When I was 16, I stopped going to Mass despite the warnings that if I didn't go, I'd risk my soul burning in hell for eternity. The ridiculous part of this was the person who was the most vocal about this was our priest who regularly had his "friend" over for a game of "hide the salami" after Mass and allegedly solicited local gay men for sex on a regular basis.
I dabbled for a little while in other religions, trying to "find my way" as the cliche goes. Going and sitting in that church every Sunday does give one some sense of solace in a mad world, if you're willing to turn off your brain and not question anything. These days, I consider myself somewhere between an agnostic and a very liberal Jew but you're not going to find me anywhere near temple either.
I came back again for a short period of time in my early 20's, just to see if as an adult, I could be treated as one by the same judgmental lot I had previously despised as a kid. It didn't get any better and I finally called it quits a few months later. Don't get me wrong, I'll still go for special occasions like weddings or some family event but you'll never catch me there more than once a year which is just to be polite.
It took me quite some time to finally undo the years of indoctrination and sometimes, I think the embedded guilt will never be fully conquered.
For me, they don't have all of the answers, no religion does. I've learned that in life, asking someone to give you the answers is intellectually lazy and a recipe for disaster. Even somehow through the course of my experiences, I were to find that the "true faith" was Catholicism, I could never go back to a church that allowed a priest to rail against "sins" that he was committing before or after the very service in which he condemned others for the same offense. I could never forgive a church that allowed the leader of their Knights of Columbus group, someone who was considered a pillar of the community, to molest kids in his basement office while his wife chatted with the victim's parents upstairs and never try to stop him.
I'll never stop having respect for those who consider themselves to be Christians, Catholics, or whatever and actually concentrate on what the religion was originally supposed to be about. However, until the day comes when the message goes back to taking care of the poor and outcast instead of the pathological obsession with people's sexual habits and controlling their lives, count me out.
