my close relatives are irreligious as well and so are my friends. religious belief is just incomprehensible to me, like i can't wrap my head around why people go for it. same for supernatural beliefs like astrology and shit. I nod along to be polite but internally i'm just ?????

>>924507
Yes, it's a totally foreign concept to me too.
Even the last question of this thread
>What do you believe in?
is unnaplicable. I don't have a hole in need of filling where you have a religious/spiritual belief.

I was raised catholic, but I don't believe in any religion. I think there's something like a god out there, but I try not to have any kind of magical thinking nowadays.

>>924503
Idk about the other religions but according to my religion teacher, in Islam Allah gives you free will and you suffer the consequences, except he also determines your whole life before you're born. But you're still accountable. Dumbest bullshit I've ever heard.

I grew up with atheist parents who did culturally Muslim stuff like holiday visits to family but nothing beyond that. Later they became more spiritual as a cope for aging and fear of death. I personally never felt faith for anything in my life and feel comfortable with that.

Why do some non-religious parents send their kids to Catholic school a la >>924491 when Catholic school has a really messy track record of fucking kids up. Especially as a faithless kid I would have gone insane in a place like that since even the once a week religious study class in my private school made me seethe. You could only opt out if your government ID said you're Christian or Jewish and they defaulted most people to Muslim so I had to stay unless I pressured my parents into changing my ID information. Glad I don't live in that shithole anymore, my faith is nobody's business.

I don't respect any religion.

>>924507
I was also raised by old school commie parents and I'm grateful for their influence because the rest of my family are extremely religious. In my view whether or not god exists doesn't change anything, we should do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because we're baited into it by the idea that we have to repay a debt to some guy that sacrificed his son because he…wants our love and devotion? Real life is already absurd, dramatic, tragic and joyful enough without this kind of misplaced magical thinking.

>>924722
based

I was raised in an Evangelical Christian household in a Southeast Asian country. Family is really involved with our local church but later down the line drama happened there and the people split up. My family is still pretty close with our pastor and his family, and my mom even gives them money and groceries every week to help support them (since the old church was their main source of income and now the pastor relies on commissioned sermons from faraway towns).

I've always been surrounded by ultra-religious people and it's uncomfortable when most of the time their answers to any problem in life is "just pray" or "believe in our Lord, he knows what's best for you". Christians here are even stupid enough to excuse the crimes colonists inflicted on our ancestors to celebrate 500+ years (I forgot the exact amount) since Christianity was brought into the country.

My siblings already know that I've long lost my connection to the Christian god, but I'm not perfectly detached from the idea and belief of other beings existing and influencing the world.

>>924481
Raised culturally catholic, but grew up in hyper Calvinist hell. I don't think I ever properly believed, but I became aware I didn't at 9. I do tolerate other's beliefs (to a certain degree) and enjoy theology of religions as any other piece of fiction, I just despise institutionalized religion and biblebelt regions. Calvinism really is a particularly evil type of Christianity imo.

I can't believe there's like five and a half non-religious farmers.
Wth are the rest of you doing on a gossip forum, actively working your way into hell?

I was raised by Protestant brimstone-and-fire freaks. I was baptized as a baby and my parents brought me to church multiple times a week and I always hated it (mostly because of the dressing up and holding hands with random people) I was actually "exorcised" when I was 11 because I showed signs of mental illness, just to give you an idea of how my family is. I never really drank the Jesus kool-aid to begin with but had I immense guilt around not actually believing in god until I moved out. I've been a turbo atheist for like ten years now but I still have a bunch of sexual and emotional hangups. I want absolutely nothing to do with religion or churches and I cannot stand the sexism that comes with religion. That doesn't stop my dad from calling me every month asking if I believe in god yet.

>>927205
>the sexism that comes with religion
See, this is another reason I'd think there are much more non-religious people on lolcow.
There is no way to reconcile feminism with dominant religions.

I don't believe in organized religion, but most atheists tend to be insufferably smug, so I don't interact anyway.

>>927326
So are you agnostic or have a personal belief system or…?
Both things you said are just a negation of other people's stances.

>>927188
there may be more who don't feel like discussing it.
like i'm an atheist who lives in a largely secular country and i don't actually know many religious people. so the topic doesn't come up all that much and i don't have much to say about it.

>>927406
>largely secular country
Czech republic?

i grew up in a very loosely muslim family. i decided i was agnostic (eventually migrating to full-out atheist, and these days essentially anti-theist) pretty early in my teenage years and have never angsted much about it. i found the idea of a benevolent creator irreconcilable with the current world that surrounds me, and every religion to be extremely contrived and evidently manmade. i'm also not at all a spiritual person, because i've never found any proof of it that stands up to rigorous testing or extends beyond personal experience. i think that organized religion is almost inevitably harmful, and while there's less structural harms in individual spirituality i still think that it is… very stupid. while for argument's sake i will concede that i'm not necessarily opposed to the creator of this universe, although i find the event quite unlikely, i imagine any situation with a creator would be one where this universe is a simulation, and the proposed creator is a very flawed, and decidedly un-Godlike being. i wholesale reject any image of a creator that is all-knowing, all-benevolent, and all-powerful.

i didn't realize how much i managed to escape delusional muslim batshittery, because my direct family is very non-traditional muslim and would be considered heretics by most of the muslim world, until i was relatively older and actually bothered to read some of the hadiths and the quran. i quickly began to utterly despise it and i revisit my hatred for the religion every year or so. it's a horrifically misogynistic religion and i did not appreciate how i managed to emerge mostly unscathed until later on in my life. i seriously thought that advocating death for apostasy or the most overt misogyny and homophobia was a more fringe opinion, the way it is with mainstream western christianity these days (although there's still much to criticize in that realm) but digging deeper in the general muslim community has panned that out to be a naïve, optimistically held falsehood. they are fucking deranged and will proudly support child marriage if given the chance.

despite purportedly muslim upbringing, i got most of my introduction to atheism through an anti-christianity lens, since i live in a predominantly christian country. so i know very well how much christianity sucks. i know the new atheism movement was characterized by heavy amounts of misogyny (see: sam harris) but i wish more women were atheists.

i hope we can create a female-led atheism movement, because most, if not all, religions are horrifically misogynistic and deserve to be abandoned in the aisles of history. it saddens me deeply that most atheists are male.

>>928384
First, you should fix your lack of education, sis

>>927406
Same. I'm Swedish btw. I'm happy that my country is so atheist now. Allahfags should fuck off from here though. If there should be religion we should bring back old norse goddess worship or something. Patriarchal religion is devastating to women.

Raised Catholic, forced to go to a Catholic middle school, church multiple times a week, subjected to every applicable weirdo sacrament, religious shame and guilt, friends who were God-believers, neurotic mom with repressed traumatic experiences that she took out on me via sexism, etc.
The worst part about looking back on my time as a Catholic, is that from the time when I was young enough to conceptualize God until I was in my late teens, I fully believed it.
I remember being five or six years old in church, hearing the priest recite prayers, "Lift up your hearts," and myself trying to manifest in my mind my physical heart lifting to the sky. My mom never could go up with me to receive communion because the priests forbade her from doing so on the basis of being divorced and a single mom for awhile. She would drag me to her after-hours choir practice, because she still sung for them, and I remember trying to play on the stairs as late as 7 or 8pm trying not to make noise. Also when she'd put money in envelopes or the collection baskets, and then guilt me later in the week if I wanted a candy bar on account of tight money. I remember the Latin. The Bible passages. The hymns. I can recite a mass line by line despite the fact that I haven't attended one in over a decade. I feel a soft nostalgia whenever I hear a song. If I close my eyes I can still clearly see the statue of Mary we kept in our house, and the crucifixes and rosaries we had around.
I remember my first atheist boyfriend and being absolutely shocked that he didn't believe and wishing I could've found that piece that I could say to have him believe like me. I recall being appalled when my believing peers did not act or had ethics in line with our religious beliefs. I didn't realize until later that it's because most of them knew deep down that religion is bullshit and so used it when it benefitted them and ignored it when it wouldn't. I remember turning the other cheek and not properly defending myself, and wondering why others weren't doing the same.

You know what it is? Sick. I was brainwashed from an early age into a religion that devalues me alone just on the basis of my sex. It's hard not to feel contempt for all the time I wasted to it in my youth. Countless thousands of hours. I even think my child self recognized that fact, as I always tried to get out of Sunday bible school to go play instead. What would I have done with those hours if it wasn't forced to worship an imaginary friend?
It sounds like a copout, but what sealed the nail in the proverbial coffin for me was how my mother treated me when I was a teenager. She was especially unloving, cruel, and nasty during that time when I was no longer a cute, malleable little girl who never complained. We fought so much. About stupid shit, like my "tone," if I hadn't done my domestic slave duties like cook dinner or clean the house (she'd never ask a male to help out, not even her third husband), or if I didn't feel like being interrogated about my day after school–shocking for a teenager to behave, I know. She'd follow me around the house yelling at, arguing, and berating me for hours until I broke. She'd always want me to hug her and make amends afterwards and if I didn't accept it she'd punish me further. One night, her fight was so outrageous that I told her how I didn't feel cared for or loved by anyone. In response, she sat next to me while looking me in the eyes and said "Jesus loves you." No assurance that she loved me, that the fight just went too far, or an apology just–"Well I may not love you and be there for you, but your imaginary friend is!" She was so pleased with herself as if she just said the most wonderful news that should have made me happy instantly. She herself has so much religious trauma that it would be too much to unpack, but I still loathe her for it. Who lets a religion fuck them so badly and then subjects their female child to the same shit knowing what it's done and is capable of repeating again?! It makes me want to scream, but no, civil society expects me to pretend religions have no negative consequences–and if they do–then the very few positives somehow outweigh the negatives. Religion is just thinly veiled ego and when I saw it enough in action I knew I was done. I knew then that I had been lied to about there being an afterlife, divine justice, and an omni-being who loved me.
Nowadays I believe in nothing, except for what we can observe and study. I tell my friends and acquaintances I'm "spiritual" because they tend to think I'm into some kind of wicca/paganism anyway because of my affinity towards nature, but deep down I don't believe in any of that either. Sometimes I considered getting into religions that "contradicted" the church just because I wished the magic to be real just to spite them, but that just leads Catholics to be smug due to their belief that people leave the church out of anger and petty rebellion–not because of real trauma, abuse, and lack of evidence that destroys faith.

That said…at least stained glass and some cathedrals are really pretty.