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Bob Davidson
Tommy -- I'll take at face value what you say about your motives and add a consideration. I know that a lot of us have had interesting and sometimes difficult faith journeys. Of the people I know best and have known longest, my brother and sisters, what they've been through has changed us over the years. You are right, we were raised in a conventional Christian household. My mother was, and still is, a conventional protestant, my dad, believed but hated hyprocrites and organized religion -- he went to church with us, but kept quiet about what he thought about being there.
My brother shared Dad's view as he grew up and has never joined or gone to church beyond ceremonial occasions, but married a future Presbyterian elder. He sent his kids to church and Sunday School with their mom and the kids are both actively religious (my neice having lost her husband to a heart attack before he was 30 probably contributed to her religious participation -- she is very active and happy in a large evangelical church in Austin). Both of my sisters drifted away from church and worrying about beliefs until they had kids -- when they both went back to the faith they grew up with and raised their children in. None of their kids are openly religious right now. Some of them have little kids so we'll see what happens.
In college and for a time afterwards, I considered myself a deist, and sorta christianish -- I attended church fairly regularly because I enjoyed the experience and generally liked the people there and the morality, but didn't take the whole Jesus saves stuff that seriously. When my daughter and ex-wife both were supposed to die after an emergency c-section with a 75% placental abruption, which was the worst nightmare I've ever been through -- helplessly watching a tiny baby struggling to live and not being able to do anything, I had some sort of epiphany: there was no question that I could feel the power and presence of the Spirit. Since then, I've know what I believe and simply am a Christian, without doubt.
I wouldn't think of speaking for any of our classmates, but I know several who have talked to me about how they've had journeys not too dissimilar to my own, at least in where they started and where they arrived. Several have told me that they had broken lives and saved themselves through faith. Others grew and came to appreciate their faith as part of a life's journey.
I personally know of no one in our class or even near our age who just kept going thoughtlessly on autopilot in their childhood beliefs. Every one of us has lost a number of people we love, had horrible disappointments in life like divorces, lost jobs and failed businesses, children and other people we love going wrong and not being able to stop them, betrayals by people we thought were friends, and/or cruel health problems, ad nauseum. One way we cope with those things is our faith.
Because of this, many people are going to be highly insulted when they perceive you as mocking their beliefs.
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