The following is an excerpt from the testimonial of new atheist blogger The Mad Atheist:

My deconversion to atheism was not a singular event. The first thing that influenced me was the broad spectrum of religions I experienced in my youth. The first was Sai Baba… cult. Not a cult in the ‘poison the drinking water and lets all die’, or even a cult in the sense ‘kill the unbelievers’. But a cult in the sense that there was a authoritarian leader who claimed to be god, complete with its own secluded world. This religion believed that he was from all religions, which meant that I leant about all religions, from Buddha to Mohammed to Jesus to Brama, Vishnu and Shiva. They had a very rosy picture of these religions, and they ignored the contridictions between them. And as a young child I became fascinated by the literiture behind these gods.

The importaint thing to note is that I took all these religions equally seriously. Add to that the new age spirituality I got off my mother, and you have a really messed up kid. With age I slowly grew out of it, but it made me live a really strange and restricted adolescence. More on that in another post.

This conundrum of religions that I was brought up with was brought into further conflict when I was sent to a Seven Day Adventis(SDA) high school. Through sheer terror of the devil I started to follow them, but the fact that I could never rule out other religions kept me from coming into the fold. Additionally I never really bonded with the other children, thus there was not much compelling me to become a SDA. There was one time, when I went on a drama troupe and I felt I was starting to get along with the other children, and I began to believe that this was the ’special’ religion that really represents god.

Then in the end of the performace, we had a party night. All the children ( roughly 8-12 year olds) plus us ran around mucking up, attacking each other with pillows, that sort of thing. Then the rest of the boys in my drama troupe, minus me and another boy who was more or less a half hearted semi SDA believer got bored with the childish games, and brought out their towels, rolled then up and wet them, turning them into ‘roo tails’, and whipped the other children with them. Given how painful this was to be whipped by, I thought they had gone a little too far. But I was shocked when the night was over that the rest of the boys in my troupe (minus that other boy), laughed about how they had ‘cained’ the other boys, even drawing blood in some cases. All of these people good SDAs. I was shocked, and I thought that these boys would be in trouble. But no, all that happened was that they were told later that ‘maybe they’d gone a little too far’.

Upon witnessing that, I decided that any religion that could ignore their own moral code like that was not the true faith, and I came up with the concept that it didn’t matter which religion was right, as if you lived a good life, god would accept you…

Read more at The Mad Atheist…