NanTheDark wrote:And that way, it's actually more likely that they might become happy christians, if they do. When you force religion down someone's throat, they end up hating it.
Like it seems to be happening with Bogdan.
2 years or so ago (you can check posts for that), I was one of the people to parrot things and then force people to swallow them, a lot lot of people disagreed with me (more on the internet than irl btw) that forced me to do some research "I'll show them who is right" and then it started with a question and "Hm, something doesn't fit" then further questions "Hey, that doesn't make sense" in final ending to the conclusion that "I got it wrong". I didn't turn agnostic-atheist just to impress people (I'm no r/atheist), but the fact that all this wasn't coming from me, but someone else and I just recorded the message and played when triggered. For instance the don't-eat-meat-on-wednestdays-and-fridays wasn't a thing I agreed with nor I did it easily, but I was doing that too just because so I was taught at religion classes (and church). I'm a meat eater, I hate most vegetables and hardly tolerate fruits and I was simply starving this days just because of this. Furthermore, I don't know how in english the period in which christians don't eat meat, milk-based stuff and eggs is called, but here we call it "post", in which we are allowed to eat only fruits and vegetables (not even fish). That's the nice "post", but there is also the "black post". It means you don't eat or drink anything (not even water) for 24 hours and a teacher (who happens to be the wife of a priest) recommended to do so during the exams. I mean seriously? Starving and expecting "God" to do the exams for us? I don't eat much myself, but hell I ain't starving nor relying on simply "faith" during my exams.
Nor going every sunday on church was something that got me easy. I wake up quite hard in the morning, and after a week full of school and a lot of things, I think I deserve to sleep a bit more on weekend. Plus, I just had to stay 3 hours or more to listen to prayers, which made me sleep rather than being "touched" (not to mention being tired aswell).
There were also the "don'ts". Don't read that book, is made by evil, don't play video games, they distract you from God, films are horribily made, don't watch them, jada-jada. Hell the same guy we talk about (my religion class teacher) told us some time ago to ignore everything we learned in physics about the universe. He claimed that Earth is still the centre of universe (Didn't Galileo prove the opposite some time ago?), the universe isn't infinite, but round sphere and that's why we cannot touch the edge and all the stars and planets and galaxies are alligned perfectly to form a cross with Jesus hanged on it. Oh wow, seriously? How can you tell that? We were constantly told that nobody saw God, nor the heaven, nor hell nor the whole universe and then we are told that the universe is a sphere, the heaven is wonderful and 10/10 better than Earth?
I personally read Egyptian mythology, it was a hobby of mine since I was little, and I loved it, but cannot say the same thing about Bible, tried to read the Apocalypse, with sounded like the most "entertaining" one but it bored me. That's why (personally) I cannot call myself a christian, because I didn't even read the Bible, all those years, all my relationship with religion was a huge EULA and I just clicked "I agree" without reading it. And I'm not the only case, most people I met that claimed themselves christians didn't read the Bible and I (and some classmates that are also agnostic-atheists) are not taken seriosly, not even by the teachers, claiming "You're too blind to see God's work" and kept being told that once we were baptized we are stuck being christians for our whole life (interesting enough, they reject Hitler being a christian). Personally I share the view of some protestants here, baptism should probably be made at an older age so people can actually mean it, not just throw your kids in water and "Hooray now they are God protected".
Note: oh yeah the point of the topic. No, it's not a topic where I want to complain about all things that happen, nor for your own amusement. I don't know what religion class in your country means, but I do believe (countries having diversity, here more than 80% are orthodox, quite a few jews and muslims (almost none) and if you see a black-skinned individual on the street it's something odd) that people don't force you swallow only a single religion/confession, but teach you about all of those. Here doesn't happen, protestants are blamed and teased (note: Our teacher actually told how wrong being protestant is to a protestant classmate), catholics are meh, but blamed for anything bad that did the christians (no matter if they weren't catholic), muslims and jews are evil and so on. People (unfortunatelly quite a few) asked for a change, but the others either don't care, either think it's good as it is (which is not).
