My experience with religion

My experience with religion is interesting (at least to me). I was brought up as "no religion" by my parents, one of whom was a failed Catholic, the other with barely any comprehension of religion. I and my brothers were sent to Sunday school so that our parents could have some "afternoon delight", but after the required ten weeks to score a bible, we stopped going and went to play instead. After that, it was Wolf Cubs and Scouts that got me into church on Sunday mornings, forced to listen to long, boring sermons.

Later, when I was 18, I became involved with an Irish girl who insisted after six months that if I didn't become a Catholic our relationship was finished. I became a Catholic. The relationship ended, I stopped going to mass, and reverted to my heathen state.

At the age of 20 I met a practising Baptist. To become engaged, she said I must join her church. I did, undergoing the full immersion. I was then persuaded to become a lay preacher and take the services at churches that couldn't afford to pay a stipend for their own minister. That I did, too.

Eventually, our engagement came to an end, and shortly after so did my church attendance. Once again I reverted to my irreligious ways.

In all that time, never for one moment did I feel the slightest connection to some supernatural being, a deity, an all-encompassing love or presence, nor have I since. We're on our own. Just as we sprang into life from nothingness (actually the splined DNA of our parents), we shall disappear once we die, and only memories of us will survive*, until they too fade away.

*Our DNA survives if we have offspring, of course, which tells us that maybe we're just patsy gene carriers.