I'm agnostic because I went through the usual process of parents insisting you go to church, and yet they didn't. So there's me, sitting in the chairs, thinking, 'Jeez, why am I here? I'd rather be playing tennis, seriously.'
I can't really put it in one sentence because although on one hand Preacher is about faith and yes it is also about, I suppose, the search for God, the search for faith and the manipulation and the abuse committed by figures in whom I suppose people have faith.
I was brought up Roman Catholic. I'm not even baptized.
I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.
I grew up Jewish. I am Jewish. I went to an Episcopal high school. I went to a Baptist college. I've taken every comparative-religion course that was available. God? I have no idea.
Some volumes against Deism fell into my hands ... they produced an effect precisely the reverse to what was intended by the writers; for the arguments of the Deists, which were cited in order to be refuted, appeared to me much more forcibly than the refutation itself; in a word, I soon became a thorough Deist.
You know, they are fooling us, there is no God.
I came to America at the age of 17 as an exchange student, and a year later, I was a student at Dartmouth. I would say that the rather weak foundation of my Christianity was effectively battered at Dartmouth. I've had mostly a secular career. But I became intellectually interested in Christianity again in my mid-30s.
I was, not an altar boy, but a reader of the Epistle, and I walked in on a nun and a priest furiously French kissing when I was in seventh grade. I walked in, saw it, and went, "No way," backed out, composed myself, and went back in, and it was still going on. And the experience of seeing that was actually very deep.
I'd describe myself as a Christian who doesn't believe in God.
I abandoned my religious teachings after I read the Bible twice - cover to cover. It took me a couple of years.
I went to Catholic school in and out. I'm what you call a recovering Catholic. I have many major issues with the church.
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
It's hard to say, 'I don't believe in God.' I would love to know if God exists. But it's a very difficult thing for me to believe.
Reading the Bible is the fast track to atheism. Reading the Bible means starting at "In the beginning..." and throwing it down with disgust at "...the grace of the lord Jesus be with all. Amen." I'm sure there are lots of religious people who've read the Bible from start to finish and kept their faith, but in my self-selected sample, all the people I know who have done that are atheists.
The truth is this: I am a Southern Baptist, and the great majority of Southern Baptists are lost.
There's a moment for everybody when you look at that picture of Jesus in the church and think, 'This doesn't totally make sense.' If God made everything, then who made God? We have no idea.
I am surprised you shd. say fancy and aesthetic tastes have led me to my present state of mind: these wd. be better satisfied in the Church of England, for bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism.
My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would've hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.
On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.
There would never have been an infidel had there never been a priest.
I'm Irish. That means I'm Catholic. But, truth is, now I'm a retired Christian.
If you're going to be unreligious, it's likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.
A Russian child asked his mother : "does God know we don't believe in Him?"
I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos - in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever - was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.
