Welcome to Gaia! ::

Great story. Any excuse to have punk in a story is good, though.

Alright. Raised in the Bible belt to a single parent who wasn't either of my biological parents. Religious indoctrination mixed nicely with neurosis that I, by proximity, inherited: the more paranoid, fearful and accusational my guardian became, the more my young mind soaked it up. Soon it was black helicopters, demons in the schools, homosexual agenda and the liberal pogrom to wipe out morals that hid under my bed, not monsters or creepy crawlies.

In my early teens I distanced myself from the church in which I had been very thoroughly steeped, and took a break from reality, simply emotionally and mentally exhausted by the tonnage of fear and repression. Of course this left me to myself, and my emotional swings gained full reign.

This, interestingly, lead me to the public, mob-style over emotionalization offered by a local church. I dove in, convincing myself that this place wasn't full of liars, cheats and hypocrites like my old church. This drove a wedge between me and my family. Three years of that finally started to wear off, as my growing feelings of bisexuality made reconciling my faith difficult. Further, the more scholarly my Biblical studies became, the more incongruous the whole text seemed. So I figure I'd fix it all by going to seminary school.

As the adage tells, reading the Bible was the cause for my Atheism. The vast disparities between the character of God in one book to the next made him seem insane, the mystical logic behind the murder of Christ made it seem like a charisma cult and the blame for two peoples' sins being passed down to every human alive seemed like slavery.

So after a vicious internal battle, I managed to externalize the concept of God and view it objectively. I'd say it was six months before I had, quite thoroughly, disassembled and discarded all theology. I kept it under wraps for a few months, but ultimately, I wasn't happy being a closet Atheist and bisexual, so I gathered my closest friends and shared it with them.

And after that, 4 people in my home town would speak with me, and 2 of them weren't happy doing it. So I accepted it and went to bed. Woke up the next morning feeling elated; I could look myself in the eye, so to speak, bore none of that awful forced guilt, and felt no need for these friends, upon whom I'd desperately depended for approval and support for years leading up to that.

So I left.

Went East with a flimsy excuse to meet a friend. Built my own life from scratch, had a cross-country lifestyle with no friends, no support from my family, bouts of homelessness, some voluntary, some forced, and still felt like a ******** king among men. It was that self-confidence and joy in living that I'd been missing all my life that convinced me that I am responsible only to myself and could be proud of whatever I did.

Now I'm stable, dating and living with the same girl for almost three years (yes, still bi but not searching), working a good job with multiple promotions, practicing as a writer, responsible in several medium-scale private group endeavors at an administrative level and happy as a clam.

So ...I must be doing /something/ right.

Thanks for inviting me, Ivan, and thanks Ilikepie4 for making this guild.

I'm 19, and just ending my 2nd year at college, where I am a physics/astrophysics double major.

My story is for the most part pretty simple: my parents were both in the air force when I was born, but my mother left and my father managed to get assigned to a base permanently. So when I was growing up, my dad would be home for several weeks or months, then he'd disappear for weeks or months with his special forces unit.

My family has never really been religious: my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother never even attended church when they were growing up, so it never entered my life from them and my father as an atheist, as was his father, though his mother was a diest.

Religion wasn't even something I knew about until I joined the boyscouts in 1st grade. I remember going to the church to listen to the preacher and doing all the work for the optional religious medals (I did get every single one of them). I always thought the stories were pretty cool, and the morals made sense to me, and since the church was nondenominational, there wasn't much 'spin' on it. But as I listened I would think 'mom taught me that stealing is wrong (beat my bottom red after I stole a pack of gum, and then made me pay the store manager for it) but she never said anything about some dude getting two big tablets on a mountain...'

Finally, after I was older, I decided that I didn't need a religion to live my life by, and since I never had a real religious influence as a kid, this seemed obvously evident. And science was always my favorite subject, and I began to look at the world through the scientific method and from objective points of view. I don't technically consider myself an 'atheist', I'm simply utterly nonreligious: I don't have any, I don't want any, and I don't particularly care about them as anything other than as a study of the human mind and society.

I suppose I'll introduce myself.

I'm currently 23. I'm a second year senior double majoring in physics and astronomy. I run a blog entitled The Angry Astronomer. I currently teach an introductory astronomy lab course and do occasional research, my most recent being a photometric survey of the open cluster NGC 7142.

I was raised moderately Christian and continued to call myself such until about jr high. From there, I didn't really know what to call myself, until I hit high school and met many friends who were openly atheist. I had already pretty much ruled out religion as logical, but then finally started calling myself such.

I'm extremely involved in "debates" on creationism (and its trojan horse of Intelligent Design), not because I'm interested in biology in any way, but mainly because I wish to stop this lack of critical thinking before it spreads any further, especially into my field (although it already has).

I've lived in the bible belt my entire life, although fortunately, always in the more liberal areas. Sadly, I have family who are very fundamentalist. Holidays suck for me.

Pot-filled, hippie, liberal, tree-hugging, eco-terrorist Portland for me. Oh, the civil unions!

Oh lawdy, I feel like I accidentally stepped into some bizarre parody of a support group.

Hi, my name is Tarquin and I am an alchoholic...

Well, my relationship with God is somewhat less dynamic than what I have seen here so far. I only had a concrete belief of scripture (Anglican style) up until the age of four when my parents stopped taking me to church so they could sleep in on Sunday. I identified more with my father's Judaism than my mother's Christianity simply because I like the culture of the North American Jewry more than I liked the creepy old people who used to try to talk to me when I went to church as a kid. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I actually had any serious knowledge of scripture. I don't know as much as the M&R subforum regulars but I still probably know more than most evangelicals who I see as preaching what they fail to understand.

I still believe in God, Jesus, Moses, Miracles, Angels, Demons, ect but don't attempt to validate those beliefs or even think for a second that every single part of the Bible is true. I don't even believe that most of it is true and that even if all of it is fake many of the ideals in it (but not all of them) can still be said to posses a personal philosophical truth to how I think I should be living my life. An example would be lines one to thirteen in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (Cor 1:1-3) which is quite possibly one of the greatest descriptions of love ever written.

Of course when it comes to most other things, I am a true-blue skeptic. My specialty, should any of you need to call on it, is sexual fetishes. I study them as a hobby and have a particular interest in how they originate. My hero in this regard is the father of modern sexology, Alfred Kinsey. His empirical approach to the study of sex inspires me still. What I cannot stand is people who take what is obviously a psychological derivative of passive childhood conditioning and try to make it into something mystical so they can feel special about themselves. Hence the "car comparison" which got me invited into the guild. I also have an interest in politics where being a skeptic is mandatory. If this guild desires recruits ED-P would be the most ideal place to look.

Great to see you guys here. The crocoduck, the official guild mascot says hello too.

Not the CrocoStimpy?