Hello, all

A bit about me, as a teen my parents returned to their old church and I joined shortly thereafter at about age 12, getting serious in the church around age 14 and leaving the church around age 16, though at the time I was convinced I was going to Hell. The church was Pentecostal. If any of you know anything about that particular religion you will know that it really does a number on the mind of a kid.

As the years went on I slowly started believing less and less without realizing it. Years had passed and I had become agnostic before I even started to question things I was told in the church. In fact, much of what I believed to be in the Bible was nowhere to be found in there. Someone in the church said it was in the Bible, they wouldn't lie to me, so I simply assumed it was true.

Once I made this realization I finally knew that I had chosen the wrong religion and started a search for God to see if there was a right religion. The religious say if you truly search for God you will find him, but all of you know what REALLY happens when you search for God with a truly open mind. You become an atheist. And I did.

I'm pretty easy going. While I do agree that religion can be damaging to people mentally, especially kids, I believe in religious freedom, so long as it includes my freedom not to be religious. I don't care if people practice polygamy and other people call it a cult. If it makes them happy, everyone is a willing participant of legal age and nobody gets hurt it's not really my concern. I do still have my "angry atheist" moments, though. When someone says something stupid like, "Atheists got prayer removed from schools", it does tend to grind on my nerves a bit. I don't like being a scapegoat and I don't like history being twisted to make me look bad. I can get quite combative at times and, like every person on the planet, I do tend use simple terms such as "Christians" rather than "your particular belief system" when responding to such ignorance, giving the impression that I lump them all together. In reality it seems like the dumber someone is, the louder they scream. What that means is that the Christians I generally come across are the most bigoted and ignorant of the bunch because they are the ones screaming while the good ones sit quietly on the sidelines going virtually unnoticed.

On thing about me which I believe is probably unusual for an atheist, I am not a Dawkins fan. Don't get me wrong, he is a great and brilliant man. I just don't like what I've read of his work which, admittedly, has not been much. I found the first chapter of The Greatest Show on Earth to be boring, often WAY off topic, self gratifying and not entirely honest, but that is just my opinion.

Don't worry, I don't expect you to know everything about every religion any more than I want to know that much about religion. Not to toot my own horn, but I was too smart and too honest for that religion. I have a hard time lying, even to myself and it became increasingly difficult to fool myself into believing that I did not have a nagging feeling that something was wrong with my beliefs. I am DEFINITELY glad to be rid of it. I let my mom take my oldest son to Sunday school there for a while years ago until he came home crying saying that his mother and I were going to Hell because we didn't go to church. He was 6. I understand religion far better now and now I have a single rule; My children can attend any church they like, so long as the church is not bigoted. Not sure how long it will take them to figure out that rules out almost every Christian denomination. They all teach their parishioners to hate someone. The Pentecostal church teaches them to hate everyone, they just don't call it hate. Gays, atheists, scientists, even other Christians, who they claim are not Christians at all...unless they're proudly talking about how many Christians there are in the world and how Christianity is the biggest "religion" in the world, of course.

Anyway, thanks for the warm welcome and I, too, am glad I am no longer stupid by choice.

Hi I believe in god or bible and i believe that bible point us the right way.