Anybody raised without any religon?

You're not the only one. My parents grew up in religious familes and didn't like it, so they decided to raise my siblings and I without any religion in the family. They did it so that we could choose our own religious path in life, so it wasn't necessarily being raised as atheist, but it definitely led to that, as all my three siblings and I are either atheist or apathetic.

 

Have you studied Buddhism? I think it's a thought-provoking and kind religion.

 

Oh well, at least it doesn't openly condemn or discriminate people (not that I know of). Every religion is unnecessary in the sense that they all offer you the morality that you can come up with on your own. Believe it or not but there are people out there that need the guidance of a religion, and I would very much prefer it if they chose Buddhism, because I can see how dreadful the other religions turn out to be.

My mother is Christian (granted that Christianity in my country is really different than in the U.S.) and my father is Buddhist, and yet I'm an atheist. Somehow the Christian folks always give me the shivers (for apparently no reason) when I'm around them and the Buddhist people make me feel at ease.

 

You're not really unique in being raised without religion, but you're story is unusual in that despite growing up without religion, you're very knowledgeable of them. Even here in what is statistically the second-most conservative city in the nation, I know plenty of people that grew up without religion, but they're typically very ignorant and militant about their lack of belief since they didn't make the decision themselves, very similar to any religious household really.

 

Me!
I was baptized, and I went to church about twice... But it was difficult for my parents to bring four kids, all aged 5 and under, to church so we stopped going. My mother was raised Protestant and my father was raised Catholic.
I, personally, am an apatheist. None of my siblings are religious, and both of my parents seem to have ditched it as well - my mom believes in God but doesn't act on it or anything.

King x

 

There's no doubt about that. People will get intelligent enough to disregard religions as a whole.

 

I didn't even feel attacked. I don't know where you got that impression.

I agree that being highly intelligent doesn't necessarily mean you will not be religious, but I also believe that intelligence plays an important part in whether a person is religious or not. Tell a child anything and he will believe it, but when he's grown up, he will learn to question before accepting anything as being true. And that's the result of higher intelligence. As you may have noticed, more and more people are openly atheistic or agnostic because they are better educated (than the people in the past), have access to non-biased knowledge and of course are more intelligent (as a result of evolution). I'm almost sure that there were many geniuses who didn't believe in God but just went with the flow because they would have been executed otherwise. Personally, I think the only reason that some intelligent people are religious is that they were raised up in a religious family/atmosphere and it became, for lack of better word, their lifestyle.

Despite what I say, I have nothing against the religious or religions (except for those who are homophobic and some really nasty religions that promote discrimination and unfair treatment). I even find some of the atheists really rude. Some think really highly of themselves, that they are superior.

 

You see these little emoticons :icon_mrgr? If you see one then I'm not mad. Actually I was smiling.
PS: I forgot to add some in my last post.

 

You know, I expected a longer response. Anyway, a little bump up since I want to know other people's opinions too. Or should I create another thread?

 

This is an interesting thread. I'm interested in seeing where it goes. I can't really participate because I was raised as a Southern Baptist, though when I became an adult and began to actually study the Bible (and ironically - gain more knowledge of Christianity than the average Christian), I lost my faith and ended up becoming what I'd term a "reluctant atheist."

My response to actually reading the Bible was similar to your own DanA. (Secret Tip: Most Christians don't actually read the Bible, though they may flip to some favorite verses they've heard of to support whatever argument they're making.)

I would compare it to reading a story - say, a romance novel - and then suddenly, inexplicably there is a robot war, dragons, and Toto from the Wizard of Oz dropped into the story without foreshadowing or warning. In other words, reading the Bible broke my suspension of disbelief. Likely, because I had been raised completely opposite to you.

I had been raised to believe that the Bible was basically a history book, and held pretty much all relevant information about the history of the world. Every word of it was to be taken literally, without question, and any contradiction had to be explained away.

It led to some silly arguments, such as the Dinosaurs not really existing - their bones were put in the ground by the devil to trick people. Or, alternatively, Dinosaurs and humans lived together. (This was necessary, because the world is - as we ALL know - only roughly 6,000 years old.)

So, then imagine coming to the Bible with that mindset, and then - after having a basic education - being constantly confronted with things you couldn't explain away. Then layer onto that, as you put it, all the "mid-Iron Age morality" that is largely ignored in modern times (unless it's convenient for a certain argument).

As a result, my suspension of disbelief was broken, and I ended up as a "reluctant atheist."

I've evolved a lot since then, though. I'd say that over time, as I've pondered the consequence of atheism, the world, the universe, and our place in it that I've ended up pretty squarely in the existentialist camp. My views most closely aligned with that of Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus. Though, I wouldn't say that I follow them exactly, they are simply the most similar.

I wouldn't really recommend my world view to most people. It isn't the world view most people want to hold. Even atheists. I think everyone has their comforting delusions, the atheistic and religious alike.

On the whole I think delusions are bad, because they rob people of a chance to really live their lives. On the other hand, delusions are comforting which is why we allow ourselves to escape into them in the first place. I don't look down upon people, or begrudge people for having delusions. I don't think ones level of delusions measures someones intelligence or their ability.

I'm not even sure what a world would look like if the majority of people held my views. It could easily become a very scary place.

 

I was raised without a religion. My father was Taoist and he tried his best to raise us as such. But that could never have really thrived with the way we were brought up in a largely white suburban area.

He passed away a from years ago and I believe the only practicing member of my extended family left is my paternal grandfather. And once he goes, that'll probably be the end of that. Everybody else seems to be largely atheist.

Funny enough, when I was really young, one of my classmates once asked me if I'm Christian. At the time, my worldview was so small that I thought there were only 2 types of people in the world: Christians and Jewish. And I knew I wasn't Jewish, whatever that meant, so I just said I was Christian, whatever that meant. Shows what kind of neighborhood I grew up in.

 

My parents raised me to be able to choose my own religion. They do not practice any religion. For a while I atended a United Methodist Church. Well, they found out about me being gay and pretty much kicked me out of the church.

After that I began to doubt in God. I began to wonder if this is what God's plan was for his people. I realized that Christianity was not for me. I realized that I had been tricked into believing something that was not there. So... now I consider myself an atheist.

 

I was raised without religion. There are two people in my family alive today who were ever particularly religious: my aunt, who used to be Catholic but is now non-religious; and my grandma, who is still a very devout Jehovah's Witness. Everyone else, while raised religious, left religion before I was born. As a result, I've always considered myself an atheist.

 

I was raised without religion, and my parents and grandparents from my mother's side aren't religious either. I don't know about my grandparents from my father's side cause they passed away before I was born, but I believe they weren't either. My parents have no religious things like crosses in the house, they only have a Bible because my sister had to buy one when she went to a christian high school (it was either the christian one in their town or one 15 miles away).

I respect people and their beliefs but I could never be religious myself. I don't know if there's some kind of deity, and in all honesty I don't care.

If there's some kind of afterlife/heaven, yeah that would be cool, but if there's just a big bunch of nothingness after I die (this is what I expect there to be, nothing) that would be fine too. I'll just make the best of my life right here right now

 

In the US maybe it is somewhat rare, but other western countries have much higher rates of atheism and agnosticism. I was (thankfully) raised without any religious influence, my mother, and her parents, and their parents too as well. My father was kind of but he doesn't believe any of it - it was mainly traditional. Very few people in my social circle have been religious, and those that have were also just approaching it from the traditional angle too. People that actually believe the things in the religion seem to be largely met with the "Smile and walk away slowly" procedure.