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I used to be devoutly religious. Around age 14, I started thinking for myself instead of taking the easy way out and believing what I was told to believe. For a couple of years, I kept with the idea that all religions have an element of truth and that nobody would be excluded from heaven as long as they were good people. For a couple of years after that, I lost faith in organized religion, seeing it as a way for a few people to control the masses, and that good deeds were the way to salvation, and assuming that the God I believed in would allow anyone who was a good person into heaven.
At this point, I have completed my progression into cynicism. I believe that religion in all forms is nothing other than a means of controlling and manipulating people (based largely on what the church of my childhood, which was quite liberal by religious standards, said and did.) I believe that religion is a plague on humanity that holds us back from achieving what we could if we were to go ahead with out lives free of the fear of divine retribution that has been hammered into us from the time we were young. I feel that anyone who follows any religious movement has been brainwashed by someone who wishes to manipulate them (whether those at the top believe or simply manipulate, I don't know.) I feel that the notion that God created us in his image is a desparate grasp at meaning by those who are unwilling to accept that they are just lumps of carbon (etc.) that got hit by lightning, crawled out of the primordial ooze, and ended up evolving into sentient beings. I believe that man created God in his image so that he did not feel so small and alone, and so that those who originally "spoke to God" were either delusional, or that they were lying in order to gain control over others.
As anti-religious as I am, I consider Atheists who are certain that there is no God to be every bit as bad as fundamentalists who tell me that I'm going to hell. I don't believe in God, but I'm not naive enough to make the asertion that I can know for certain that there is no God. What I do know is that I am a logical, rational, scientific person who will not believe anything that cannot be proven true or false. I have been told that this means Science is my religion, and if you really want to phrase it that way, I won't complain.
As a final note, I must point out that the only reason I said nay of this is because you asked. If you hadn't, I would have kept my mouth shut. To me anything else embodies the most offensive thing about religion.
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