Damn...those poor pagans/Wiccans always getting left out.
I consider myself a Christian, but I do not attend church. Actually haven't regularly for nearly 7 years now.
It became obvious to me pretty quickly that most churches are, unfortunately, full of do-gooders and hypocrites. I had to deal with far too many a person who was judgmental and arrogant toward "unbelievers", and seemed to be highly selective in who "deserved" to hear the Gospel.
One guy, my old youth minister, decided to bitch us out one day over drinking IBC Root Beer in glass bottles. Because it looks like a beer bottle and "as Christians we must abstain from even the appearance of evil."
Everywhere I went, I'd run into legalistic, fundamentalist nutcases. Typically, they'd be a family with 10 children, drive a very large van with "Ichthus" stickers, and the females of the family would wear denim dresses, no jeans or shorts allowed. I'd visit these people at home, where it would always follow a pattern: the mother never has a job (mothers who get jobs are evil for leaving their children), cable/satellite TV is evil, so just rabbit ears on an *old* tube TV, which was next to an even older computer that always had dial-up internet (if it had internet at all.) The males of the family were all rednecks whose gun collection was almost as large as their Toby Keith/Alan Jackson/David Allen Coe/Kenny Chesney/George Straight collection. I'd see this everywhere.
Now that I've left church behind, I definitely think it was the best thing I've ever done for my faith. Maybe I was just attending the wrong churches, but it doesn't matter to me now.
