I grew up going to church and identifying myself as religious but I actually have never been. I was not popular in church and was never really included in anything unless I went out of my way to try to include myself in things. In hindsight it was obvious to others that I didn’t belong. I was trying to be religious while they found what the church provided naturally appealing. They felt something from church while I felt nothing. I wasn’t getting anything from or providing anything to the church experience. When I stopped going no one noticed or said anything about it if they did.

I didn’t stop being religious after I stopped going to church. I had known from the sermons that when the preacher quoted the bible it was always completely removed of the context of the passage to mean something entirely different than what it meant in the bible (I knew because I looked the quotes up in the bible provided in front of me during the sermon). I figured that churches were a kind of con-job and not the real religion, so I read the bible myself. If I ran my own church it would be nothing more or less than me reading the beatitudes out loud from start to finish every week and my Bible would cut everything else out. Christ-like to my own satisfaction since I was living by Jesus’s explicit instructions I continued to claim Christianity and even considered myself a better Christian than almost any other since my religion was unfiltered and uncompromised.

Over the years I grew out of this seriously misled attitude. I still like the beatitudes and consider them highly influential on my present values, but I no longer feel the need to attach that to a religious identity. I realized that if I had to try so hard to be religious while getting nothing out of it, it probably wasn’t for me. Right now I consider religion like alcohol. Fine for most people, some people are highly prone to abusing it and should avoid it, and some people just don’t find it appealing at all. If I didn’t like to drink it wouldn’t make sense for me to spend all my time around people who like to drink while poorly pretending I’m getting drunk with them. Anyone who gets what they need from religion and doesn’t make their faith a problem for other people is fine with me, I just have different ways I prefer to spend my time.