"dabbled with Christianity"

Religion When I was at school I dabbled with Christianity, the born-again, singing dancing sort of Christianity which involved attending bible study, scripture union meetings and prayer gatherings. I even took lunchtime minibus trips to Garston market to watch preachers offering the word to shoppers, wearing a pullover to hide my school uniform. But I never did "convert" because in the end none of it seemed entirely real to me, it was the start of my genuine adherence to the Groucho Marx rule and I had other things on my mind being in my teens and all of that.

At this point I'm not really anything but I do remember the odd couple of weeks when I was closest to converting but never did (it was the not converting which ultimately led me to toss in the whole thing because these were kinds of Christians who really didn't seem to like you hanging about with them unless you were a Christian yourself which seemed a bit inconsistent and counterproductive) and so still have an affinity for this Buzzfeed correspondent who talks about her falling out with religion but also how she sort of misses the feeling of having everything explained to her:

"I know — I think — that Christianity isn’t real, but I miss believing it was real. When I got confused in my career, or hurt by a broken relationship, fellow Christians assured me that it was all part of God’s plan to lead me to the right calling or the right person, something that made me calmer and more willing to take risks. Now when things don’t go the way I want, I cling to a vague “everything happens for a reason” sentiment or confront the fact that shit, maybe life IS meaningless, because now I can’t view trauma as just a rolling ball in some cosmic Rube Goldberg machine.

"Some days I wake up in my bedroom in Brooklyn and I just don’t know what to do, in an existential sense. Christianity gave me something to do. A large reason I converted to the faith as a teen was because I felt a weird void in my life, like something was missing that no relationship, amount of money, or enviable career could fill. The Christian message was packaged and sold to me as the only thing that could fill that void. And for six years, I let it."

Some of the commenters underneath suggest that she's taking an unhelpful all or nothing approach and she could just you know, pick the good bits, but as she says herself in the piece, once you realise how much of the book is consistent and contradictory and in the end as much based on earlier legends and stories, retelling them in a similar to how they've always been repackaged (not unlike Shakespeare actually), it's difficult to work around it. You can say to yourself that it's simply how man has chosen to worship or communicate their feelings with and about God, but since this its also the scaffold on which that belief is built, it's difficult to square the two.