7 Weird Realities Of Growing Up Without A Religion

[beam me up scottie]

muriel_volestrangler posted this gem in the other room, so I thought I'd share it with the smart people who trashed that group:

7 Weird Realities Of Growing Up Without A Religion
Mathias Östlund


Growing up in Sweden is awesome in a lot of ways, but something we don’t have much of is religion. Most of us grow up surrounded by atheism, and a lot of the times we’re not even introduced to the concept of God until we learn about it in school.

Honestly, I wasn’t even entirely sure what a “God” was until I was about 8 years old. And as it turns out, not being indoctrinated into a religion until you’re somewhat capable of critical thinking can have some pretty weird side-effects.

...

3. You start questioning people’s sanity

At first, I kind of just shrugged religion off as some sort of ridiculous stories, meant to entertain the generations that didn’t have video games or the internet. So imagine my surprise when this kid in school told me he actually believed in God, and prayed to him every day. At first, I thought he was joking, and when I realized that he wasn’t, I reacted in about the same way as I would if someone told me he actually believed in Super man.

Needless to say, I got sent to the principal’s office.

4. You can’t tell if religion is real or not

After getting in trouble for making fun of that kid’s religion, I was more confused than ever – if religion wasn’t real, then why was it such a big deal to make fun of it? So I asked my teacher about it, and she gave some halfhearted explanation about how it was sort of real, but still wasn’t.

So on one hand, religion was a real thing, and on the other hand it was just make-believe. For a kid who was still struggling with basic math, this wasn’t exactly the easiest concept to grasp.


More: http://thoughtcatalog.com/mathias-ostlund/2015/05/7-weird-realities-of-growing-up-without-a-religion/