This name is associated with incredible negativity: mocking, criticism, hate. I believe this is because many self-proclaimed Christians aren't living the life Christ intended.

True Christianity - really living life by the example Jesus gave us - is love and sacrifice. It is a God who created us, loving and sacrificing for us, showing us our faults and helping us through them. (My husband summed up a blog post with this: "This is not a picture of an iron fist, but a pierced hand.") It is about loving and accepting people, even if you don't understand or agree with them. It is about sacrificing your time, money, and comfort to help others. It is about being bold in your beliefs, not pompous in your personal judgement.

By bold, I mean that I do believe what the Bible teaches. I am a hypocrite if I pick and choose what in the Bible I want to believe, and what I want to live out.

I am a Christian. I try every second to live my life with the kind of love God wants me to have. I am not perfect and could never claim to be. Nor do I believe others are beneath me. I am excited in my faith and about my faith and I am sorry for what we as people do every day to darken the light Christ has given us. But I haven't given up on "the Church" because I recognize that Christ is God and people are humans. We are supposed to be reflections of God, but the reflection is dim.

I follow God and The Lord Jesus Christ.

I have no affiliation with any church seeing as all through history and even today they are mostly corrupted by the wants and agendas of earthly beings so they can't be relied on to do what they are meant to and teach the people.

However I also don't fall in the category that most nonreligious people or people of other religions usually put Christians in.

I don't force my religion on other people and I openly accept same sex and mixed race couples because if people aren't hurting anyone with their actions or choices then why make a big deal out of it and ridicule them?

So please, don't lump me in with everyone else because of your own personal biases. Thanks :)

I was born and raised as a Roman Catholic and now I am sorely embarrassed to openly admit it.

The stigma of belonging to a religion so stigmatised by revelations of paedophile priests, bishops et al is so pressing upon me that I refuse to even look towards a church as being a place of worship.

I have declared myself an atheist and no longer follow a religious path.

I was born in a Roman Catholic extended family, but my parents never practiced it outside of holidays and ceremonies. As children, we were given full autonomy over our spiritual path, and so at the age of reason, religion fell away just as Santa Claus had before it.

I align myself with atheists politically and intellectually, but I do permit myself the glories of imagination. When I do contemplate a hereafter, it is nothing like a heaven – it is more like the next life in a series of lives, an assembly line on which life on Earth tightens its assigned screw.

None of this rises to the level of "belief." I am more comfortable thinking of afterlife as some permanent dream state your dying brain falls into. There are no religions that stake their claim on that.

I feel more traces of worship for space. Once I learned that our sun is just a star in a sea of trillions, that flipped a lot of pre-programmed switches into the off position.

I do use the words God, Heaven, and other such borrowings, but only metaphorically. These are the words I grew up with, and poetic license begs the strength of these words when used well.

To summarize, I am my own kind of agnostic with benefits.

I believe in the good of people, of humanity. We grow from one another and we teach one another, the basic human kindness.

I believe in doing what is morally and incontrovertibly right in all cases.

We are taught that Satan is the root of all evil and he should not be reckoned with. But we are also taught to pray for others who have done wrongdoings unto us or not. So, who prays for Satan? Who has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it the most?

We are so subjugated by strife and jealousy that we forget the foundations of what will keep us together at the end. I put in my hope that we haven't forgotten.

Side note: Thank you Mark Twain for changing my outlook on religion and life itself.