Religion has never been a focal point in my family. It simply never mattered. It was never a part of our identity or our lives. Now I consider myself to by without religion. I'm an atheist.
My father was raised Catholic in a half-ass sort of way. I'm fairly certain that he is an atheist as well because on more than one occasion he's essentially said as much. He also says that when he was a child it was said that he was to be a priest. Obviously that prophesy was more than a little off. My mother is some sort of Protestant, as if it matters as to what variety. They were married in a Methodist church and that led to myself and my sisters being baptized Methodist.
My parents were going to have me baptized Catholic but they met with a priest while my mother was pregnant with me and when it came out that my older sister had already been baptized Protestant they were run out. Thus my issues with religion began while I was still in the womb.
Those issues continued into my childhood. The closest thing to a religious experience was going to Bible School when I was about six or seven. The thing is that I never realized that it was supposed to be religious. Sure we sat through a bit of a service before had, but it never clicked. I just thought I was there to make friends and color pictures of guys with beards.
After Bible School, religion fizzled out for me. We've always celebrated Christian holidays, but in a completely secular way. It was always more about giving and eating and Santa and the Easter Bunny than it was about Jesus. My grandmother vaguely tried to make us pious little Christians. Every now and then she'd tell us that Jesus loved us or that God was watching. Whenever this came up I'd look at the cross or the portrait of Jesus on her wall and just get scared. It was like I was being told a ghost story rather than something spiritual.
I remember praying when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I was a little embarrassed by this though. I felt silly talking to some invisible deity, even as a child who would make believe he was a Ninja Turtle. Once High School rolled around I considered myself a Deist. I assume God created the universe and then could give a shit about what happened on one particular speck of dust. Doubting even this, by college I was agnostic. I figured if there was some all-powerful creator, who was I stay say whether or not we could know if He exists. He is all-powerful after all.
Eventually the huge implausibility of such a thing being reality started to dawn on me. Had I ever truly believed in God? Not really. Why then should I bother with this forcibly humble label of agnostic? I think it's so unlikely and have for my entire life; so much so that I was always embarrassed by the thought of doing something religious.
I am an atheist and always have been. I tried to be religious and it never proved reasonable enough to stick. This worlds got enough problems without worrying about ghosts and goblins.
I still know a fair amount about the Bible. I thought the Passion of the Christ was a decent flick. I love the Ten Commandments, Charlton Heston was amazing in that. I view all of these things as mythology though. Not as fact.
As Richard Dawkins says, all of us are atheists about most of the gods that have ever been believed in by humanity, some of us just go one god further.
