by VorJack
Folks like the Pew Research Forum do a good job of figuring out the breakdown of religious groups. From them we can figure out what percentage of the population are atheists.
But one thing they don’t do is tell us what those atheists used to be. It’s my sense that most atheists were raised in religious households, and then deconverted. To test this hypothesis, I’ve put together this quick survey.
Obviously, this is for atheists, agnostics and other non-believers. Just as obviously, this is not a scientific study. It’s also hard to capture the diversity of religious faith in a few selections. Still, it will give us a general sense of the question.
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As long as you realise that the readership of this blog – a blog as far as I can tell for sharing insights about post-christian atheism – is a subset of atheists that is inevitably skewed towards your hypothesis.
You also seem to miss the agnostic household in your questionnaire…
He didn’t miss the agnostic household, it’s near the bottom labeled ‘Non Believer’.
Agnostics are non believers, just like atheists, they just choose different titles.
I guess I wasn’t too deeply entrenched in my religiosity growing up: I have no idea what sect of christianity my mother subscribed to.
It took me until I was about 12 before I realized people actually take religion seriously. That was a pretty frightening moment. I never really paid it any attention before that.
Since I was raised irreligious, I have a similar experience. I recently was talking to a friend of mine who was raised Catholic but realized atheism sometime in childhood about that. Many of my schoolmates were also Catholic, and went to CCD, so I had no one to play with some days after school. I asked my mom why I couldn’t go to CCD (I didn’t even know what it was, just that all my friends went), and she said it’s because we’re not Catholic. My friend asked me what happened after that, didn’t you ask a lot of questions? I don’t recall asking what it means to be Catholic or any other questions on the topic of religion, that time or ever. It’s not that I couldn’t, I just didn’t. I reasoned at some point that different families did different stuff and that was sort of cool. I had another friend who wore a Buddha necklace, I just thought that was her family thing that was different than mine, and I never said to myself or asked my parents if we could be more like some other families. We were us and they were them, and none of this “god” stuff clicked in my head for a long time. I thought it was like the food they eat or the way they liked to decorate their house, very much more cultural than anything else. And that was still COOL.
I also remember a few of my cousins being baptized when I was about 8 or 9, they were children, not babies at the time, and maybe the first time I went to church. Later, I recall making a pun on the trinity, which, after I said it aloud once and was ignored, I decided not to say it again, because I suddenly realized how disrespectful (blasphemous!) it was.
I can’t say I ever believed in god, but there was a time when I considered the possibility as sincerely as possible just short of actually pursuing the topic in a church setting or asking someone who knows about Jesus to tell me all about it. At around the age of 16, I was home alone when I answered the door to some JWs and proceeded to have a debate with them on the front porch. I thought they were nitwits and countered all their claims the best I could. Actually kind of fun. When my parents came home, the JWs were still there, so they drove past the house and didn’t come park in the driveway for another 20 minutes or so.
I feel like I was always an atheist, but I didn’t really put a lot of thought to it until my late teens and while in college, and ever since. At some point there, I became an atheist, where before, I was just mostly oblivious to the nature of religious belief, although I never believed there was a god and took a long time to realize how seriously others take it. When I did realize how seriously they do take it, I reacted to address the subject with as much seriousness to examine what I actually believe or don’t believe and not just coast with an assumption there’s no god.
After 30 years of being a christian, the only thing Im really happy about is that Im not blind anymore. If there is a God & I should thank him for anything, I thank him for giving me an open mind & the ability to see that the bible is full of crap.
I have the same kind of ironic feeling sometimes. Sometimes I’d like for there to be Someone to thank for getting me out of that mess.
Thank Epicurus.
Yes!
you can thank me, if you like
sure, I didn’t get you out of that mess, but neither did God… and at least I’ll appreciate the gratitude :P
Thanks. :)
Thank yourself, because you’re the one who did it!
My parents are officially catholic but, as most catholics in spain, they aren’t “true believers”. I have always seen them as being catholics as an habit. I had a mixture of catholic (outside school) and proper (at the school) education. Since I thought by my own I have always been an atheist.
So my first question is wether I should vote catholic or non-believer.
My second question is about what are you trying to answer. The answer will be pretty different if you want to know where US atheists come from or where “global” atheists in general come from. To begin with, Spain is a catholic country with few members of other christian sects.
P.S.: What sect is “charismatic”?
Think snake handlers and Jesus Camp.
Yeah. Denominationalism is primarily an American phenomenon. Isn’t it?
I actually don’t know. My house was secular- but then my parents weren’t Atheists which is weird.
Although my mother was baptised Catholic she pretty much was an Agnostic Theist, or a Deist. My father was an enigma to me. He never spoke much about his life at all, so even now I’m finding stuff about him. I suppose he was born or converted sometime along the line to Islam, but he took us to an Anglican Church to get a place in a nearby Church school and even went there for a bit.
Also one of my earliest memories as a kid was when I was three I started debating the existence of God to myself. I had a habit of talking loud to myself when I was alone in order to prove some sort of a point (to whom or what I don’t know – I was a weird kid). I was yelling out “God, why is there evil in the world?” And God replied “BECAUSE OF THE DEVIL”. Then I replied “Why can’t you just fight the Devil then if you’re so strong?” I got no further response. xD
But aside from that, growing up I was pretty much apathetic to the whole idea. I used to pray, but more out of habit form what the school told me. But I never really felt any divine presence. I was young but I recognised some flaws in religion without my parents even telling me. I just knew it didn’t add up. For example I used to love dinosaurs and one time some creationist guy told me Dinosaurs were put there by the Devil to trick us. Even then I was thinking “Yeah, right”.
I went to stay with my fundamentalist Catholic Grandfather in the Caribbean in my teens and he made the whole idea seem so unappealing to me. Aside from that I used to get comments based upon my lack of faith which sucked.
Oh, also when I was 13-14 I started coming across religious people online. Something about that made me want to debate them. It wasn’t so much the God aspect of it, but rather the fact they denied evolution and abortion. Debating evolution and abortion lead me to question more vigorously the existence of God. Then my mum brought home this wonderful book called The Philosophy Gym and I decided after reading it to become an agnostic. And the rest as they say is history.
Raised baptist… but the old school god fearing, hell burning, spongebob hatin’ version. Spent time in Catholicism and Assembly of God church.
After 25 years of that I started doubting my faith… 4 years of being agnostic, now I’m a converted Atheist.
It seems to me, everyone comes to a plateau in their religious life. You either doubt and question your faith or move forward with it. I picked the right choice lol
Baptists hate SpongeBob? Really??? That is just sad.
Yes it was creepy… saying Spongebob was gay. Power Rangers were evil. Come on! lol
I finally said enough is enough… I rather raise freethinkers.
I did select mainline but can’t really say I was a true believer. I was forced to attend church until I was around 14.
my parents kinda sorta believe in god but they never go to church and never pressured me into church,they were kinda happy when i went but it was never forced,i was always allowed to find my own way.
Actually mine’s complicated…
1. Raised nominally Catholic (went to Mass maybe twice a year until my parents stopped going when I was about 12 (basically my dad got a vasectomy after my sister was born and the chaplain refused to baptise her– so my parents said to hell with them).
2. In junior high and high school I was basically a theistic-leaning agnostic, but still somewhat skeptical. Avoided Bible-thumpers like the plague (I was often proselytised by other students with Bible in hand).
3. My first year in university, dealing with lots of low self-esteem, I gave in and got sucked into the Church of Christ. Still, I had problems swallowing certain doctrines which I kept to myself.
4. Got kicked out of the local Church of Christ, did a preaching stint at another Church of Christ, also held a “house church” with some other friends (also kicked out of the same Church of Christ) and we were uber-fundies. I know this sounds odd, but I was using Ayn Rand’s epistemology to back up a sort of “Objectivist Christian Fundamentalism” (yikes! the worst of two worlds! LOL)
5. Lots of craziness ensued after all that and I put Jesus on the shelf so to speak. In my mid-20s I started reading Daoist texts, stuff on Wittgenstein and other philosophical examinations of language.
6. Got into Christian mysticism (Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius) and liberal theology (Tillich), as well as various philosophers and other religious writers (Merton, Buber, Heschel). Called myself a “liberal Christian” though I went to no church and my notion of “God” was a very odd one. Flirted with Greek Orthodoxy for a time as well as Reform Judaism. Flirted with Episcopalianism and later flirted with Unitarian Universalism and the Quakers.
7. Struggled to maintain some semblance of Christianity, wrote extensively in private notebooks trying to justify my own peculiar Christianity which was hardly “Christian” in any normal sense of the word.
8. In February 2001 (age 31), had something akin to a “revelatory experience” which made me realise not any god, but rather the total absence of any such thing. There was nothing to transcend. I felt no need to label this anything, no need to justify anything. It’s difficult to explain, but I embraced this absence of faith and it was liberating. This universe is enough. I’ve been an atheist (and a humanist) ever since, with strong existentialist leanings. But the peculiar anxiousness that was a part of my thinking for all those years prior was gone. I’ve been much happier ever since.
Basically, from age 20 onward, I started at the most conservative end of the spectrum, worked my way to the liberal end, and finally fell off the whole continuum.
Fundamentalist Christian. Very much so; non-denominational. I always had doubts & had spent a lot of time reading apologetic materials and studying my Bible. I put in a year at a Christian college before transferring to a big state school, and actually spent greater than 10 years as a deacon in a fundie congregation. At some point, I got very tired of the intellectual acrobatics involved with belief in the literal truth of the Bible and things rapidly cascaded from there. I finally realized, around the age of 40, that there really is no good reason to believe in God (or a god of any kind) and I’ve never been happier.
Where did the stuff for the universe all come from? I don’t know, and I don’t have a problem not knowing. I do not have to invent a magical explanation.
“I don’t know, and I don’t have a problem not knowing.”
That statement speaks volumes. The more fundamentalist one is, the more one clings to absolute ideologies.
There is no “The Truth” which is absolute, but only truths which we can approximate to a greater or lesser degree. And these truths don’t come to one on a silver platter of faith, but by hard work, self-examination and examination of the world around us. Or, as Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
The fundamentalist obsession with absolute possession of absolute “Truth” ironically betrays the weakest “faith.”
I was raised by a nominally Christian (single) mother – she believes in Jesus and all that stuff, but since she only got religion when she was about forty, she was never fundamentalist. Before converting to protestant christianity she drifted through many religions – mostly spiritism and even candomblé for awhile, but never seriously. She did some Zen stuff as well (then again, it was the 60s). She was also raised Catholic.
She has that perspective that some pagans have (at least I only found it in pagans), that all gods are one god and all religions are in fact facets of the same thing. So, since she never minded other religions (she’d been through them, after all), she never raised me strictly Christian. More like Deist with a side of Jesus. She thinks it’s very important to believe something, no matter which religion it is. She also believes we – her children – should be free to follow our own path and find our own truths.
You see how that worked out.
I love my mom :)
My sister’s a kind of nominal theist, I never saw her worship anything and she never goes to church, but I suppose she believes or at least goes with the motions of belief. She doesn’t show any faith.
I never bought the whole ‘religion’ thing so like Kodie I was mostly non-issue about religion. I used to pray (mother believes, remember) but I don’t ever believed it would happen or that someone was listening to me. I used to ask for world peace…
I suppose I never really thought about it. I know I didn’t feel anything at all in church that wasn’t easily replicated by a good book or good music. It was from college and up that I decided that trying to believe wasn’t necessary. I feel the lighter for it.
The more I hear of creationists and anti-homosexuals and how people lay their lives in the hands of someone who may or may not exist, the happier I feel that I was never caught in that snare.
Regarding the last paragraph, funnily enough despite me being irreligious, I was kinda homophobic when I was in my early teens until 17. I’m 20 now, and I look back and wonder why I thought like that.
I don’t know in your country, in mine it is pretty usual for male teenagers to be homophobic, and homophobic related puns are probably the worst for a kid. It’s the vision that our society had, and probably it didn’t change -if it did- till now.
And it don’t disappear until you are sexually confident enough.
That’s what I thought – something to do with testosterone and trying to appear manly and tough, perhaps, which contrasts with the common stereotype of effeminate gay men. Being a girl, I was kind of out of such things (we don’t mind lesbians nearly as much, after all).
I suppose it also helps that I grew knowing my mother’s and sister’s gay friends – including a couple that has helped us through a lot during my illness. They’re well over sixty now and together for over thirty years (I think. They were together before I was born, and I’m twenty-five). One’s bordering eighty years old.
I don’t know. I think homophobia is more cultural than religious (or cultural because of religion?). Men seem to be more inclined to be vocal against homosexuality than women, too (of course, I could be wrong). I see that with my coworkers… the amount of innuendo-riddled jokes poking fun at one’s sexuality and such. I doubt any of them is seriously homophobic though.
What you attributed to pagan beliefs also exists in Hinduism, or at least the kind I was taught. It’s not a top-down religious system so most people tend to do their own thing based on what their families teach them. This is actually the reason that it’s been so difficult for me to reject religion and become an atheist.
The religion I was raised in taught me that all religions are equal and should be accepted (and is apparently the only religion that recognizes atheism as being legitimate), and the household I was raised in put science above “my religion said so,” so I was raised with a pretty reasonable worldview. At first, it was really tough to argue out of a fairly reasonable way to think.
One of the things that has made me reject god and religion is actually the crazy fundamentalism that I see pushed in the US and some other parts of the world. Even when I was raised in a third-world country, I was taught the story of creation from about 3 or 4 different major religions’ views (I think it might have been worded “myth”) in a sixth grade social studies class as something that was interesting to know, but not something to be believed in. The next year, I moved to the US to find it more backward than my underdeveloped country.
I’m from a third world country too. I was taught myths as myths and biology as biology.
It helps that over here in Brazil we’ve an amalgam of peoples and faiths and everyone tends to believe everything at least once. The different religions tend to blur and blend into a mix and match of beliefs.
I know what you mean about Hinduism, though. The friend who had this P.O.V was Wiccan and is now Hindu (she’s converted to Vedanta or whatever it’s called).
Your survey does not test what kind of household we were raised in. It tests the religion we converted from. They were not the same for me, though they probably are for many people here.
I’m with Bonnie. My mom was Mormon and my dad was Methodist. My mom would take me to church and then my dad would spend the afternoon explaining why the Mormons were sort of nutty, so although I grew up in a household with definite religious leanings it never really “took” for me. It might have been different if both parents followed the same religion and presented a united front, but since neither of them followed the other’s beliefs I never really got the One True Religion rap laid on me. I don’t think I ever truly believed in a deity.
I agree with Bonnie’s comment; while I grew up in a Fundie/Evangelical household (and did answer in that category), my final conversion was from a liberal mainstream United Church of Christ. Like Hermetically Sealed, I kind of spent a decade or so working my way more liberal, then finally just let go altogether. Oddly, I remember it being an Easter Sunday Service where it first dawned on me that I didn’t believe a whit of it. Still took me another couple years to claim atheism as my own, though.
Once again, the church of Jedi gets overlooked.
not many people could be raised in the CoJ, since it’s only been around for about 15 years…
I think VorJack understands that you can’t possibly come up with a reason to leave the Church of Jedi.
I hope I don’t skew the results. I posted in other, because I wanted to see the progress :)
this poll didn’t take in to account the circuitous route that deconversion can take.like for me i started from the stand point of Pentecostal/assemblies of god,and went to satanism,to witchcraft, dropped in a little Buddhism ,and Hindu,Kabbalah,and then stewed in that funk for a few years.after that i came to the realization that i didn’t believe,and after a couple of years i decided to admit it. long journey,and it cant be encompassed by one question on a poll.
I went through the whole “looking for something that fits” thing also. But for the sake of the poll I just picked the one I was raised with.
I think another interesting follow-up post to this one would be–if you were raised in a religious household but are now an athiest–how did you “come out” to your family and what how has it affected your family relationships?
Me…family heritage is Orthodox Judaism on one side and mainline Protestant on the other. My parents both converted young and I was raised evangelical, fundamentalist Baptist…my dad was a pastor. I attended small Baptist schools and Bible college before transferring to the Presbyterian college I graduated from. Yes, I was marinated in religion for a good long time before my skepticism couldn’t take it any more.
I thought coming out to them as a lesbian was hard (and it WAS–completely irrational insane reaction). God forbid they find out I’m an agnostic on the road to atheism. Help me Jesus. (-:
Religion has always been laughed at in our family, so there was little chance I’d be religious.
since I can’t click on more than one, I won’t.
I’ve been involved in several religious and spiritual organizations, trying to find my way.
Started Catholic, then went against my parents in my teens to become pentecostal…………and back to Catholic for a time (guilt is a very useful emotion when plied with enough force). In early adulthood I went to my SIL’s baptist church. Then slipped into more Zen things with Buddhism, TM, Native American and then finally on to Wicca.
I guess you could call me a religious mutt
and now atheist thru and thru
My father was a non-practicing catholic and my mother was a rarely practicing lutheran. I was baptized as a lutheran and went to the training for my mothers sake with the agreement that once I took my first communion, I could decide if and when to go church. But even by 12 I realized it was probably all just smoke and mirrors, so now church is only for weddings and funerals. Of my three sisters, two have converted to catholic from lutheran and the third never talks about that stuff. At 16 (40 years ago) I told my mother I was a non-believer and they all know by now how I think. They don’t like it but for family unity they seem to tolerate me ok. And fortunately, no one has tried to convert me.
I was raised with a Deist and a lapsed Roman Catholic who still isn’t going to church in a silent protest against the RCC’s treatment of divorced women (it’s a very long story) and against their handling of child abuse cases (also a long story). And because they never helped him with his depression or his anxiety problems (also very long stories), but that’s a whole other kettle of fish. This whole thing happened in Australia (and I still live here!) so it might seem a bit odd to people in other countries, seeing as there was never any guilt or big fuss over any of it.
I never could get into Christianity. I managed to get myself into more trouble than it was worth at primary school by continually asking awkward questions and making awkward comments (‘if God killed so many people, why is he still the good guy?’, ‘but Mary can’t have a baby while she’s a virgin, you have to have *sex* to have a baby!’, ‘but how did Noah fit them all in, did he have a shrinking ray?’ and so on) and eventually got kicked out for being too smart. Which was just fine and dandy for my parents because they didn’t like how high the school fees were anyway, and there was a nice, non-religious primary school down the road for a quarter of the annual fees, and I was going there next year and that was the end of that.
For a long time, I was Deist. I figured that there had to be a God, otherwise how did the Universe get here? Then, thanks to the Internet, I discovered Expanding Universe, Big Bang/Big Crunch and Constant Universe (I think that’s what it’s called) theory, and realised ‘well hey, no need for God then, right?’ By the time I started to seriously study science at school, I figured that God was only there because people didn’t know Science 3000 years ago, and they couldn’t come up with any better answers. I didn’t get why people worshipped God today, so I figured that they didn’t know Science either. (At the time, I wasn’t aware that there were different classes of sciences like Biology, Chemistry, etc. so I just called all of it Science.) This happened when I was about 10, and by the time I was 15 I was a flat-out atheist. It was all pretty quick.
My Mum’s still a Deist, but now she’s going Pentecostal, and that’s fine – she’s nearly 60 and obviously very scared about dying, so if it makes her feel better then I guess that’s good. Dad’s just not even bothering with religion anymore, which is pretty normal for Australia. For us, asking if you’re religious or not is like asking if you prefer boxers or briefs – we don’t really care, but it’s interesting trivia. I keep wondering what all the fuss is about in America – it’s just religion, right? I guess you guys take it more seriously than we do.
I was born into a Catholic family by virtue of the fact that my mother is Catholic. My father doesn’t seem to have any religion at all and I’ve never discussed it with him except as how my attendance of mass or whatever affected my mother. So, of course, I went to Catholic mass growing up. I went to CCD with the other kids and learned what everyone else learned, although it really didn’t make much sense to me. Sometime around 8 or 9 years old, when Confirmation time rolled around, I started asking questions. I asked my mother what it meant and she replied that I’m making a commitment to be a Catholic forever and raise my kids Catholic. I responded with something about never having been to another church, so I don’t have anything to compare it to, so I’m not going to go to Confirmation. Boy was she pissed!
Later, when I started getting toward 16, my parents told my that at 16 I’ll be able to start making my own religious decisions and I don’t have to go to church with them if I don’t want to. Well that didn’t work out too well. On the Sunday after my 16th, I stayed in bed. My father came to my room and asked if I was sick and I replied honestly and said that I don’t want to go to church with them anymore. He said something to the effect, “If you don’t get up and get ready for church, I’m gonna kick your ass. You’ll break your mother’s heart.” Needless to say, I continued to go to Catholic mass with my family for the rest of the time I was living at home and immediately stopped as soon as I entered the Navy.
A buddy of mine talked me into going to church with him because he said there were a bunch of cute chicks at his Assemblies of God, Pentecostal church. He was right, there were cute girls, and the church was unlike anything I’d experienced before. If you’ve never been to a true Holy Roller church, I highly recommend it for the entertainment value. But I was taken in by the showmanship and bible thumping (and the girls) and decided to get baptized into the religion. I was very excited about it and wanted to share the Good News with everyone! I shared the news with my mother and it didn’t go exactly as I was hoping for. She started crying and handed the phone off to my father while I sat in bewilderment. I was under the impression that my family wanted me to find my best path to God and if this was it then all was well. So much for impressions. My mother and I have not spoken about religion since then and that’s been more than 20 years ago.
About a year after my baptism, I came to realize that this church was telling me that everyone else is going to hell! (I know, I’m a little dense.) This didn’t make much sense to me. People with no knowledge of a Christian god will still be going to hell. Catholics, even if they’re not pedophiles, will go to hell. Anyone who doesn’t belong to the AoG church are all going to hell. Well, I figured out that ALL my friends and family were going to hell, with the exception of the girl from the church that I was dating. I also figured out that I’d rather be with them than with her, so I left that church, too.
I flirted with a couple of other philosophies through the years, but none could offer me the real answer to the questions that were being posed by science. If there is a God and we are His ultimate creation, why aren’t we at the center of the universe? Since we’re not in the center, is someone else a more perfect creation? The answers provided in the bible no longer offered me solace, but more confusion and anxiety. I did take a shot at reading the Koran, but that was even more confusing to me. So no religion has really offered me the satisfaction that science has and I cannot reconcile religion and science, no matter the perspective I choose to view either. A couple of years ago I decided that if there is a god, and I don’t believe there is, he doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about any of us. The universe is too unimaginably large for the creating entity to care about little ole me, so I don’t give a damn about it. Atheism: True Freedom.
You got to make your own decisions at 16, but if you made the one they didn’t like, threats of physical violence ensued.
Sounds a lot like… god.
I was raised Catholic by two practicing Catholics…mom more liberal than dad. I actually thought about becoming a priest when I was younger (praise FSM I didn’t follow that through). I never had any really bad experiences as a Catholic – my parish always had good priests (no molestation accusations as of this posting) and I made a lot of friends whom I continue to hang out with.
In my teens, while attending a Catholic high school, I gradually started to lose interest. I realized that I didn’t agree with some things within the Church, particularly the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and treatment of women. Once I went to college, I attended on and off at a local church. It was then that I got a music gig at a Presbyterian church. In the course of doing music there, I gradually became deist, agnostic, and, finally, atheist. I never told them that I was a non-believer, so I still occasionally play gigs there. At least I know that some of their tithes are going to a good cause ;)
My sister had stopped believing some time before, my brother seems to be agnostic or deist, but my parents remain born-and-bred Catholics. Us kids don’t talk about religion around the parents.
Well…. I’m not exactly Athiest, I’d say I’m more Agnostic. I read this blog because I’m trying to figure it out and enjoy reading all different viewpoints.
I was raised A Jehoober Witness, they’re the ones that really damaged me. I also did a few years time in a non-denominational christian church.
I guess I can’t participate in this poll but I do appreciate this blog.
Thank you for this, VorJack. I don’t know what “Church of Christ” is. Even ignoring their self-righteous belief that they are the one and only true church, I still don’t think of them as Protestant. They’re non-Catholic, but does that automatically make them Protestant? They didn’t have a “fundamentalist” checkbox. They’re certainly not charismatic, in either sense of the word: you know, miracles “tongues” were for back then, not now. So I’m not sure what they are.
When I was young I always thought that the bible was just a story to educate people. A Boring story too. I love the OT, since they kicked ass, but the jesus things was so boring.
I was baptized and raised as an evangelical lutheran. I wrestled with faith in waves for years after I actually read the bible and then gradually dropped it when I’d moved away from home and finally had some room to think and sort myself out. My family remains very religious and I haven’t officially come out to them. I’m sure they suspect my apostasy but, being lutheran, are far too polite to press the issue. It’s kinda cute actually, though I know that if I were to confront them with the issue there would be a spectacular fallout.
I had to click “other” because I’ve been back and forth. Raised Catholic. “Saved” into Evangelical Protestantism, then back to Catholicism, then to Mainline Protestantism, then agnostic, now I say I’m deist because I still unreasonably cling to a belief that there is some kind of non-personal god.
There seems to be quite an over-representation of Catholic deconverts in the audience. I wonder if that is more because it is a worldwide trend (which it is) or because there is something special about converting from Catholicism that makes on want to post on Unreasonable Faith (or at least vote in polls there). I’m guessing the former is much more significant, but who knows?
I was fortunate enough to be raised by atheists. I have thanked my father for that freedom! And am doing the same for my own children.