It's not home if I can't talk about religion.
I was raised in a christian science household. I used to hold religious beliefs throughout my childhood basically out of the fear of death. I was scared of the unknown. This fear intensified throughout adolescence as I discovered the plausiblity that pretty much everything I was taught was completely false, just a collection of unproven ideas passed down through generations. I constantly reconfigured my beliefs until my early 20's; faith had taken such a toll psychologically I could no longer take the stress of regularly second guessing myself. I knew the answer: religion is just made up. A mixture of superstition and emotional manipulation. All based on the fear of the unknown. So I gave up on using faith in the place of simple rationality and critical thinking, and essentially went atheist/agnostic. I think once the whole world realizes that what they truly "feel" to be right is really little more than a feeling rather than a fact, then maybe humans can free themselves from this preposterous conflict of interest over our various interpretations of a magical sky entity that supposedly created us.
