My experience with religion began when I was very young. I grew up in a small town in Tennessee, and like many children who have grown up in small southern towns, spent a good deal of my Sundays fidgeting in a church pew. My mother has always been very religious, and placed a lot of importance of raising her children that way, even going as far as pulling us out of school to homeschool me and my sisters to make sure we were learning the right values. Christianity however, isn't always the most palatable thing for young children, despite the great efforts taken to make it cool and fun for us kids. So I spent most of those Sundays feeling bored, and then guilty for feeling bored, because I was taught if you don't love God and listen to what the
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I had been taught a set of absolute, unquestionable, religious values ever since I could remember, values that were unthinkable for me to reject. My mom seemed to become more deeply involved in religion as I grew older, and those Christian values were tightly woven through my homeschool curriculum and my life. As I went through high school, the things I were being taught only got more intense as my mom and grandma got involved in one pretty crazy stuff. They joined an online community with a cult-like leader who claimed to be a prophet of God, and made predictions that the world was going to end in a few years. It was all completely absurd, and the religious values I was being taught shifted from the normal stuff on salvation and resurrections, and suddenly I was being taught things like how to identify the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and avoid being marked with the sign of the beast. Thankfully my Dad is a skeptical and pretty non-religious person, that was able to keep my mom and grandma from trying to get us all to run off and join a commune or move to Jerusalem. After awhile they realized that the stuff they had gotten into was actually pretty insane, and were able to pull away from it before it really got out of hand. After this happened I started to think more seriously about pulling away from religion entirely, and so I slowly started shifting my
I had been taught a set of absolute, unquestionable, religious values ever since I could remember, values that were unthinkable for me to reject. My mom seemed to become more deeply involved in religion as I grew older, and those Christian values were tightly woven through my homeschool curriculum and my life. As I went through high school, the things I were being taught only got more intense as my mom and grandma got involved in one pretty crazy stuff. They joined an online community with a cult-like leader who claimed to be a prophet of God, and made predictions that the world was going to end in a few years. It was all completely absurd, and the religious values I was being taught shifted from the normal stuff on salvation and resurrections, and suddenly I was being taught things like how to identify the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and avoid being marked with the sign of the beast. Thankfully my Dad is a skeptical and pretty non-religious person, that was able to keep my mom and grandma from trying to get us all to run off and join a commune or move to Jerusalem. After awhile they realized that the stuff they had gotten into was actually pretty insane, and were able to pull away from it before it really got out of hand. After this happened I started to think more seriously about pulling away from religion entirely, and so I slowly started shifting my