As soon as people leave home for the first time, it’s a pretty sure thing that most will deny everything they grew up with and start out fresh. And why not? For the first time in your life, there’s no parent figure telling you what you should or should not do. Suddenly the entire world is yours to choose from and the choosing is ripe for the taking. Most of the people I’ve encountered go for the drug/drinking/party scene; schools have told them for years and years that it’s wrong and dirty and it’ll kill you, but you don’t know that firsthand. And so they party on, until the day when they find out that maybe all those Red Ribbon Week and Awareness seminars in grade school were probably right.

Life is singularly about experience, and how we ultimately deal with said experiences in the long run. We can’t always rely on the wisdom of our parents. No matter how hard they try to make us NOT touch the hot stove, at some point in time there will come the day when we will touch that burner and figure out that, “Oh, maybe that’s not such a great idea after all.”

One of the biggest experiences in life besides love and ultimate personal enlightenment is religion. Religion, as I understand it, is a mindset of belief, and that belief can be anything as long and you feel it wholeheartedly. Some people’s religion is going out every night (or day) to get doped up, smashed, and totally wasted. Some people believe in only themselves. And some, like myself, believe in ideals backed by an organized church.

In some countries, and definitely in the United States, there’s a religious dilemma: you may belong to an organized religion, but you simply belong to that church out of tradition. This is very prevalent with almost every religion conceivable. And why? Because people can make their own way in life without having to stick to the rigors of any set of beliefs. There is that nasty little thought in the back of their heads, however, that says that no matter how far away they get, there is always that one thing they can go back to. Maybe a person doesn't have a home or a family they can fall back on, but organized religion will always be around to accept them back.

Changing your belief system though, is a whole different matter. A friend of mine that I met in college made the leap from what he had been taught as a child and landed in a place so alien that most people would shy away and go crawling back. He’d grown up a Mennonite, just a step down the ladder from the Amish. As soon as he left home though, he discovered that he didn’t have to be Mennonite if he didn’t want to, and that he no longer believed in that way. It was a classic tale of trying to separate himself so fully from his old life that he jumped to the other end of the spectrum, becoming a Wiccan and discovering he was homosexual. Of course, he can never fall back on the religion of his childhood, or on his family. He is completely on his own, creating new and different social groups that he can belong to.

Not everyone can or should do that. I’m a Mormon. I was born a Mormon, and I will most likely die a Mormon. I grew up with a strict moral code and ideas that an outsider would think was horrendous brainwashing; I've been told that on several occasions, and about how I should be ashamed of my parents for being so terrible to me, as to raising me in a belief system that they thought was correct. My rebuttal: what did you expect them to do? Mormon parents are like any decent parent: they teach what they know, they try to protect their kids from harm, and want their children to grow up to be good, upstanding adults.

My story is a lot like many other stories of people who thought they were too constrained in a religious headlock. Like my friend, as soon as I got out of the house and headed off to college I discovered to my dismay that there was no authority figure telling me what to do. I had almost unlimited freedom as to how to live my life. And one of the basest beliefs in Mormonism is that you have the freedom to choose. So I chose. I went inactive. This was actually super easy for me, even when my boss (who was also Mormon) found out who I was. He didn't care that I was inactive and made no effort to bring me back to the fold.

Life was good; I’m not going to lie. I didn't have to give ten percent of my earnings to the church to help with welfare; I didn't have to suffer through three hours of church every week, and most of all, I could disregard everything I’d ever been taught. I drank; I even smoked once (it sucked, and I have asthma, so I decided it wasn't for me at all). Since life was going so great without God, I started to question if there even was such a thing as God. So I decided to become atheist.

I can laugh at myself these days, because I was the poorest atheist in the world. I was really very bad at it. Every time I was invited to do something with other people I knew to be atheist, I questioned their motives and backed myself up on the only knowledge base I had: Mormonism. They hated my guts. I found out very quickly that most (forgive the term) secular atheists are hardly kind and caring people. With a few exceptions, every one of them I met was a cold and calculating person who ripped up and and all ideals of a higher power of any kind. I once even got into a fight with a girl over why I felt morally obligated to help a friend who was considering suicide. I wanted this person to go and seek help from his Rabbi and to get some counseling. The girl I fought with was adamant that he should make his own decisions and not let some old crock with a religious agenda get to him. It was a stupid thing to fight about, and the young man left school the next month and did indeed take his own life shortly thereafter.

Believe it or not, the thing that got me to go back to Mormonism was an atheist. He was the sweetest and most considerate person I knew: and it was because he felt that for everyone to be the best they could be, they had to deal with life in their own way, even if that meant that they believed in something he didn't. He knew even before I did that I was unhappy with the new life I had. And it was true: underneath all the happiness I’d set up on the surface, I was a trembling ball of guilt and regret. This young man therefore sat me down one day and told me the following:

Be true to yourself. Don’t try to be anything other than what you are, because you’ll hate yourself for the rest of your life if you do. Life is about experience: your religion should teach you that, no matter what that religion is. If you don’t believe that, then you’ll regret everything you've ever done. Making mistakes is only good if you learn things from them. Your mission in life is to be happy and fulfilled, and live with as few regrets as possible, and to make other people happy as well. You need to find your place in the world, whether it’s with a God, or not.

And so I went back. Sometimes I think and do things decidedly un-Mormon, but I always come back from these experiences with a better understanding of who I am, and what I expect of myself. My religion has always taught me that I have the freedom to choose who I want to be. My church, like my friends, want me to be the best person I can be. And just because my system of belief is one that’s chock-filled with rules that some people would find cumbersome, I've discovered that because I choose to follow those rules, they’re not really rules at all.

I’m not an atheist. I never really was one, and I never will be. We are and should be the best people we can be, for others and for ourselves, no matter our belief system. The best atheist in the world taught me that, and I’ll be forever indebted to him.