By Adriana ~ I seem to have a similar story to many on here. I grew up in a Christian home, raised in a Southern Baptist church, and even after my family switched to a more laid-back church, I was forced into going to BSF, and had other very conservative ideas given to me.Getup Get God (Photo credit: prettywar-stl)I accepted Jesus at a young age, about six. When I was young enough to not be able to fully think about things, I was fine, going to Sunday school and such. As I got older, things stopped making sense. God created humans to worship him, and we'd all worship him in heaven? Wasn't that a little narcissistic? What if I didn't want to sit around and worship God all the time? But I was afraid of hell, and I didn't want God to know I was thinking such blasphemy, so I stuck with it. As I got older, I'd pray, at my mother's encouragement, for good teachers and good friends at school. This never worked. While I did have friends, I usually didn't like my teachers and was bullied often. My mom would just say it's because I had God and they could sense something different about me. Sure, elementary school kids rip other kids apart for a religion they had but didn't talk about much.As a teenager, I discovered these Christian kids in the church youth group were not only terrible friends, but not very good people either. I wondered how these people with the Holy Spirit in them could be so cruel and judgmental. I guess this is where I started to turn agnostic-there may be a god out there, but clearly He wasn't as invested in people as the preacher would have you think, and I hadn't felt "the spirit" in a very long time, so I didn't know where God fit in. It felt like God had abandoned me-I was having a terrible time at school, in my family and with my friends, even the ones that were supposed to follow God, and I didn't understand how a loving God I had tried to follow by reading the Bible and following what I was being told could set me back at every turn. My mom told me God was preparing me for something later, but I saw all the nonreligious (or bratty religious) kids having an easier time, at least in areas I was having trouble in. This didn't satisfy my rational thinking. I was also beginning to wonder why things like premarital sex, cussing and homosexuality were wrong, while strong judgement against those who were different ran rampant, while talking about love Sunday morning.

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