Losing my religion?

Some have said that they’re sorry that I was “robbed of my faith” by people who tried to foist a fundamentalist doctrine on me when I was young. I appreciate the sympathy, but I don’t feel like anyone robbed me of my faith. This sentiment seems ethnocentric to me and based on the idea that we are naturally drawn to Christianity unless something gets in the way. Since billions of people in the world are not Christian, and since human history stretches back thousands and thousands of years before the advent of Christianity, I just don’t think that human beings are Christian by default. Christianity is simply the religion that is most common in our society, but there are more things in heaven and on earth than are found in Western Civilization. Also, who said I don’t have faith? Just because I express doubt and refrain from dropping the name of Jesus into conversations on a regular basis doesn’t mean I don’t have my own beliefs. I have my own way of looking at religion and spirituality, but even though I have certain feelings, hopes and dreams, I don’t talk about those things as if they’re facts. For me life is a mystery, and it’s important to me that I regularly remind myself of the deference between what I believe and what I know.

The circumstances in which I was raised helped me become a critical thinker. I couldn’t trust the adults around me to explain the world to me. Much of what I was told seemed off in one way or another, so I learned to silently question what I was told, take things with a grain of salt.

If I was robbed of anything, it was a sense acceptance and safety. It seemed like the people around me weren’t really interested in me. They simply demanded and expected me to conform. And I felt like I was in danger of being rejected, thrown out, tossed away, even physically abused if I was too demonstrative of just how different I was.

If I were to relive my childhood, I would want to have more friends and more adults in my life who would express to me that they appreciate me, adults who would regularly encourage me to be myself. That’s what I feel like I missed.