The first independent thoughts that I can remember were about religion. By "independent thoughts," I mean things I came up with myself, not things told to me by others. I listened to what college classmates said in the coffee shop, and started down a long and lonely road. I thought, "There are lots of religions in the world, and they all disagree with one another to some degree or other. They can't all be right, unless you eliminate all of the conflicts and see what's left-- what they all agree on. When you do that, there's nothing left." Eventually, I concluded that the scientific method was the best way to figure the world out. Faith in something that was effectively unknowable was useless. I figured that even if I'm wrong about a supreme being, the one that really exists wouldn't have made the world as the Judeo-Christian one supposedly did. Why would a god create a world with apparent conflicts and unknowable mysteries in it? To entertain itself as we stumbled along, trying to solve the puzzles s/he created?
It took a long time to get to that place, months of having debates with myself. Since I was raised in a Catholic family, telling my family what I discovered would have upset everyone, so I didn't. I wasn't ready for that. If I had to go to church with family I went through the motions, and I found other things to do on Sunday morning when I "went" by myself. This lasted for years. After my father died, I started discussing things with my mother, and although she didn't disown me, she wasn't very happy. I'm not sure that all of my extended family knows yet what I don't believe. Right now, I live in a community that has a large number of fundamentalist (or nearly so) Christians, and few others. Many are my friends and acquaintances, and I wouldn't want to be ostracized (or worse) by them for my beliefs. So I'm still living the lie. I sure would like to have someone other than my wife and kids with whom I could discuss these things.
A by-product of my change of beliefs is the observation that indoctrinating a child with religious dogma at an early age produces attitudes and emotions that are extremely hard to change later in life. The RC church teaches that baptism places an indelible mark on one's soul. They're pretty close to right. Training by parents, clerics and nuns molded my thought processes more than I ever would have thought. I think that some of my immediate reactions to events and ideas are still attributable to the almost twenty years I spent steeping in Catholicism. I don't like that, but I'll probably never get over it.
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