I was up for confirmation, when allegedly the Holy Spirit enters you and you start a more adult phase relationship with God. Post-ceremony, the prep class teacher asked all of us newly confirmed kids if we had felt the holy Spirit enter us. Every single kid but me said yes. It was obvious to me that they were being influenced by each other and the encouragement of the teacher and the specialness of the ceremony. Realizing I didn’t want to be carried away by the wave of group fuzzies was the start of my drifting from the church.
And then the firm end to it all was when I left home and got away from the network of religious friends and family I grew up around and really saw how the church treats gay people and women and children.
When I was doing my sunday school classes getting ready for confirmation, I remember thinking, what if I don’t want to be confirmed? What if I get up there and just say no? I didn’t do that cause my parents obviously pressured me into religion in the first place, but that’s definitely the first time I realized it just wasn’t for me. Took me until college to convince my family I wasnt going to church with them anymore.
Im not a religious bashing person, but you just have to be blind to so many contradictions and horrible events to stay sane and believe it’s all for a better reason and that there is a higher power orchestrating it all. Props to those people cause I just can’t do it.
Personally, I think everyone should be taking this. Extremely safe, improves cardiac outcomes, some evidence that it can reverse damage in chronic kidney disease. Most people won’t feel different, but I take high dose CoQ10 for mitochondrial dysfunction, and I can tell you it definitely has a huge impact. Love this stuff.
At 13 I realized one’s religion - and therefore whether they live in paradise or suffer for all eternity - depends almost entirely on the place of birth.
Why would God do it that way? There is only one correct religion and thousands of false ones? I would need to be very lucky to have been born into a culture that spoon fed me the one correct religion while discouraging all the others. What were the odds of me not going to hell?
From around 18 on it was religious people’s behavior and politics. Why do religion’s “morals” support irresponsible and hateful legislation?
Mid to late 20s I got into philosophy and realized “because God” is never the simplest answer.
Where did the universe come from? God made it of course.
But where did God come from? He was always there.
Then why couldn’t the universe just be the thing that was always there? Or at least the conditions that allowed for the universe to come into existence?
Adding God into the mix only complicates the answer and makes it less likely to be true compared to whatever our current best, simplest hypothesis is.
I saw absolute human depravity growing up. In my early 20’s, I dived deep into spirituality. I found my answers on my own. Most importantly, that religion is poison. Poisonous to the whole world, and largely the cause for war, mass genocide, and to keep humanities progression crippled.
I was a Christian until I was 18. One day I was reflecting on how Jihadist’s will blow themselves up because they’re totally convinced they’re right.
I asked myself if I would do the same, but ended up saying “I don’t believe that much”, which promoted me to ask myself “then why believe at all?”.
Since then I’ve totally deconverted and I’m now anti-theist. I resent that I was indoctrinated, and I see religion as the main culprit for most of the problems in the world.
I live in Colorado, so generally some unusual form of weed for those who enjoy that. A dispensary near me has THC chocolate truffles, those usually go over well.
Unsure of the rest of my family but it’s become a running gaga to get my mom the cheesiest custom-printed throw blanket we can think of. This year’s is a horribly cropped screenshot of a text conversation we had a while ago about buying groceries from Dollar General
I use a strategy for some gifts which I call “luxury consumables”. Get someone something that they will use up (food, cheese, chocolate, olive oil, soap, booze, tea, etc) but that’s a bit nicer than they would get for themselves. If you can afford that!
For instance, flavored oil and vinegar for the chef. Fancy chocolate for… everyone. And in this case, smoked cheese! Sounds tasty AF.
Hell yeah this has been my tactic too. My family had stopped making the habit of gifting because of the unnecessary gifts, and so this is a great way to ensure they’ll actually use the gift.
Bathing salts, a chair cushion, a calendar, a cooking book, slippers and some chocolate.
It all sounds random but what makes them good presents is that I have reason to believe my family actually wants those things.
That said, I think next time I’ll be giving less thought into it because apparently half my family would like to stop with the presents cause they feel like they don’t need more shit and also don’t like being obligated to buy stuff for other people. Fair enough, but if it’s small things I still like gifting stuff.
For my sister, compression socks (she’s a runner), a box of toilet paper (how is she always running out?!), and some shirts with her business logo on them For my niece, we’re going to see the Nutcracker and going ice skating For my dad, books
asklemmy
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