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What was your religious upbringing?


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Both of my parents were religious. My mom was evangelical, my dad is not. He goes to church on Sundays when he can and he says grace before like Thanksgiving dinner or whatever, but he's not devout.

 

Personally, my dad absolutely forbade my mother from forcing me or my brother to go to church. He said we'll come to it later if we decide we want to go. My mom tried to force us to go to church. Spoiler alert, neither of us became Christians.

 

That makes me curious about households that did insist on church when you were young, and how that may have impacted you.

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Pretty intense traditional Pakistani Muslim religious upbringing. Sunday school every Sunday at the mosque (or masjid if you prefer), fasting (Ramadan), Eid, etc. 

 

Currently, I'm an apatheist/agnostic/secular humanist/spiritual. Definitely in no way Muslim. I eat pig, I love to drink alcohol and smoke weed, I'm married now but dated and had plenty of pre-marital sex. I was never really buying what Islam was selling from the get go, but particularly once I turned 14-15 I was rebelling pretty aggressively against it with my traditional parents. By 17-18 I was pretty much done with it all, and that's only solidified since (I'm 34 now). 

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Free Will Baptist, but I did get a fair bit of exposure to Assemblies of God from my Dad's family.

 

My parents weren't super hardcore, but they had us in church weekly, which I found boring as hell. But my dad's family lived next to us and they had a lot of influence with the fundamentalism. My youngest aunt, who lived with my grandparents when I was little, wouldn't allow me to watch Ninja Turtles.

 

I got "saved" at VBS when I was 9, but I feel like it was just more that I was doing what was expected of me. I never felt the things I was supposed to feel or whatever. No Holy spirit or any of that nonsense. But it terrified me because I'd been taught if I didn't follow the path and truly get saved, I'd burn in Hell for eternity.

 

It was pretty traumatic breaking away from all that as I got into my 20s. My husband played a big role in that, since he was an atheist since before we started dating.

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Evangelical Christianity. Specifically, the Southern Baptist Convention. I was taken to church, raised in it. MOULDED BY IT /BaneVoice. My religious belief isn't something that will ever leave me. 

 

 

Then, I moved on from the SBC to a non-denominational, but still evangelical church. This time, one that came out of the Churches of Christ. I began dabbling with an Anglican church too. Just this year, I've decided to leave the evangelical church and find some new faith community. 

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I didn't grow up religious. No one in my family was remotely religious growing up, but would have said Christian if asked. Well, then this shit happened today and is the reason I came into the thread. 

 

My dad called me today and mentioned how it is weird that Easter isn't more poplar than Christmas since rising from the dead is more important than his birth and "where is your proof god isn't real" and that the bible proves god is real. I ended the call. 

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My family wasn’t religious at all, though I was baptized because my grandma insisted. So if that somehow ends up mattering thanks grandma. Other than that my dad took me to church one time and we never went back. My mom took me once too and we never went back. That was it.

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10 minutes ago, Dodger said:

My family wasn’t religious at all, though I was baptized because my grandma insisted. So if that somehow ends up mattering thanks grandma. Other than that my dad took me to church one time and we never went back. My mom took me once too and we never went back. That was it.

I got baptized in boot camp because if I didn't I had to run up a long hill many, many times. My integrity is absolutely for sale. One guy I was in boot camp with had 'atheist' on his tags. He got fucking s m o k e d every Sunday. That dude was a trooper. I had 'no rel pref' on my tags and I got away with pretending I was jewish after the first two weeks. Jews got bagels on Sundays. I'm not kidding. Initially we only had like 2 jews in the company, by week 9 there was at least a dozen of us. Of course that was after I got baptized.

 

The first Sunday I stayed behind because I didn't partake in religious service, I will never forget that smoking. There was literally like 7 of us, drill sergeant sent everyone else off to their respective shit, he dead ass turned to the rest of us as we were in formation and said "oh ye of little faith" and smoked us half to death for the rest of the day.

 

I learned I'll say some words and get dunked in some water, no biggie.

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2 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

I got baptized in boot camp because if I didn't I had to run up a long hill many, many times. My integrity is absolutely for sale. One guy I was in boot camp with had 'atheist' on his tags. He got fucking s m o k e d every Sunday. That dude was a trooper. I had 'no rel pref' on my tags and I got away with pretending I was jewish after the first two weeks. Jews got bagels on Sundays. I'm not kidding. Initially we only had like 2 jews in the company, by week 9 there was at least a dozen of us. Of course that was after I got baptized.

 

The first Sunday I stayed behind because I didn't partake in religious service, I will never forget that smoking. There was literally like 7 of us, drill sergeant sent everyone else off to their respective shit, he dead ass turned to the rest of us as we were in formation and said "oh ye of little faith" and smoked us half to death for the rest of the day.

 

I learned I'll say some words and get dunked in some water, no biggie.

 

Oh man, I forgot about the army spell within the Fizzzzzle story arc.

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Wildly strict, Latin American Pentecostal. We call them rajatabla churches, but I don't know if there's any direct English translation for that. Let me see, Spanish to English dictionaries day "exact, strict, rigorous", so I guess in American terms, a crazy fundamentalist everyone is going to hell because none of you all are good enough church.

 

I'm not any of that. I'm still very religious. I was at church just this morning, but I turned away from that craziness a long time ago.

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Family believed in Jesus, but we never regularly attended any specific church until I was 13.  For a year or two my mom took us regularly to what I think was an Assembly of God , whatever the fuck that is.  Preacher at the time would speak in tongues and really believed in the Rapture. I tried to buy into it, asking Jesus to save my soul, but it wasn't happening.  Luckily, unlike @CastlevaniaNut18, I never had the fear of God programmed into me so I had no guilt telling myself "this is all bullshit" and luckily around that time the whole family stopped going regularly anyway.

 

After that, until a few years ago I would have leaned more towards agnostic, keeping the possibility open that there could be a God out there.

 

Currently I strongly believe there is no God, nor gods, nor supernatural beings, nor entities like souls or ghosts of any kind.

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Grew up baptist (pretty sure it was southern baptist but don't fully remember). My dad was loosely religious as a kid but my mom was pretty hard core (yeah I've had a bar of soap in my mouth over saying a swear word and not even thee good one). I had to go with my mom to church every sunday but was able to go less in my HS years where I mostly got out of religion. A lot of that stemmed from me having friends in other religions (mormon, catholic, etc.) and being told to be careful around them or they might convert me when they never did and just questioning the BS they raise you on in the youth part of the church. When I moved out at 19 I pretty much dropped religion/church and became an agnostic but now I more consider myself agnostic atheist, more so because I'm so fed up with the concept of religion that I don't care anymore but mostly subscribe to the atheist side of it.

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Mom was a pretty strict Catholic. I went to Catholic school until high school. We were really active in the church. I was an altar boy (her decision, not mine). I don't remember ever really believing in it, except for all the bad stuff, of course (hell is scary!). I probably would have kept going through the motions to keep her happy, but when she died halfway through 8th grade, I was done. My dad was more or less agnostic, so he didn't make me go after that. 

 

I remember reconnecting with some of my middle school friends a decade later, and was surprised to find out that they were mostly still pretty devout. A couple of them are priests now. 

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Dad grew up in the AME tradition, mom grew up in the Churches of Christ. They met in high school and dad ended up going to church with mom. When I was a kid we attended a Church of Christ in one of the more affluent suburbs in the area. This was really close to JSC, and the church was actually started by an astronaut and some big time NASA engineers. Our church was pretty different from most Churches of Christ, which to some extent they all are due to no overarching denominational authority, with the only real tell tale sign of being CofC was our non-instrumental music. But the oddest thing about our church was the level of education. It was mostly NASA and oil engineering folks, so an abundance of graduate degrees in hard sciences.

 

Because of this and some of the cultural norms of the CofC, our church was much more into the academic study of scripture than the more spiritual elements of Christianity. I know for me, I never felt any strong emotional connection to religious faith. I never really saw that in our community. For example, our youth group was more likely to participate in bible knowledge competitions than in revival events or purity culture stuff like "True Love Waits", which was a huge deal in my Junior High years in evangelical circles.

 

We were away from there for a time in a church that I would now categorize as cult-lite. A lot of really insidious methods of exerting control that I just wasn't down with once it became more clear to me once some of that junk was tried on me and my wife and I wasn't having any bit of it. I was pretty deeply connected with the leaders of this church, and it was legitimately damaging to our relationship with many friends when we left. Now we are back at the place I grew up. It's basically all super old people, and my wife I committed to taking care of these sweet old people until they die and then my guess is we will probably move to a more private religious expression. I continue to be more interested in religious study as an academic exercise than a spiritual one.

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3 hours ago, Chris- said:

 

Oh man, I forgot about the army spell within the Fizzzzzle story arc.

It happened. And I will say, that first Sunday in basic of not going to church will stay with me forever. Imagine the worst workout you've ever done and multiply that by a hundred, while a slimy  shit head is yelling about some random shit in your face. Also it's 95 degrees in georgia.

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my parents were kinda christian. i remember going to church until i was about 6, and then we stopped for some reason. my mom tried to send me to a sunday school thing when i was in middle school and i was able to convince her to not send me. it wasn’t because of religious reasons, but why the hell would i want to go to more school on my day off? wasn’t until high school that i kinda thought it was all BS. 

 

family is still religious. my dad goes to church every sunday. my brother and his family go sometimes. i’ve never told my family that i don’t believe but they probably know anyway based off of how i respond to religious stuff. 

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Raised catholic, went to catholic school from Jk - Gr 8, but only my mom took us to church. Dad I have no real idea on if he had any real religious belief. Mom tried to take us to church every Sunday but I didn’t feel good a lot of times on Sunday. Then we kind of stopped going when I turned I think 12 because my sister had her first job and worked some Sunday shifts. So I gotta thank my sister and her job for putting a stop to it. I consider myself spiritual, in that I believe in a higher power out there but not all these bible stories. Too many things are wrong with the book and I feel like some personal events in life have made me a bit bitter to “God” Plus I think people consider it too literally and has made the world a bitter/angry place to be (well all religions cause this really)

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3 hours ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

I remember being legit afraid of the rapture coming and being left behind because I thought I was doing it all wrong and some of my family said the rapture would happen at some point in our lives.

 

There's definitely a lot of trauma back there for me.

 

Well then here's a fear we both shared as kids. Nothing quite like having it drilled into you that you're a sinner and everyone good was getting raptured and everyone left behind was getting tortured for years.

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Fake Jewish. A hodgepodge of the Torah, old Christian scripture, new testament, doomsday crap, and the ramblings of a disturbed idiot (dealers choice on whether the disturbed idiot in question was the cult leader or my father, depending on the night).  

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I don't know if I really had a religious upbringing. When I was young I went to a Lutheran school. I remember eating the grape juice bread but not much beyond that. When my parents divorced my dad never went to church and my mom went to a Unitarian church. I stopped going with her because I decided that I liked watching football more. It's not like the kids attended the sermons anyway. They'd take the kids and we'd go play in some room. Now my mom's in Order of Ascended rose, or maybe not. In any case I feel she's more spiritual than religious. I think my grandpa was somewhat the same. I mean they'd say prayers but she says he wasn't a catholic or anything.

My dad would always joke "I'm a christian man," but it feels like he kept his beliefs more to himself than anything. And of course on his side of the family they are pretty religious, but you know black religious so kind of fun.

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