bryan: nearly all my religious past is nowhere to be found... no more sunday school, no more church, no more giving my parents' money to old man God (SOMEONE needs to find a jobby job)... jesus might be love, but satan's way cooler... I do miss those pizza pigouts though...

Tom Fitch: Despite the fact that I now consider myself agnostic (and am OK being labeled as such) I don't think I've drifted very far at all from my baptized and confirmed Catholic upbringing. Even as a very young kid going to church or Sunday school or an after school Religious Education Program I always felt really conflicted about Catholicism, religion in general and where I fit in. There was the external pressures from family to go to the above mentioned religious activities and also the pressure to believe in what I was told and what I was doing during those activities. The main problem being I hated going to church and the other stuff but I really wanted to believe, and neither of these goals was achieved. I submitted to family pressure and went to church every Sunday and REP on Wednesdays and went through the confirmation process (which was really the peak of the conflict) but I was never able to fall in belief with God no matter how I tried. Due to these conflicting pressures the effect of the Catholic guilt complex was multiplied. Not only did I feel guilty for any sin I had committed (and recently learned about) but I also felt guilty whenever I took communion or said a prayer because I didn't believe in the Catholic God but wasn't sure if he was there or not.

So I felt that if he (or she or it or whatever, but I admit I'd always personified God as being male) did exist he'd be looking down and saying "Look at this non-believer in my church pretending to pray. I can tell he is in earnest but yet he does not believe in me. And now he is eating the flesh of my only son and thinking it might be just unleavened bread. Oh, look, he is asking for a sign that I exist. How do you think the ground you stand on and the air you breath got there? Is that not enough? Look at the stars! And I created you! This is an affront. Satan will have a good time with this one." Shit. Sorry, God. And I have yet to break free from all that. Perhaps I am too much my parents' son - my mother went to church and my father did not. Hmmmm. External pressures are still there only not from the same sources and not as great. Like going to a friend's wedding at a Catholic church. I'm certified and confirmed and all that so technically I can receive communion but there is still the doubt in my mind that God is watching and he knows I don't believe so who do I risk offending? Friends and family or a God that may or may not be there? I still haven't found the right answer to that. That is where I was and where I am.

Geoff Herbach: My father was Jewish and my mother Lutheran. At Christmas, I burned candles and also lit lights on a Christmas tree. Later I celebrated the resurrection of Christ and then the angel of death passing over the homes of Jews. Some ghost drank wine at the Seder table, which scared the shit out of me. One time at Lutheran church camp, I made out with this girl named Mary. She was really hot. Later, she ignored me at this party. That was senior year of high school, and I keyed her dad's Cadillac. I felt really guilty about that, but didn't have a personally satisfying way to ask for forgiveness. I went to confession at the Catholic Church in town. They told me they don't do that anymore. No more confession. They play acoustic guitar and they never talk in Latin. Religion is so frustrating. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be a Unitarian when I grow up enough not to laugh at all the earnestness. Unitarians seem very decent, which is what I'd like to be, but I am not mature enough to quietly sit through their kind sermons.

Keith Pille: Pretty drastic change. I've gone from being raised very, very Catholic (I think I've mentioned somewhere else on the site that my grandmother was the leader of the Blair, NE chapter of the Legion of Decency, and was influential in getting porn and Dungeons and Dragons banned) to some Heisenbergianly indeterminate position between hard agnosticism and soft atheism (the single biggest agent of change was probably Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, who did quite a job of rearranging my mental landscape around 1990).

The conscious phase of the shift happened pretty quickly, but it took me years to stop mentally preparing a round of Hail Marys whenever I found myself in a tight position. And I'm still pretty good at feeling guilty about things.

Don Pizarro: One could say, strictly speaking, that the only significant difference between my religiosity as a child and that of today is that I've got 45 extra
minutes on Sundays, nowadays. Now, does that represent a shift in values? Not necessarily.

Jonathan Shipley: I was born and raised in the Methodist Church but now I belong to Lisa Lisa...

Amethyst Vineyard: My mom went through a brief phase during which she thought church would be good for us kids. For about three years we went pretty much every Sunday to the same church that her parent had gone to, as well as their parents before them, Sixth Avenue Church of Christ. The Church of Christ does not condone dancing and does not allow musical instruments in the church itself. We stopped going after a well-meaning church member told me a story about a sinner trying to get into heaven that ended with him unfolding a piece of paper in his hand that spelled out the word 'hell', much like those cute little paper-chain dolls only scary.

I'm an atheist now, and I think it must show on my face because I get told an awful lot that I need some spiritual structure in my life. And I love to dance.

Jennifer Whigham: My religious upbringing consisted of reading the Bible story at Christmas and attending sporadic Sundays, if only to take advantage of the omelet bar our particular church provided. Here is what I remember about church growing up: blah blah blah blah Jesus Saves blah blah blah mushroom and cheddar cheese omelet with hash browns and throw in some orange juice, too, please. My parents have self-described as "spiritual," as opposed to outright religious, so I adapted that moniker and half-heartedly told people that I didn't believe in God, per se, but I believed in something. I didn't know what the "something," was, but I knew it didn't judge me for skipping school to drive to the beach or for losing my virginity to a gay man on a Sunday morning (oh, the sins!) or even for going as a pregnant nun for Halloween. In college, after the requisite philosophy intro courses and deep, drunken 5 AM conversations with fellow heathens, I dropped the "something," which makes me an atheist now. You could say my religious shift from childhood was a slight arabesque into a more empirical realm. I sometimes miss the magic of believing in the "something," but I feel more grounded in the here-and-now, as it is. My parents' only reaction was to say, "Really? You don't believe in anything?" and then to make me a grilled cheese sandwich because, while spirituality applies to a higher power, the real religion is food.