Over 10 years ago at a church retreat I accepted the Lord, Jesus Christ, as my God and savior. I was baptized at the Westside Baptist Church soon after. Years later, I look back on this part of my life in an entirely different light and wonder what led me to that conclusion. The earliest religious experiences I remember were from my childhood, perhaps as young as five or six years old. I don't remember going to church with my parents that young, but instead, it was my father's parents who brought us with them on those Sunday mornings. To be honest, I did not enjoy those days. I don't remember ever protesting however, perhaps because I loved my grandparents too much to upset them. My mother's parents also brought us to church later on, but I don't think we attended Sunday school so it wasn't as boring to me. Then, in my teens, my brother started going to church with friends... on his own. That was kind of surprising to me since I think we both thought church was boring when we were young. I started going too because it sounded fun. It was. I made friends in my youth group and eventually went on the retreat. I thought it was the right thing to do. My friends were Christians, my family was Christian, it must have been right. After all, if you're not saved, you will go to Hell.
A small turning point in my life was at my Mom's church (not the same church my friends attended) when I was about 18. During a Sunday school lesson, my "teacher" had the audacity to suggest that the bible should not be taken literally. It did contain moral lessons worthy of following, but it was ultimately infallible since it was written by many people, and translated by many more people. And let's face it, some of the things in the old testament were not the best things to teach your kids. Maybe this was the seed which led me to seek truth in my life after so many years of following other's idea of the truth. I had had my doubts in the past, but I didn't want to disappoint anyone- especially God. At the time, I was aware of the existence of other religions, but that was about it. In my world civilization class a few years later though, I learned about our earliest history. I learned about our cultures and religions and began to see flaws in my beliefs. First of all, my religion was not the first. In fact, the religion my religion came from was not the first either. So what made mine the right one? I had no answer.
Fast forward several years and I was no longer attending church. I lived on my own and had very different friends. I had a friend that described himself as agnostic. I had never even heard the term before, so he explained it to me. He didn't believe in god because there wasn't enough evidence to support the idea. At that time, I still believed so we didn't really get into it. (I was never the preachy type of Christian.) I also had gay friends. They were really not that different from my other friends, except for the bigotry they experienced. I felt sympathy for them in their struggle for equal marital rights, despite what the church says about it. I started to think that church wasn't really for me, but I still felt that there must be a God. The world was just too complex and amazing to be random chance.
I found the atheist community about a year ago. Despite what I had previously thought, these were perfectly normal people who just had a different view from my Christian family and friends. They were not all evil heathens. I realize now that I am and always have been an atheist. I was never fully convinced, but I was always afraid that I might be wrong. What I had learned about Hell and the devil scared me into doing what I thought I had to do to be a good person, to please my family and to go to Heaven.
