My Christian Experience

By Jeff --

My first experience with religion was the Roman Catholic church when I was around 10 years old.

Image by viewerblur via Flickr

My father insisted on me and my siblings to attend, I never wanted to go, I thought it was confusing, boring and I couldn't understand how people got so enthralled. Thankfully my mother did not make us attend she felt that if we didn't want to go we didn't have to. Obviously she wore the pants in the relationship.

My next experience was a Lutheran church that my friends family attended at the time. At this church I first experienced the shakers, I was blown away by how red faced and wild some of these people would get, I would look at them in the same way that I look at people who were on hard drugs out in public. At this time I also realized that the only reason I went to church was to be social afterwards and play in the church until my friends mother was done with bible class.

My final experience with Christianity was when my father sent me to bible camp when I was 12. Sadly, my mother let this happen; she still regrets it. When I went I didn't know anyone there and I had never been away from my family for an extended period of time. The part of the camp that forever changed me was when we had the campfire lecture. The counselor was talking about how important it was to live for god and follow Jesus then he started to talk about sins. He gave us a visual presentation, he had a pitcher of water and told us that this is what we needed to be to get into heaven (pure), then he put a grain of sand in and said that even one sin will send us to hell for eternity. Then he says "This is what you are now." and dumps the pitcher of water onto the ground. My jaw literally dropped, I looked around to see if anyone else had the same expression, I was the only one. When I got home a few days later I cried for an hour. Ever since then god has never been an important part of my life. So now I'm atheist and I can't imagine ever turning back.

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