Honestly, I never wanted nor thought I would turn out to be one of those atheists who is constantly hating on religion. I consider myself an open-minded person, and for much of my life, I didn't entirely regret my religious upbringing simply because I know there were parts of it that made me a better person. Or at least, I thought so.
But the more time I spend outside of religion, the more I see how different and restricted it's made me. How I was never taught to be myself or live for any other purpose or meaning. How I lost touch with my entire generation.
I became an atheist during my Spring semester of my freshman year of college, in 2008. I had signed up for a "Human Species" class as part of the general education requirements every college student needs. It was the first time I was ever genuinely exposed to the theory of evolution. The teacher was fantastic, and everything started to make a lot of sense. I was completely dumbfounded that all my life, people sought to keep this kind of information from me, when all along it made a hell of a lot more sense than anything in religion.
Everything I'd been taught in church was a lie. The arguments I thought proved evolution false were based on absolutely nothing but wrong science. What the church taught me was evolution was NOT evolution, but a twisted story to make me think it was illogical. When I realized that everyone I used to associate myself with in the world of Christianity failed to tell me the truth about any of this, the few threads I had left of my faith eroded and died.
It's now almost four years later. I can't hear a person talk about Christianity without thinking about how completely crazy they sound. Time wasted, worshiping a god that doesn't exist and will never listen to you. False hope, thinking that there's someone who has "a plan" for everything that goes wrong in your life. And it's all a bunch of bullshit. I've wasted enough of my life on it, and I don't want to be forced to hear it anymore. I'm ready to move on.
And I've started to realize just how much religion is poisoning our world in general. Making us ashamed of sexuality. Not approving of anything out of the norm. Being disgusted about people who are doing nothing but being themselves. There's something so wrong about that. How can religion ever be right if it decides that certain human beings are more worthless than other "normal" ones? We're all a little twisted. We all have dark secrets. But Christians hide their dark natures behind apologetic religious practices and act like it's just a flaw that they're "working on, with God's help."
Humans are animals. We have dark natures. Some of us more than others. We have different desires. As long as someone has a genuinely good-natured soul, who are you to tell them they're sinning against a god that doesn't exist? It's disgusting.
Anyway...
I guess my point is... There is so much wrong with religion, that I have a hard time seeing any kind of good in it anymore. Even the people I once thought were "good" Christians... the Trowbridges were the most realistic Christians I ever knew. Mrs. Lindsay was a genuinely kind woman to me. But now... I could never force myself to talk to them. I feel detached. I feel like I've been to a side of the world that they can't possibly understand. And I know that as long as they're stuck with their faith, they would never accept my decision to leave. I've left their world, and I can never go back.