<rant>

I can imagine that being a struggle. My mother was religious in a
confused sort of way. She started out Lutheran (during my lifetime - she
was 40 when I was born) and stopped going to church when I decided I
wasn't going back about age 7. I guess my father must have supported me,
since there was no contest. He was the one who suggested to me about ten
years later that getting overly religious was not a good idea. I had
decided to try to find god as a teenager, and I had heard (through an
influential friend) that the Mormons were the one true church. After
finding out that they were issuing nothing but hot air, I went non-
denominational, only to find more hot air. For the decade before that,
and until my parents died, there was no religiosity in my house. After
my dad died I found out he was a Jehovah's Witness going in to WW2, and
an atheist upon honorable discharge. He never told us what caused that.
My mother claimed to be a believer until she died, but what she believed
was beyond me. She had a "portrait" of Jesus hanging in her bedroom and
commented on how beautiful he was. Her church going consisted of
watching the Hour of Power (now the Crystal Cathedral with Robert
Schuller) on TV on Sunday morning, although several times she mentioned
that she thought that when you die you just go to sleep. She never
pushed anything on me, although when I mentioned once that my wife had
talked me into converting to Judaism, whe was sad because it meant I
didn't believe in Jesus. Well, I never did convert to Judaism, and after
she died I came to the realization I was an atheist. This was just after
my brother had come to the same realization.

IOW, I never had parents that pushed it on me. Thank god.

</rant>