So, I now understand why you left the Roman Catholic church and Christianity in general. Might I ask what made you choose the UU and Atheism specifically, as opposed to, say, Agnosticism or Buddhism or any other type of faith? I always enjoy hearing the tales of others who have chosen their faiths on their own.

legacyme3 : Aye, unfortunately it seems that Christians these days have a serious problem with people skills. It comes from the more self-righteous pr***s breeding and stamping out the people who take the Bible and its message seriously. I'm often surprised by peoples' hesitance to confide in me based entirely on my religion.
A lot of religions are like that, but Christianity is the example I hear most often. Guess why :p

Like I said, I've met a lot of people like you: rejecting their religion and/or their god because religious people turn out to be such jerks. And I'm not kidding around when I say the vast majority of them first met God through the Catholic church, and hated it. We all know how great the Catholic church has been lately.

The book of Job is 40 freaking chapters devoted to one conversation a book about a man who was tempted by Satan to reject God. I see some parallels between your life and his. I'm interested in your opinion on the book.

Crawldragon :

I actually picked up my grandmothers bible to read it, and I will get back once I have refinished reading it. And yes it is a shame people are selfrighteous *****s

Elara :

oddly enough, at the point I first renounced my faith, I looked at religions and a friend joked with me that I should take a quiz on this site that is deep and insightful.My top 3 results were Buddhism, UU, and then Athiesm. Roman Catholic ranked near the bottom of these "compatible" religions.

So I decided to look into each of them and thought that being a UU made sense to me. I added qualities of Atheism where the UU concept didn't make as much sense, so I guess I'm in the middle.

legacyme3 : Ah, that makes a lot of sense.

I believe that there could very well be an ultimate power but I doubt he/she/ze/it/??? would behave like we see in the Bible or other religious texts. Who knows? I recall from my Sociology 101 teacher that some physicists got together and did all of these equations and punched in numbers or whatever and discovered that there's a greater possibility that this is all a virtual world as opposed to a real universe because the chance that everything that made the universe possible and enabled life is just so small. It's kind of like there's a greater chance that this is all part of the Matrix.

I read a quote from Einstein the other day that really got me thinking. "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Coming from one of the greatest minds of all time, that made me feel good considering that I'm more inclined to Art/English as opposed to Math/Science. It makes sense when you think about it. Without creativity and taking chances and failure, we would have never even considered harnessing the power of fire in the first place to cook, to create, to destroy. Without all of the combined imaginations over the millenniums, where would we be now?

Knowledge is important, but it is imagination that allowed us to convert from hunter gatherers to farmers and so on to whatever we are now. Imagination created stories to explain how things worked with myths and it took imagination to see the world in different ways and discover new answers. Whether imagination is where our religious beliefs originated from is not important. I say that if you can cope with the world (it's a cold world out there), whether it be from religion, science, or baseball is your business.

Anyway, I respect your belief.