Truth to be told, I don't think I remember any of the Atheist Four Horsemen, Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and Dennett ever mentioning a bad experience with religion.

I know that Hitchens has never mentioned it.

Me personally, I had a bad experience with religion. Now, I am not going to repeat it again here, as I have mentioned it so many times on other threads.

I agree that not every Atheist has a bad experience with religion. Some people just come from very secular homes and have never been exposed to it. Others, like you Tapey, have come from ordinary homes and just came to realize there is no god.

I think your on to something there.

Humans are social creatures and are naturally going to feel alot better, when they can be in a type of fellowship.

That was one of my biggest problems when I realized I was an Atheist. There was no one around me, in family or in friends, that thought like me.

I got alot of ridicule.

I seriously wondered if I was just going crazy and all these other people were right about me.

Finding sites like these was like, EUREKA, there are other people out there that think like me, there are other people out there and they are NOT mentally ill.

Finding Atheist web pages were a greater experience in my life than all the books could ever be.

Because, no matter how many books a person can read, it can still make you feel like your going crazy when you are surrounded by people that are telling you how evil,sinful and insane that you are.

I may dislike irrational, organized religious claims. But me personally, I don't hate religious people. I just dislike it when they try to use society and law to make everyone believe as they do.

Thanks for starting this thread.  I've wanted to post to the other, and probably will eventually, but the best thing religion ever did for me was keeping me from offing myself as a teen.  It also ended what was the darkest time in my entire life -- a stretch of at least two years that can only be described as In The Pit of Hell.

I went through some horrible sh*t when I was a pre-teen.  Things that NO ONE EVER should have to go through.  The end result was that for several years I'd go to sleep and pray not to wake up the next day.  This went on, almost every night, for several years.  I still believed in Hell and was convincd that if I actually killed myself, I'd go to Hell.  Which seemed like a really bad idea.

One day I ran into a Charismatic Christian couple who wanted to know if I'd accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior.  I said yes, they invited me to their church.  The minister of the Church we'd been attending as a family preached very watered down Christianity.  I think the head minister (we had two) had even said on more than one occasion that he didn't actually believe in G-d.  Some parts of what they taught at my parent's church I agreed with -- good people go to Heaven, too -- and some parts I disagreed with.  I didn't feel safe telling the minister what was going on in my head because my parents had already shown their indifference, and I'm sure he'd have told them.

This was my first chance to find a new church, so I went.  And somehow or other I actually liked going and stopped going to sleep each night hoping to wake up dead the next morning.  The new church was much bigger on the praying and spirituality aspects, and less on the sitting for an hour and being lectured by the minister and entertained by the choir.  It was a nice church, up until the point where I realized they viewed G-d as the source of All Free Things, including things they could have fixed themselves by simply passing the plate.

Perhaps the best thing about leaving my parent's church was they couldn't =exactly= keep tabs on how far I was deviating from normative Christianity.  Dad and I had always had religious debates before then, but afterwards I'd wandered off into a more "spiritual" (read: Jesus Freak) direction and Dad stopped bothering for the most part.  We'd still get into debates, but he'd been more mainstream Christian his entire life and I wasn't exactly during that time.  By 18 I'd discovered the joy that is Pentecostal Christian hypocrisy and I left the church completely for a couple of years.  I found another church in college, then starting dating a deacon a few months out of college and we wound up going to church together up until we split and I moved to where I live now.

So, I'm still alive today, all thanks to Jesus.

Except that, you know, I ran off and became a JEW!

This is still coersion because they are the one's to define what is 'good'. They are still trying to control your behavior with threats. It is the equivalent of a business that makes false promises that they don't know they can deliver upon.

But one of the ways religion(probably this church too) sells itself is with 'family values' with creating strong, happy families and teaching parents to be good parents. Obviously, this church didn't live up to it's claims otherwise your parents wouldn't have messed up so much. When your family had problems, why didn't your parents go the pastors and get good advise on how not to mess up? All religions sell themselves as experts on raising children, treating depression, stress and anger when they are not. They sell  parents snake oil.

My hope is that an atheist church would provide parents advise based on what works in the real world. That advise would be based on scientific evidence rather than ancient books with a lot of inaccurate facts in them.

My parents thought they were doing the right thing by sending me to church and Catholic school, that this was about all they needed to do. So they never looked for help from rational science.

 But this church failed in some ways, right? Otherwise you'd still be going?

I have no doubt you felt those emotions. But again ,YOU and other humans got you through it. Fear of hell and them being religious, and your indoctrination of those things was a crutch placebo. You don't want to give yourself a lick of credit? I give you all the credit, not fictional places or fictional beings.

Do you think you are the only human in history to suffer depression on a planet of 7 billion? . My mom flipped her van years ago because I was too lazy to go out and do the chore for her. You can ask Bob Spence here how depressed and scared I was. You think I didn't get depressed and feel guilt. You think I didn't want to kill myself? And that wasn't the only time. She was in the hospital for a bought of pneumonia for a week. That scared the shit out of me too.

BUT my own desire to live and my support group of friends and co-workers and especially Bob Spence here got me through it.

You do not have a monopoly on pain and suffering. No human does, not you not me. But,when you place your survival on fictional beings you demean yourself and you demean my story and everyone else who has gone through what you and I have gone through.

And I was raised in religion. I had far more emotional baggage and depression then then than I do now. Depression is a human condition, not the result of kissing the wrong god's ass or not praying enough. I survived for one reason only, because I wanted to.

I still love life and life still gets tough sometimes, but I don't pawn any good or bad emotion I have on fictional beings. I simply recognize them and deal with them the best I can.

Emotions are a result of our collective life experiences and manifest as electrochemical reactions to stimuli in our brains. People who suffer depression are not suffering it because of a man with a pitchfork or a man with a white robe battling over the neurons in your head. It is merely a medical psychological condition.

I am sure you believed in hell and I am sure the people at that church wanted to help you because they believed that too. But the REAL help was your desire to survive and their real actions, not their words or the god they sold you. Otherwise if surviving depression depended on a god, why am I still here?

You are looking at my finger while I am pointing at the moon. The believe in hell was a placebo. The fact that you stopped believing in hell does not change that. You simply replaced on distraction with another to act as a coping mechanism.

I rail against all superstitious claims, not just yours and not just religion.

If I had ignored my depression instead of dealing with it I would have killed myself . Humans brains widely very when suffering depression and people cope with it in different ways. So for FOR ME AND ME ONLY it took simply venting to friends, I consider myself lucky. For others it can mean professional clinical(not the religious bullshit) AND EVEN medication The support is what does it, not super heros, not super villains.

If religion always worked in curing depression there would be no suicide. And no one in these religious programs would backslide.

Why do you believe? The short answer is that you want to. The idea of being protected by a super hero appeals to you. That belief did get you through, but "belief" DOES NOT CONSTITUTE THE GOD BEING REAL, it just means you used the belief as a coping mechanism.

The biological evolutionary answer is that humans evolved with the flaw of filling in gaps when answers lack.It is merely the anthropomorphic reflection of an infant wanting to be protected by it's parents. If humans didn't have parents we wouldn't evolve. It is the flaw of anthropomorphism in projecting human qualities on the world around us.

No sane shrink attributes depression to invisible super heros or super villains fighting over the neurons in your brain.

Why would any of us be insulted? I'm sure if we saw flying Raindeer and a fat old guy comming down the chimney to deliver presents, we'd start believing in Santa after exhasting other explainations. Beliefs should change with evidence, right?

Maybe he is being very blunt, but are you actually disputing the science behind the link between depression and delusions:

http://www.healthyplace.com/depression/main/psychotic-depression/menu-id-68/

Ah!  Five minutes to relax before chaos again.

What happened in my family is there was too much abuse going on.  Not my parents, for the most part, though my father believed discipline should be handed out liberally.  It was =other= family members and whenever I went to my parents, I was told either to "deal with it" or if it was something too severe for "dealing with", I should "forgive" the other person.

Now, you'll note that most of the Bible is stuffed inside my head somewhere, and I seemed to recall that Jesus, at some point in time, said that if you harmed someone, you were go to and ask for forgiveness.  This part, of course, was IGNORED.

This wasn't a little abuse either, but the big stuff.  Bad enough stuff that after becoming an adult I looked into the statute of limitations because I was out for my pound of flesh.

One of the attractions of Judaism, other than being pure monotheism, is that in Judaism, if you harm someone, you have to get their forgiveness.  And, they don't have to give it.  They can say "I can't deal with this right now" or "I'm still getting over it" or "I don't think you've changed" and that's just the way that is.  You have to clean up your messes yourself.  G-d absolutely, positively, period, no exceptions, cannot forgive you for a sin against another human being.  It just doesn't work that way.

So, that's one of the ways Christianity, at least, seriously screwed me up.  Because if I'd been able to say "That family member hasn't changed, I don't forgive them." I'd have had some answer other than "You must forgive them.  Forgive and forget!" and all that other crap (and much more!).  I probably dedicated several years on a shrink's couch to coming to grips with the fact that some people are just completely in denial about how unbelievably harmful and destruction their behavior as parents, and as human beings in general, can be.

And now for ProzacDeathWish, because I think I was particularly unfair to you -- I thought you were making light of suicide, because as you've now read, it's a pretty huge part of my life.

Galelio "The sun does not rotate around the earth"

You, "You've already said that, you're being rude"

I am sorry if you want to percieve my comments as rude, rude no, blunt yes, but for a reason.

I put positive experience with religion in the same category as negative experiences with religion. They're just anecdotes.

It is amusing however to see the people with negative anectodes fight with the ones with positive anectodes with neither realizing they are using the same logic as the other.

No one here is claiming you cant understand science. What we are saying is that science does not prop up myth. Trying to retro fit it to prop up your myth is what you are doing.

FACT, thoughts require a material process. There is no scientific dispute there. There is only you in denial of that fact.

FYI, "thoughts" are not things.  No one is claiming that, but you falsely and willfully ignore our argument.

If you were born with no legs. Or they were amputated to stubs. And you had no artificial limbs or artificial aid, you would have no legs to move yourself in a forward motion.

Running IS NOT A THING, it is an observation of the material process of legs moving forward at a faster pace. RUNNING is not a thing, but it is observable.

Thoughts are the same. They are not things, but the end result of a material process just like running requires legs even though running isn't a thing itself.

God/deity/entity/super natural are merely mythological stories humans invent as a placebo gap answer in place of the parents that cannot protect them throughout their lives. It is merely the infantile desire to want protection. It is an evolutionary flaw in human thinking.

If you are capable of rejecting the pet gods of others then you should have no problem understanding why we reject your pet god as well. The only difference between you and I is that I reject one more pet deity than you do.

It does?  Got a proof for that?

Got proof that creating the Laws of Nature even required "thought"?

Yeah, didn't think so.

"Proof by Repeated Assertion" sounds a lot like Religious Belief to me.

Don't make Science a Religion -- bad idea.

Yes, but there are a very large number of ways to move, some of which involve moving backwards, others of which involve mechanical devices, others of which might even involve being carried, or subjected to various external forces.

"Legs" are NOT a requirement for "moving", in other words.

You seem really hung up on this "thought" thing.  Here's some clues --

1). G-d does not THINK.

2). G-d does not have a BRAIN.

3). G-d's NON-EXISTENT BRAIN does not THINK.

4). Natural Laws do NOT require a BRAIN or THINKING in order to operate.

When your counter-arguments include those little clues, we'll talk some more.  Right now you're using "Proof By Repeated Assertion", and I'm pretty good at that one, too.  The only difference is I admit my beliefs are a "religion" and you seem incapable of doing likewise.

Wonder why.

I tried to come up with something, in the interest of fairness, but I couldn't think of a single good experience I've ever had with any religion. All which weren't bad were simply neutral. Maybe there's something that isn't coming to mind, but it isn't coming to mind.

Talking helps me to a lesser degree because my upbringing was fairly pedestrian, no incidents of abuse or cruelty that would have damaged my young psyche.   I was just born "different".  

The problem is that you keep trying to create a person-god or god-person and then you knock it down.  So, we have a folk-story --

One day Abraham is in his father's idol making workshop.  He decides he's going to smash all the idols, except for the biggest one.  When his father gets back he asks Abraham what happened.  Abraham points to the last remaining idol and say "He did it."  His father tells him that's impossible because he made the idols himself.

But mostly, it's Proof By Repeated Assertion.  Science can't prove G-d exists, and Science can't disprove G-d exists, and you keep trying to do one of those two, and you've completely fixated on the god you've created.