Raised with little religious zeal in a liberal catholic church. It was just a sort of background thing I ignored most of my life.

At 25 I was at the height of studying comparative religion and evolutionary biology. I saw it all as an integral part of how we have operated as a species, and then I pivoted out of academia and dug clams for half a decade.

I like the good religion can do. But it’s like the state: bridges are neat, but the police patrolling it can really ruin it for everyone.

I’m a preachers kid. By 25 I was a full atheist. A decade later I still am. I will have nothing to do with religious people. I’ve learned those people can’t be saved.

I’m 38. I was raised Muslim. I was a pretty good Muslim until about 18-19. I have had quite a journey with my feelings on religion.

When I was young, I hated all the rules and being told that I can’t drink or I can’t date. I eventually read “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins(ok yes I know, I was young and didn’t know better) which opened my eyes to the possibility that there are other ways of looking at the world. I think I completely abandoned my faith by the time I was 23. I spent most of my 20s pretty much ignoring religion.

I will say, the religious people I actually respect, the ones who really do live by the ideals of loving your fellow humans, forgiveness, being nonjudgmental, they never made me feel judged. They accepted me as I was and never made a big deal about it. It was mostly my parents generation who did judge. So I knew that religious people came in all shapes and sizes and I knew that not all of them were the rule enforcing crazies like my parents.

I never resented religious people. I resented my parents and the way they used religion to control me. As I grew up, I felt a lack of community. Capitalism does that to us. It alienates us from our friends and neighbors. It makes us feel alone. And when I got into my 30s, I understood the main reason many people want to belong to a religious group. It creates an actual third space. It creates a community space you can show up to for free and hang out with your friends and discuss whatever’s on your mind.

Growing up one of the things I remember my grandfather used to say about going to Jummah(that’s the Muslim version of going to church). He said that Jummah is for the community to get together. And I remember going to Jummah as a kid. My friends would go play basketball in the parking lot and the older people would drink tea and chat.

And as a man in his mid 30s, I realized that I suddenly felt alienated from the people I grew up with and from the community to which I actually do belong. Running away from the rules based control but I lost the one thing that mattered and will continue to matter in our increasingly alienated capitalist world; community.

I’m a doctor and the mosque I grew up in has a free clinic open to everyone (anyone of any faith can go). They provide free medications l, free pap smears, formula for new mothers, free doctors visits. And they invite anyone who needs help to come. I started volunteering at that clinic a few years ago. This is the religion I believe in. Bring everyone together. Take care of your community.

I don’t really care much for theology, I don’t care much for rules. I still drink and have premarital sex(tho not for much longer, I’m getting married next month). But my religion believes in taking care of the community. My religion gives you a space to hang out for free. My religion welcomes everyone.

I was raised pretty conservative evangelical. At 25, I still mostly held those views (although with more and more cracks). Since then, a lot of my views have changed. I’m still a believing Christian and an active member of a church, but much more progressive, open to different perspectives and questioning my own (and my church’s) views.

Over the decades, I’ve been a member of many churches and have seen and experienced many, many forms of Christianity - the good, the bad and the ugly. For me personally, my faith and the community of church is a clear net positive I want to hold on to, even more so in a time where it feels that many of our old securities are falling apart. My church family recently had my back when I went through a very challenging phase in my life. I’ve also had a couple of experiences that I would ascribe to the supernatural (God, in my case). At the same time, I empathise a lot with the thoughtful skepticism of many atheists and agnostics.

I would personally advocate for a lot more openness and generosity on all sides, particularly around the age you mentioned which is a time in life where a lot of people question the views they’ve been brought up with and mature in their thinking. I’ve seen people who were staunch agnostics at 25 come to faith at a later point, and people who experienced the exact opposite. I cringe at both those who think atheists or agnostics “just want to follow their immoral desires”, as well as those who think religious folks are all brainwashed or uneducated. Once you get to know people better, you’ll find they often have good reasons for why they believe what they believe and act like they do, even if you don’t personally agree.

The indoctrination of mental illness, mainly via child abuse (Gotta coerce em while they’re young and vulnerable to effectively suppress and corrupt their critical thought!) and terrorism (“if you don’t do/believe this you’ll suffer unspeakable horrors for eternity”).

I’ve always been an atheist and I still despise every form of religion. I avoid religious people like the plague. I’m 39 years old now.

It’s a bullshit scam that preys on weak minded people. 43 now and it hasn’t changed.

You’re bang on that religion encompasses more than just faith. They’ve been around so long that those institutions carry within it culture, community, art, etc.

Since you’re on the fediverse I’ll use the analogy of Reddit. It had incredible communities, talented people, and wealth of knowledge, but it wasn’t on the right course so we left. Now we have to build all that up again. None of those things were intrinsic to Reddit, they were just collected under it’s roof.

So back to religion, recognise that generations of people of all talents lived under it’s roof and I think it’s perfectly reasonable to enjoy it’s art and philosophical teachings (when applicable). We live in a go-go-go world right now that doesn’t give people the time for reflection and introspective thinking, and religions often did. What you shouldn’t do, however, is assume that gods have any relevance today. They are nothing but superstitions used to explain a confusing world, and then harnessed to control populations. Religion itself deserves no respect.

At 25 I was pretty atheistic, but now at 29 I feel more agnostic or apatheistic. Can’t say for certain either way, but it’s probably not a good use of my time to fully commit one way or the other

I didn’t (and don’t) believe in the supernatural metaphysical claims made by any religion, and don’t like that it seems to give hateful people a reason to be more biggoted and spaces to find each other and organize behind hateful causes

There are plenty of good religious folks though. By 25 I had moved much more into a “live and let live” mindset about religion. I’d also started to look more into Buddhism and realized there was a lot of value in the Buddha’s teachings even if you set aside the supernatural claims about the nature of the soul, rebirth, etc.

I like religious art and spaces – in fact in undergrad I wrote my final thesis on Spanish depictions of religious visions in the 17th Century – but I don’t have any faith personally. I’m 33 now but at 25 I felt similarly. I suppose I’m technically a hard agnostic since I don’t think it is possible to prove or disprove the existence of God.

I thought it was a grift and the priests only congregated with the “well to do” after mass, not the local poor.

I’ve found that once I began to view religion through the lens of reason no aspect of it provided any comfort whatsoever. The architecture, the serenity… all laid bare as a ruse. Religious artifacts, the physical, tangible aspects of a belief system all shown to be hollow and barren, and therefore stripped of any quality of serenity or comfort and serve only as an example of the capacity of mankind to be willing to accept what amounts to the suppression of other men over ourselves.

At 25? Where I settled now.

• Religion can provide a loving, peaceful philosophical framework to live by. Some of the most wholesome, kind, generous people I’ve known are devout.

• People’s brains are all wired differently, and this works well for some.

• It’s cultural. You can’t just throw away that huge part of someone’s background

But.

• Some of the most unspeakable things in my personal life happened in the name of religion.

• Ive seen it ruin families, and kick rationality out of groups and instill hate in its place. Not in news feeds; with my own two eyes.

• What’s more, some religions reinforce idolization and “worship” of people, which is extremely dangerous.

So I’ve settled on this:

• …I respect other people’s faith, especially in people I respect in person. People do what they do, you know? They have their own perspective of the world, and I’m not going to presume to know better.

• And I keep in mind that religion is more philosophical for many. And that kind, devout people won’t push it on you.

• But I am under no obligation to share it. I’m sure as hell going to push back against idol worship, anti-science thinking, bigotry, political cultism and so on, but not cross the line to their belief in God or the afterlife or whatever.

• …And I have no interest in it myself. It doesn’t fit my brain.

This was a journey, though. For a long time I was an “apathetic Christian” because it felt like an obligation, even though Christianity made no sense to my systemic view of the world. I would have never dared admit I was agnostic or atheist when I was 18, not even to myself.

I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school until my parents got divorced in 2nd grade.

I remember being very young, probably around 6, and realizing what fiction was. A lot of things which did not make sense to me I just waived off as me being young and was told I would understand when I was older suddenly were revealed as just… Lies. I think Santa Claus waa the start, but within a couple of days I realized that the Easter Bunny and tooth fairy were lies too. The “government” is not some all-knowing benevolent entity that makes sure everyone is nice to each other. The claims companies make in TV commercials are lies. And there is no God.

The world suddenly got a lot scarier, but still felt more… Right. More real.

Aa I grew older and got more exposure to other religions, I realized that religion emerges from 2 aspects of human nature. First, we want to understand the world around us. We want to know where the ground beneath us came from, where we came from, why we exist, etc. Second, there are always people looking for opportunities, who are willing to lie (or otherwise hurt others) to get power and resources for themselves.

There are some good lessons to be learned from religion. Jesus overturning the tables of the moneylenders for example. This could be my own personal bias, but when I read the Tao Te Ching it seems to me like Lao Tzu was an autistic person who used “The Tao” as a way to solve the double-empathy problem.

But also a lot of religion is just old fiction. From the days before the internet and copyright laws. Imagine a Star Wars or Harry Potter fanfiction website, then imagine that those people can only communicate physically and in a world where most of them cannot read or write, and these communities persist for hundreds or thousands of years.

I really like going down the rabbit holes at the intersection of archeology and theology. There are plenty of books that did not make it into the Bible, and even the books that did make it in have different versions and translations across history and sects. A lot of what we think of as modern Christianity comes from Dante’s Inferno rather than the Bible.

So all this means that the messages tend to be inconsistent. Even when the actual text remains the same, the way those texts are interpreted and used in practice can vary significantly. So it’s really more about you interpreting and applying things for yourself than the actual texts, and this is something you can do just as well with any other piece of art.