Does your experience with religion as a child influence how you approach Atheism?

[daaron]

10. Interesting questions all - been thinking about this lately, too.

Because I think, in my case, that my childhood experiences with religion and religious thinking were formative. Neither of my parents was or is religious, but they went through the motions because we lived in a small town. I was baptized Methodist at around 12 yo - milquetoast protestant with hayrides and choir practice, the works. So it wasn't my parents or church that religionized me. I think it was not knowing my grandfather, who died the same year I was born, and was the Campus Minister at UMich in Ann Arbor at the time. It made me curious about religion, in particular Christianity, to read the letters in the top drawer of his desk while wearing his reading glasses and rolling his pen between my fingers (thx dad for keeping it unchanged since grandpa's death). My parents weren't excited about my interest in religion, but they never opposed it either. It helps that I never learned how to evangelize.

As I got older, I danced with atheism a few times before we got hitched, so to speak. It all started with Santa Claus, man. Then the Devil was the next to fall. I think I was 12 when I first thought The Thought, but pushed it away until 16, when a nerd buddy of mine (a genius with an IC board and cash for Radio Shack) went all Baptist on me, and started converting or trying to convert my friends and me. He cut off all contact when I told him I didn't believe in God, and he had converted a childhood friend of my (then his GF); she called me "the Devil" after he told her, and would only read one book. Bet you can guess which one. Almost all my hostility to fundamentalism was born the day speaking the words, "I don't believe in God," trashed two long friendships.

So I read the Bible, too. Cover to cover. I've since reread the more interesting chunks many times over, and delved into the literature on mysticism, and became interested in comparative religion. It has fascinated me, and at times threatened my sanity, I think - especially when I overdosed on Kabbalah. (On a side note, I think an overdose of Alchemy is the cure for that affliction.) All this reading has convinced me that all religion is based on myth, and any normative benefits that religion might have can and often is cruelly cancelled at once by one foul deed in the name of (insert name of deity, here). Reminds me of something the driller on a rig I worked on told me on my first day; hardhat in hand, he said, "It takes ten 'Attaboys' to cancel one 'Make 'em bite!'"

I think all my answers to the OP questions are in there, somewhere.