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[quote=Anonymous]This is why I think it's odd to say confirmation is a personal rite of passage to choose your faith as an adult, but it's tied to a young teenage timeline.

OP, I was raised in progressive churches and my parents were all about "thr community" and "planting the seed," and I felt like i didn't have any intellectual reason to BELIEVE any of it so I became a teenage atheist. Then I got into reading about Taoism and Buddhism at the end of high school...and something the Dalai Lama said about how westerners should look for the truth in their own faith traditions made me say "ok fine, I'll give it another chance."

I started with the gospels and Augustine and Aquinas. I really did look for thr intellectual arguments. None of them convinced me. But I did spend a lot of time with Christians in college and wound up feeling like i wanted to live the kind of challenges they did. So I eventually came to an idea of faith that wasn't about being convinced, but about how we orient ourselves to the world and find our way through it, and about Jesus being the sign of a God we can't hope to grasp. I'm maybe still an atheist intellectually but I'm an atheist knocking on God's door every day.

Anyway, my point is that faith is a journey, and being pushed into it can push people away, but giving them room to reject it and return can allow people the time they need. The way I understand religion right now is a 180 from what I thought it meant at age 15. Your kids are young and you HAVE planted seeds. [/quote]

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