What religion WAS your family and why don't they practice now?

My mother's side were Catholics from Northern Ireland. Then for some reason, when they came to North America, they switched. My Dad's side were presbyterian. He went to church as a child, but I never went. My mother openly despises religion. My Dad quitely believes in god. As a guy once asked him when he was running for council. "What religion are you."

Dad's respons
"Me and god have our own arrangement."

I think we never went to chruch because of my Mother.

And we still practice.

The only time I ever went to church was a Lutheran one. I was staying with a friend and her dad was a minister. So on Sunday they all went to church - I didn't have to go, but I went because I felt I had to see the other side.

I was so hungover and feeling sick from the night before I ran out mid hym and let-er-rip in the washroom.

I hope they didn't think I was the anti-christ...of course they still may not know what I was doing.

I pray to the porclyn (sp?) god that day

He did the Israeli birthrite trip...he went to temple ONCE for a wedding..just wanted a free trip to Israel

Areligious.

My mother is currently going to a Evangelical Luthern Church. She considered UCC which she grew up in to be sort of interdenominational anyway. Living in a differnt community from her childhood, I think that it is just her preference for churches. Her parents were originally Methodist and Jewish. I think UCC was a compromise.
My dad's family is Methodist. He's come back to the Methodist Church. His father's family was Methodist. His mother's family was Baptist, but he grew up in the Methodist church.
Both my grandfathers are agnostic, atheist leaning. I find it ironic that their wives, who are rather spiritual, changed religions for them. They both served in wars and said that made them lose faith in God.

much to the chagrin of my father's southern fundie Baptist family. He himself was a Freemason. Funny enough, in my generation, the fundies of the previous generation had married Catholics and my generation ended up being raised Catholic, but we are for the most part godless atheists, every single one of us.

;-)

then my parents moved to FL and joined the Unitarian Church. My brother has remained active in the Methodist Church. When my parents moved back to IL for health reasons, they didn't join any church, though I'm sure my brother would take my mother to church if she wants to go (my stepfather is in a nursing home). I became a Sufi initiate in 1989, after having left my local Methodist Church because of an anti-Jewish sentiment that was prevelant in that particular church.

One sister is Catholic, the other is Unitarian.

Oddly enough my ma never went to church when I was younger, and my dad always did.

Then, for some reason, it switched,...my dad never goes to church, and my ma has started going to an ELCA congregation downtown.

I think my ma just likes the congregation, my dad is just burned out on religion...he still considers himself a catholic, but he thinks alot of it is full of shit....

I myself was raised a catholic (parochial school and all) but dont consider myself one anymore.....since Im gay theres just no way for me to be at home there anymore, and my last exeperience at mass was pretty bad.

So, Im an agnostic now.

Then switched to Methodist because we moved down south and they had a bigger, fancier church. I personally decided that the whole concept of religion was silly and have been an atheist since high school.

My dad was raised in the Swedish Covenant Church. We never went to church when I was a kid. Both of my parents were traumatized by their religious upbringings.

I still think very highly of my church. I think I finally couldn't rationalize believing the supernatural any longer. My siblings are the same way. We're all that's left of our family.

There are a great many wonderful things about Christianity. I hope people can take it back from the Fallwells and Robertsons.

My father's side is Catholic (practicing/active - it's the Irish background) and my mother's side is a mixture of Protestant denominations (never really figured out the major one). I am currently agnostic, but with some Catholic leanings

My mother's family was Catholic. She left Roman Catholicism in college and I guess started going to the Episcopalian church. At least that's where she was going when it was time to baptize me. Meanwhile, my father's whole family was Jewish, except that his mother was into experimentation. She tried eastern religions, the Ethical Culture Society and Christian Science. My father went along with the Episcopalian thing for a while but his heart wasn't in it, I guess so experimentation continued. We went to the non-denominational Riverside Church for a while. I went to Sunday school there. They settled on the Church of Divine Unity for themselves, for several years. I have no idea what that was about. They went to services on Wednesday evenings and the only time I went there was for my sister's baptism. My mother led my brownie troop for a while and we met in the Presbyterian church, so I went to Sunday school there for a while, I think. Then we moved out to the raw, new suburbs and none of these options were available. There was a Methodist church down the road and we went there. It wasn't bad. It was a different era. The pastor eventually left to become a chaplin or something at SUNY Stony Brook and created a stir by inviting the Black Panther's to speak there. After that we kind of gave it up. I married a guy whose family was Methodist, so we tried to be good church going parents and give our kids some kind of religious background. Our daughter was happy with that up to confirmation and then she kind of faded away from it. My son wanted absolutely nothing to do with it from the time he was old enough to register an opinion. He still feels the same. In recent years my mother, now in her 80's has started going to an Episcopalian church again. My husband and I watch MTP on Sunday mornings.

when I was a kid. Then they asked my parents not to bring my autistic/mentally retarded brother back. My mother hated the church after that and we never went back to any church.

I went to the Unitarian church for a while when my kids were small so they could learn something about religion. I gave it up when the church got too big and didn't provide the same spiritual uplift I first found there.

Now me and the Divine have our own arrangement.... I may try again at some point, but there is so much hypocrisy in most organized religion that I have a hard time getting excited about it.

I knew it was all a crock when no one could answer me as where Adam and Eve's sons wives came from, if Adam and Eve where the first man and woman created.

My parents were brought up Catholic, and we were baptized because thats what their parents felt, my parents I think believe in a higher power but arent religious or devout, I am a middle ground honest.

whole, whole lot less wars.

I got packed off to Catholic school until I rebelled at the ripe old age of 10. My mother had been kicked out of a convent school at the age of 12, so I beat her by 2 years. I once asked her why she did it to me, and she said "I just wanted you to have all the disadvantages I'd grown up with."

My mother firmly believed in reincarnation and never bought the idea of a god with a recognizable personality. My dad was a follower. He went to church as long as she did, stopped when she got disgusted. He did guilt her into going to church once a few years before she died, but came to regret it. The minute my mother set foot in the church, the priest dropped dead (true story).

As for me, I've never understood the phrase "fallen away Catholic." I'm a "stomped off in disgust ex Catholic."

The Irish church has provided me with one useful thing, though, a yardstick by which I measure all the religious nuttiness I confront in others. Nobody else has come close, though.

""I just wanted you to have all the disadvantages I'd grown up with."
What an Irish thing to say

I raise the glass of the black stuff I'm drinking in a toast to our Irish Mothers!

"Mother this and mother that....ohh my Irish mother!" - Belushi

:toast:

She went to college and realized, "Wow, what a load of crap I've been fed." Father's family was mildly Lutheran, not practicing. Both think religion the source of most of the world's problems. Happily, I was spared being brainwashed by any church when I was a kid.

Don't buy original sin, think it's a sack of crap. And Martin Luther was a raving Jew hater. Funny, I was never taught that in Sunday school.

or Mormon church, which I now regard as a cult. For the first 13 years of my life in Salt Lake City, we were what is known as Jack Mormons, claiming the faith but not practicing it. Then we moved to Arvada, Colorado, and the home teachers came, and my parents jumped off the deep end in what I now believe and my mom refuses to admit was an attempt to save their marriage. They got married in the temple and made us go to church every Sunday for four or five years.

I shudder to think how traumatized I'd be if it had been any longer.

While I was at Ricks College (aka Ricks Big Churchy High School with Curfews and Snitches) in Rexburg, Idaho, where my dad sent me with the intention of straightening me out - wasting money and getting in trouble and being further traumatized - they moved back to Salt Lake and reverted to being Jacks for most of the eighties.

In 1983, they moved to Oakley - a very Mormon town not far from Park City and within binocular viewing distance of Marion, where the Singer-Swapp polygamist clan tried to blow up the LDS Stakehouse (that's a church building, not a restaurant), which led to the standoff with the law that killed corrections officer Fred House and his dog.

In the early nineties, my dad went all mentally haywire for a few years before a series of strokes and heart attacks left him severely disabled and my mom was essentially housebound with him for six or seven years. He died last April and was buried in his temple clothes. It was a tense and annoying week for me, with church people barging in and out of the house every five minutes.

My mom still believes and would have gone to church if my dad had gone. She sort of participates, but doesn't attend services.

My brother still lives in Salt Lake and is even more down on the church than I am.

Actually, it seems there were five but he didn't actually marry the fifth one. The churchgoing members of my extended family don't like to admit to the fifth one and seem to enjoy pretending the first four were consecutive rather than concurrent.

Then the Inquisition came along... :P

Thanks for this thread.

A branch of my Mom's family was of the first Methodists to settle in North Carolina; my Dad was raised Southern Baptist and was the grandson of a Baptist minister.

My Mom is still a Methodist (a very liberal Methodist) and my Dad rejected the institution of the church as a very young man, but believed in God throughout his life.

My mother's family was catholic. Sometime in her late teens she became Southern Baptist. Never did understand the reason. My father's parents were Southern Baptist. I was raised Southern Baptist and my parents remained Baptist until they died. But they were not Fundamentalists. They were just good mainstream Baptists like it used to be before the fundamentalists took over the Southern Baptist Convention. I got tired of fighting the wars with the fundamentalists and am now Methodist. I still remember my Dad in his 70s. I was explaining to him that the Fundamentalists said that to be a Christian you had to believe right wing Repiblican politics. He commented that things had changed. He said that when he was growing up, he was taught to just believe in Christ.

My father's family is Catholic and my mother's father was a Baptist minister. I was baptised in the Catholic church and grew up going to Baptist services off and on. I have had both positive and negative experiences with people at church.

My father is latino and my mother is anglo-American, and I grew up in my mother's almost exclusively white hometown. When I was approximately six (early 80s), I remember being approached by a man at church while standing in the coat closet with my aunt and the man saying that the Bible says that the races shouldn't mix and that I and my brother were "abominations" against God. That colored my view of church early, which is a shame since I know that his view is inconsistent with the inclusive teachings of Christ. I grew to be on guard whenever I had to go to church services, because I thought people there knew I didn't belong. On the other hand, some of the kindest people I have known believe deeply in God.

I know this is a cynical position but I feel like organized religion can often be manipulative and corrupt. It should be about keeping fellowship with fellow believers. It shouldn't be about maintaining social standing in the community or for show. One thing I remember from the Bible is that the Pharisees can shout their faith on the corner, but you are just as well going to your closet to pray. I don't think it is necessary to belong to be a good, decent human being. I also don't think that people who choose to believe should force their beliefs on others.

My ancestors were Presbyterians and Quakers.

I have not practiced in 20 years. It's weird bec I grew up going to Catholic schools...the whole bit.

My family was VERY Catholic. In fact, on Good Friday we were not allowed to talk from 12-3PM (when Christ supposedly died). Yeah, it was pretty strict.

I got disillusioned, not bec of the Catholic Church, but bec of organized religion in general.

I follow the Buddhist philosophy. Makes so much more sense.

when they died. I did better; I stopped while I still had some life left to enjoy.

My kids were raised strict agnostic. They seem to be sticking with that.

catholic living in northern ireland and all the death and ugliness because of god..........oooosh.

my mom tried to get us to do religion, i couldnt. i couldnt do group and couldnt be around the hypocrits, the sunday faithful, all love as they were spitefull behind peoples back. i tried three times to read bible and couldnt get into old testament, told mom i dont feel that angry and killing god, that is not what he is to me. she told me to read new testament. i was more comfortable with that. i practice my own spirituality and share with all i come in contact with, with passion and love and lite. living in harmony with earth in sound, the love of children and joy, and the warmth of the sun that fills me up

It was her parents, but that theory could maybe work for them.

1. My mother "came out" and announced that she was a closet atheist.
2. My brother converted to Sufiism (mystical sect of Islam).
3. My sister married in a Jewish ceremony but is culturally Jewish, not religiously.
4. My father is still Jewish but I don't think he really believes any of it. He's into "tradition" (like Tevye the Milkman in Fiddler on the Roof).
5. I left the faith during Yom Kippur services in 1982 as I didn't believe in living a Jewish life, adhering to the tenets of the Torah, I didn't believe in God, and I took up the argument of Israel returning the West Bank to the Palestinians.

fell off going to church regularly in later years. All three children were baptized catholic, none are practicing, we escaped as soon as we could, lol. I have faith, NOT religion.

Neither now practice. Too much overhead in money and time. Not enough truth (as the Guess Who told us).

People who want truth and want to deal with doubt honestly would have a hard time in some of the churches I have attended in the recent past. The real religion of America shouts from the airwaves and billboards anyway. And it sure isn't Christianity. Pope John Paul recently said something about America being in danger of becoming soulless (or some such). I think that is about right.

Sadly, I think America has been led into true poverty by the money changers of our time.

Dad was a Buddhist (ethnic upbringing, not countercultural). Being Buddhist meant he wasn't really religious at all.

When they got married in the early 1960s, my dad agreed that he would become Christian at my mom's insistence.

Growing up in the 1960s and '70s, us three kids were sporadically brought to Sunday School/church at a Presbyterian Church, which was sober and mainstream, not at evangelical or fundamentalist. I wouldn't even call us "church goers." We were just nominal Christians.

Now, all five of us are agnostic/athiest and haven't been in a church for services in decades. My mom, once a devout Christian, is now an athiest - no particular reason; she just evolved away from the church thing. I think all of us find church, or the Christian religion as practiced in America, is irrelevant to our lives.

I'm an athiest and am quite happy with that. But I am glad I got a taste of Christianity in a Protestant church when I was a kid. It gave me enough of a spiritual base and religious identity so that I didn't have to go searching later on, whether it be Eastern religions, evangelical Christianity, Scientology, or whatever. That little bit of Christianity inoculated me from religious bugs.

Neither of my parent's were very religious. My mother descended from Mormons and my father was baptised a Catholic.

My mother's side was Mormon-descendant, though both she and my grandma were resolute atheists (I'm not sure how far back the atheism goes; my family were among the first Mormons that arrived in Utah). I'm an agnostic, so I'm really just continuing that legacy of atheism.

The tongue-in-cheek family story why we left the Mormon Church is that my great-great grandfather one day went to his wife and said that God had commanded him to take another wife. Her response was, "You take another wife, and I'll send you to God." He returned the next day and said, "God changed his mind."

My father was baptised a Catholic and went to a Catholic high school, but he wasn't very religious (he married an atheist, after all). He later converted to Islam, though I think that was more for convenience since he married an Indonesian Muslim after my mom died.

I think my father's family was largely of the sort that goes through all the Catholic motions, but wasn't what you'd call devout.

are still devout Catholics...

I have attended "other" services: Jewish, Methodist, Fundy types and Pentacostalist...

UU.