Yeah, reasonable, liberal Christians make coming to your senses much harder. A half-truth is much harder to spot than a full-out lie.

Welcome to the forum!

Hi everyone. =] Thanks for your kind greetings.

Brian- you're actually the only person who has EVER recognized my username. How weird is that? Anyway, yes- post-rock is awesome, and GybE/smz are the best of the best. You're so lucky to have seen them. Even though they come through here fairly frequently, it never works out for me.

Hello, Sarah...just joined and I noticed your User Name on another post. I am old (46) but I am still utterly enthralled with the Montreal post-rock scene (a friend and I saw Silver Mount Zion a couple of years ago in San Francisco and the show utterly blew me away). So, kudos on a great user name! :)

Hi Sarah and everyone. Thanks Daniel for starting this forum. I go by my middle name which is Nell.......which turns into Nelly whenever anyone addresses me, so I gave up trying to correct people...... ;-)

Just a quick story on how I got here (in the present). Born and partially raised Catholic. Dumped that for Pentecostal (looking for boys,,,ha), my mother had a fit. As an adult I dabbled in Paganism and Wicca before finally realizing that I'm basically wormfood when I die. Science and astronomy have been a huge part of my life so that's what finally set me down firmly in reality. I'll retire from NASA in 2011 and am looking forward to chatting with you all!

Hi, Sarah, I'm Kandy, and I posted under "Confirmed Athiest" my story, different and older in perspective, but I certainly share that excitement you describe. I was thrilled to the core, perhaps as someone with a religious conversion may be (although I never felt that at all, just waited wonder if I was supposed to feel something about god), and could not stop talking about it to the people I was comfortable outing myself to. There are a couple. This forum is tremendous, and I am glad we are here!

Nice to meet you, Sarah!

Hi Sarah, nice to meet you :) I'm Sandra, and can tell you from experience that age doesn't mean someone has anything of value to contribute...my 90yo grandmother might argue that point though. lol
BTW - I look forward to getting to know you too.

I'm old, so between us we make one normal person.

Hi, I'm Sarah. Like, seemingly, a lot of people, I've been lurking for a while here, but now that there's a forum I'm excited about talking to everyone.
My story, if anyone's interested:
I'm an 18 year old girl living in New York. I was raised by two "born-again" Christians, both passionate about what they believe. Most of my childhood was spent on Christian college campuses, since my dad's a professor and administrator.
The fact that my parents have relatively reasonable, liberal Christian beliefs made it hard for me to come to terms with my disbelief- their views didn't seem that outrageous to me, and they actively encouraged doubt and free-thinking (Howard Zinn books for Christmas, and so forth). But the more I thought about it, the more it insidiously crept into my brain- something kept whispering that none of it really made sense. At one point I even put away all of the books that I considered to be leading me away from faith (featured most prominently was Douglas Adam's Salmon of Doubt- a fact that I think he would have relished.) The everyday struggle of believing God existed was really starting to be hard work!
After a "break" from organized Christianity (which I never liked anyway- it was obvious that it had nothing to do with who I saw Jesus to be) I faced the revolutionary (to me) idea that there really was no god. And from then on I've been cheerfully entangled in the process of separating myself from a lifetime of conditioning and constructing a new identity for myself. I'm moving to Greenwich Village this fall to go to the New School, a den of evil atheists if I've ever heard of one, and I'm very excited about it. I'm hoping to do something related to environmental activism or humanitarian design, but we'll see.
But anyway, I love this blog, and I'm looking forward to getting to know all of you. I may be a youngster, but I'll do my best to contribute. =]