re: #207 Feline Emperor of the Conservative Waste

My upbringing was very non-dogmatic. Sunday school - but at the UU church my mother attended. My father was non-practicing Catholic and was probably pretty much an atheist at that point I think. It’s just not something we discussed as a family.

And it didn’t come up much among my friends and social set. Mostly RC, but no one was overtly forward about it. Ran into a few evangelicals in high school, but they came across as odd.

So I had a pretty simple “live and let live” attitude up until college. That was were I got exposed to nut-job “our way or burn” types. And the lack of pushback towards them from their fellows was what started me down the road towards default suspicion about religions and their agendas. Helped along by reading further history at an adult level and getting knowledge in greater detail on the abuses and such carried out in $diety’s name. (With the later decision was that this in essence was actually just the cover story for abuse and murder for the sake of control and keeping power.)

Sort of similar here. Brought up Catholic, taught that God and Jesus were real, but it wasn’t anything that dominated our lives. It was something you just did.

As I got older, I morphed into a kind lazy deist; there was a definitely a God, but I just let it go at that. Never once questioned that evolution was real and stuff like that.

Between 9/11 and watching my mom die 3 weeks before she could see her 1st grandson born, I finally figured out that modern religions were really no different than the mythical pantheons of old. The big difference now is that many of the believers have access to way more destructive weapons than our ancestors.

I really try to maintain a live-and-let-live attitude. If God, or Allah, or Crom or Moroni get you through the day, fine. Just keep it out of my government, and if I say I don’t believe, don’t start screaming like a jackass about the horrible atheist oppressing you.