My family is a collection of Christian, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, agnostic, and atheist people. As a family, we can talk about religion without threatening each other with an invitation to Hell (I know! It's possible!) I'm grateful for my family's openness with religion and how they allowed me to choose whether or not I wanted to adopt religion myself.

I didn't know that religion existed until I was nine years old. At that time, my best friend asked me "are you Christian or Catholic?" (apparently, those were the only options available to me). I'd heard her, but genuinely had no idea what she was talking about, and I'd said "What?" She'd repeated herself and I said, "I don't know what that means." She'd insisted I had to be one or the other. That night, I'd asked my mom "Are we Christian or Catholic?" Her answer? "You can be whatever you want to be." I'd insisted that we needed to be one or the other "so which are we?" and she'd repeated her answer. I decided "Well I'm Christian because that's what my best friend is." A few weeks later at recess, my best friend was fighting with another friend. She'd said "She's Catholic and I hate Catholic people" about the other friend. That was the first time I realized that something seemed off about religion. If you could hate another person just because they're different than you, and justify it through religion, was it really something I wanted to be a part of? Okay, yeah, I know we were in the fourth grade and her understanding of religion was probably very underdeveloped, but she had to learn it from somewhere.

When I was fifteen, a religious boy whose parents were friends with my own was over at my house because our parents were hanging out. This was a little while after I decided to deem myself an atheist. He spent almost an hour incessantly telling me that if I don't start worshiping his God, I would go to Hell. He didn't seem to understand my argument that if I don't believe in Heaven, then I obviously don't believe in Hell, so his argument was more obnoxious than it was intimidating. Eventually, he realized I could make solid arguments for my own lack of beliefs and he backed off.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, I asked my dad what his religious beliefs were (I honestly had no idea for about sixteen years of my life). His response was that he doesn't believe in God and he always tried not to push his lack of religion on my sister and I because him and my mom wanted us to find religion -- or the lack thereof -- for ourselves.

I'm grateful that my parents never pushed religion on me. I've grown and learned that religion just isn't for me. Religion is at the heart of wars, though it preaches peace. I don't mean to spit on religion, my experiences with it just tend to be negative. Without religion, I've learned to judge people not by their beliefs, but by their actions and who they are as people. My beliefs are simple: I'll respect you if you respect me.

So thank you, Mom and Dad, for letting me believe what I want.