It's funny I can't remember anything else from the church experience; I went for years.  My pastors left me with no negative recollection about them but I also don't remember anything they said, except one Reverend reminding us to pray for our soldiers fighting in Vietnam.  I know other things were introduced to my mind; particularly the stories surrounding the pageants and ceremonies for Christmas and Easter but so much of my concept of God and how I think he acts has slipped into my unconscious brain that what I was told as a youngster feels like it originates from me as an adult.  I imagine this is how it is for many who grew up in the all white suburbs of America in the 50's and 60's.  I remember in High School government class encountering a fellow student who said he was an atheist.  Amongst us racially prejudiced teenagers, he was the only one who said that the civil rights movement was correct and that we were a bunch of buffoons for not feeling so.  I was stunned, I had no idea someone's parents would allow their son to be an atheist and that his sentiments were in line with what I had heard much earlier in my life from a woman in my Sunday school class.  I disliked the student for thinking I was stupid but I also admired him for such fierce individuality from someone my age.  It seemed that he had actually thought about the issues of race and was not parroting his parents like the rest of us.  
As I aged, insecurity and fear began to control a great deal of how I acted and how I thought.  I would have to describe myself as an unstable teen and young adult, looking for attention.  This is not a particularly unusual personality trait, since it appears to be outwardly the case with so many people of all ages.  Still, for me it led to some strange religious behaviors that to this day have an appeal but are successfully resisted.  To be more specific; in times of stress I would often crack my King James Bible open to an arbitrary page and read the first few verses from the top of the second page; interpreting  whatever cryptic message I could derive from these words as applicable to my trouble and stress.  This felt like Biblical tarot cards, very satisfying but misleading in one aspect, since there is no magic in tarot cards or the Bible, but strangely not so misleading in another respect; the fact that my own mind created answers to my problems.  I would not recommend this practice to anyone, especially if, like me, dread and fear of punishment predominated your thinking because the Bible has enough ammo on punishment to send people over the deep end.  What was astonishing about this habit was one day in college an English professor made mention of the habit of some overly pious fundamentalist elderly woman opening their Bibles to an arbitrary page and deriving a message in the verse for their problems.  Once I finally saw this behavior as a human pattern not a unique personal discovery, I knew the practice had no validity.  I probably knew it all along but I just didn't want to let go of such comforting false control of my life.
This childish attitude may seem like so much, I've heard this all before, bunk and in many respects that is true but my contention is that no matter how remedial and trite these sentiments are they ring true for millions of people.  I always made sure that I should never disclose my little game of Bible tarot; probably because I knew if it was exposed, I'd have to give it up.
Another great monger of my former spiritual self was the belief that signs would let me know when life was going according to plan.  If I was on track about something God would let me know by the appearance of butterflies, conversely I had to be on the look out for bees and cockroaches, they were harbingers of ill will.  Also, dead birds filled in nicely for the more dreadful interpretations.  This type of mania is akin to the attitudes of 17th century colonial America; their world was constantly full of signs.  Luckily, I never let this attitude fully dominate my reasoning, in fact, it served more as a play thing, a diversion from fear or responsibility, which were synonyms in my mind.  Natural occurrences like rain or sunshine served as indicators too.  A question I read on a fundamentalist's website recently addressed this issue of God using weather to hand out punishments.  This is an exceptionally absurd concept but what other conclusions are followers to draw when so much of the Bible has causal relationships given in its narrative?  If the book is to be taken like matters in law, as precedent, then for believers, God does punish us with natural phenomena.
The final coup de grass for my own quasi-colonial religious beliefs was my personal quest to read the entire Bible.  I had always held the contention that 95% of believers have never read the book from cover to cover.  I still haven't, but I made it from Genesis up to Jeremiah, plus reading through the New Testament, many times.  If you want to come away from the Bible doubting most all of what you thought you believed, then read it.  The book sadly does not stand up to how we understand our world.  This is certainly a major shock to anyone willing to put it to the test and is also why, I feel, most believers never read it.  They know it won't stand up just like I knew Bible tarot was a frightened boy's game for unanswerable questions.
As god of our children, we know such un-wielding power can be used to coerce the gullible into behaving as we want; Santa Claus ought to tell us that much.  If you're good then lots of toys, if you naughty a lump of coal; if you accept Christ, eternal life in heaven, if you reject him, Satan has his way with you.  When you come of age sufficient to realize you are to die later down the line, something becomes necessary to lift us out of our despair that most of life now seems absurd.  Religion was invented for this fact, not to take advantages of our susceptibility, but to offer hope that as we love our existence, we also wish for it to go on forever.  Our knowledge of death is a real and palpable fear requiring some type resolution for our inner stability's sake.  Once again, the causal relationships that the Bible presents us obscures most investigations for hope unless we tow the line according to the rules, those rules being so nebulous that anyone with a little imagination can exploit them for any purpose they wish.  I have come to realize the authors of the Bible usually had their own agenda at hand, after all they were not any different then you or me.  If you wanted to start a religion, like Paul, then you had to have guidelines of behavior, structure and continuity so that Santa Claus would reappear each year on cue.
Faith is at a crossroads once more or maybe for the first time.  It has become difficult to drag from the Bible's misinformation a clear picture of salvation.  People are told to not take the Bible literally (sound advice) but the construction of what to believe and what to acknowledge as so much nonsense becomes increasingly complicated.  Today's world of changing social values and scientific discovery places enormous pressure on a document that requires virtually decoding to be understood.  The task is so daunting that most believers cave in and declare the Bible as the only guide for life pretty much as is; the fundamentalist revival.  Fundamentalism is, to use Oliver Wendell Holmes remark in a different vein, "a clear and present danger."   If we as a society are to resort to a 19th century attitude towards the world to maintain allegiance to an every weakening Bible narrative, we are apt to create terrible unforeseen hardships and misfortunes for the entire world.  I cannot offer an alternative but to only say that one is clearly needed.