My Religious History

I figured the question of my religious history will have to be answered at some point, so why not start now?

I was raised Catholic.  Up until I was about 12, I went to mass every Sunday and every religious holiday without fail.  I was so devoutly religious as a child, that I believed a Sunday school teacher who said that Mary had visited her once, prayed to be the next "virgin mother," and was extremely disgusted with my brother when he decided that he was atheist (I was 8 at the time, he was 12). 

So what changed?

Well, my family was extremely scientific anyway, and my parents raised me to think.  My mother has a PhD in Differential Equations, and my dad has a PhD in Statistical Forestry.  We talked about everything, and I learned a lot about how to interact with other people and various other things from advice they gave my brother at the dinner table, well before I ever encountered the necessity for knowing. 

So when I entered 8th grade world history, and we started at THE VERY BEGINNING -4.4 billion years ago -, I started to wonder why the bible didn't begin that way too.  This was just a beginning, though, because I did not really reach that moment where things changed until my 9th grade biology class, where the facts of evolution paired with this history sort of started to scream at me. 

It was essentially really close to that moment where I learned Santa Claus wasn't real.  Just because one of them wasn't real, meant that all the rest like the easter bunny, the tooth fairy, etc., also weren't real.  So when I learned that the beginning of the bible was completely false, I began to wonder about the credibility of the rest of the book.  A little research and some thinking, and it became completely evident that the book wasn't absolutely true, and thus, believing in the being it proclaimed to be real did not really make any sense. 

I pretty much still did a lot of research on the topic and paid attention to news, but it wasn't until the shooting here at Virginia Tech where I decided I needed to really thoroughly examine my views.  I was stunned and worthless as a person for a couple months afterwards, but once I got past that stage of my life I started to develop my knowledge and interest in secularism, humanism, and freethought, and so here I am, president of the Freethinkers at Virginia Tech, and writing a blog.