I was raised as a Roman Catholic but I'm an agnostic now.
I didn't choose my initial religion. I haven't met anyone who had that privilege.
I'd like to say that my break with RC was a result of me discovering that there's something rotten in religion but unfortunately, that wouldn't be true. After a few years, I've calmed down from my Radical Atheism and I've come to accept that what caused the break wasn't a religious issue at all. I just didn't want to go to church every Wednesday and Sunday, as my school mandated. I became an atheist and rationalized it by referencing the things I found objectionable about the Bible and the Church's influence on scientific progress.
Looking back, my motive seemed trivial and silly and it was. I was a lazy teenager and I appropriated a valid stand to mask my real motive. After that I just stuck to my guns because admitting the truth was embarrassing.
Having said that, I wouldn't say that my being an atheist now is regrettable. In fact, I don't believe that I can genuinely be one of the Faithful again. The scientific method is just a more credible process of understanding how the world works. That said, "explaining how the world works" is only a small part of religion. There's still the matter of what a person does with that knowledge and it is in this that I think my soul searching, motivated as it was by trivial things, bore a lot of fruit.
When my endless cries of "RELIGION IS EVIL" got too tiring even for me. I started asking myself, "what should I believe in?" After all, God or no God, I was still more or less following the moral standards of Christianity. I re-evaluated everything that I considered "the right way to live". It fell apart.
I think that when you examine any of the truisms that adults spout, like "Honesty is the best policy" and "always try to be friends with others", you'd find that there will always be a situation where they're not beneficial to you, your loved ones or to society at large. This was a problem. I've always viewed religion as providing a black-and-white guideline to being a good person. I no longer had that. I became apathetic.
I continued searching. I devoured information from Psychology, Politics and other social sciences and I evolved. It wasn't a beautiful evolution at the start. I was drawn to Objectivism and very faintly, fascism. That hate you feel when you become an atheist can lead you to some ugly things.
I hated Communism though perhaps because I saw it as no different than religion.
"A desirable dream used to control the masses".
My breakthrough came when I thought I've given up. Well, after burying myself in countless textbooks and dropping out of school because I used all my time to study social sciences, I said "Fuck it" and just started watching anime. I was watching a HS rom-com/drama, I think and I remember thinking, "it must be nice to live like this". It wasn't instantaneous of course but the sentiment grew within me. I remembered how great having friends was... how satisfying it was and how happy I was. Then I realized, "in the end isn't all of this just a quest to feel fulfilled?"
I mean, why did I want to become a good person in the first place? Wasn't it because I assumed that good things happen to good people
and that would make me happy? Isn't it more important to pursue the things that make you happy instead of worrying about complex systems that bring no satisfaction? I got the feeling that I got lost in the details and forgot my original goal.
After that I decided that I'm not going to worry about "correct" religion or "proper" politics anymore than necessary and that it is only necessary to do so in pursuit of happiness. After all, I don't know all of science and all of science can't explain all of reality yet. There's a large possibility that any answer that I prepare in advance for future problems will be wrong.
I'll just live with the fact that I will probably make mistakes but as long as I learn and as long as I don't give up on happiness, I will be okay.
I'll have what I need to live.
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YAAAA-----! That took too long. I hope it wasn't too rambling. It's been ages since I've expressed an idea.
