Oh boy... I assume you are talking about religion (although if you were wondering about other aspects of my thinking feel free to ask)
Anyway, as a child my parents never put much stock in religion. My mother was raised catholic (and did not have a very good experience) and my father was raised in some branch of protestantism and was not a very religious person. They both raised me and my sister to assess religion for ourselves. I remember asking at one point and my Dad told me that "Me and your mother wanted to raise you to be free to choose your own faith when you get older" (probably not an exact quote but that was the gist of it).
When I exited the fifth grade I got into wicca, likely due to my fifth grade homeroom teachers fascination with the occult.
As a Boy Scout, the only requirement is that you believe in some form of a higher power. As a wiccan, I believed in higher powers (plural) so my scoutmaster was a little concerned about it (that was his excuse anyway, I think he just wasn't used to dealing with scouts who weren't some Abrahamic religion). He told my Dad (privately) that he thought he should take me to church. My Dad, still holding on to the philosophy that I should be able to choose the faith that fit me, did what I consider one of the best things he has done in the process of raising me. He took me to a UU church. I was reluctant at first, I was in my early teens at this point, and of course convinced that everyone in the mainstream religions was out to get me (poor little 'ol pagan), but after a few weeks of him dragging me there, I actually got to like it. If you don't know, UU stands for "Unitarian Universalism" which baisically means that they believe (officially) that there is only one god, but all religions are a path to him. In practice however, this meant that all church functions were a cornicopia of diversity, and they had plenty of pagan elements as well that I could partake in. The church became as much a part of me as I became a part of it. Over the years I became so attatched that at some points it was me dragging my Dad to church.
Eventually, as part of the youth group, we had to do a "coming of age" program. One of the things that we had to do was write a statement of faith and present it to the congregation. During the process, I came to realize that although the rituals and practices of wicca spoke to me in a way that christianity never had, I did not truly believe in the god and goddess. Over the next year I formulated my own unique faith based on what felt right to me, by the end I had a completely custom fitted belief system, it was perfect for me and only me (it had many similarities to the Gaia hypothosis, which I didn't hear about untill years afterward)... and then it all came crumbling down. I realized then that this set of beliefs that was custom tailored to me, had no more bearing in reality than any other religion. That no matter how much I liked it, the truth is not subjective and my own faith, the one that I had fashioned to stand above all others, hardly differed from any other in the fact that ultimately, it was man made and actually posessed just as little credibility and justification as any other faith. I was on the outside looking in at the thousands and thousands of world religions, all milling about aparently oblivious to the fact that they were just one of many others, proposing different answers to the same questions, no one stopping to question why that was, each one convinced that they were right.
At the same time a friend of mine at school was talking about atheism, something that I knew about, but never really explored. He was also talking about the joys of firefox and stumbleupon. One night I went home, downloaded both, and set "atheism" as one of my favored catigories.
For those of you who are unaware, stumbleupon is a web browser application that brings you to thousands of different websites on a given topic at the click of a button. The vast amount of information that you can absorb just bouncing from website to website, article to article, video to video, is actually astounding. By the middle of my Junior year in highschool I was an avowed atheist. I didn't go out and preach the word mind you, but I did not back down when asked about it either. Except now I realized that where, when I was wiccan, I thought people's incessent questions and curiosities were them "out to get me" (like the insecure teenager that I was) now people actually were. In America, atheists are the least trusted minority, even less so than gays and muslims after 9/11. There was definately hostility, verbal abuse. I was allowed to stay in scouts because we had a new (more foreward thinking) scoutmaster, but it affected my advancement and I was unable to attain Eagle by my 18th birthday.
In Feburary 2009 I moved to NZ for an exchange, and the atmosphere for atheists here is definately less hostile, in fact it's downright apathetic, people actually don't care which was a refreshing change, but I definately missed the conversations, the controversy feuled exchanges and deep discussions that I had back home. They weren't all agressive, and some of the conversations points that came up were challenging and interesting. On a whim I came onto christian forums, I don't know where I found out about it, it was just a name that had been in my head which I typed into the adress bar. Since then CF has kind of stuck and here I am.
That's not the end of the journey of course it never is. My current goal is to understand the religious perspective as throuroughly as I do my own, for the sake of intellectual honesty and to increase my ability for constructive discussion in the future.
