As a Christian, reading your post revealed to me the possibility that you don't actually understand Christianity i.e. Biblical Christianity. In particular, some of the comments you made indicates that you think Christianity is all about being a morally good person, whereas the Bible says that our striving to live moral lives (by what standard is your life moral?) are like rags to God. I've grown up in church since I was 8, but I never took Christianity seriously until I was 20 or so. What did I do? I started reading the Bible and started studying church history, theology, and philosophy, and that's when I could call the faith that I was brought up in my own; that's when I understood that growing up in church did not make you a true Christian, but instead it is God that draws you to himself.

I'm sorry to hear that your life as someone who grew up in Christianity was less meaningful to you than what your life means to you now. However, I must contend with this point and make sure that you understand that just because that was your experience does not mean that it is sensible to put a blanket over the entirety of the Christian religion, wipe your hands of it, and deem it pointless, poisonous, and damaging to people. The church today is quite scattered; it is not in a state of unity that it once beheld, and I therefore there are plenty of people who call themselves Christians that I do not identify with (welcome to denominationalism). However, you have to understand that the church is an historical assembly of people beginning with the Apostles of Jesus Christ, then onto the church fathers (patristics), followed by the institution of Roman Catholicism for over 1000 years, the Protestant reformation (protesting against heresies of the catholic church), followed by the Puritan age in Britain and America, followed by a slow death of Christendom ushering in the secular society, and to an extent, the secularization of the church (not all of it, but a great deal of it). Large swathes of Christianity are falling prey to postmodernism, liberalism, the prosperity gospel, and moral therapeutic deism. Suffice it to say, though the church does not seem to be in a great place, once I understood it from a birds eye-view historically, theologically, philosophically, and in light of Scripture, I was able to make much more sense out of my own life as a Christian. My point is that the world is a big place, evil can be found everywhere, and it takes time to learn and reflect on events before you existed and on events that shaped you as a person. As you can probably tell, my experience has been very different to yours.

Zooming in a little...

I just turned 24, and I'm getting married next month to an amazing girl (yes, a Christian like me), who was not really interested in relationships when I was, and yet my perseverance softened her heart and she fell in love with me. Long story short, 1.5 years later we are a month out from our wedding. As you can imagine, we are excited to start life together as two people who did a few things correctly (albeit, not perfectly!) before and during our time together. These are those things, (1) before we started dating we were both resolved to look for a spouse (I even said this to her before we were a couple), not a relationship that could go somewhere (this alone solidified the idea for me of who to look for as a potential wife, and who not to look for!), (2) we spent time getting to know each other as individual persons without forcing open the door to sexual activity (oftentimes you can rush into a sexual relationship, clouding your vision to the reality of who you really want to be with, let's face it, you aren't having sex most of your life, you have to be able to converse with them and enjoy their company in any context. You have to find every dimension of the person pleasant, not just the sex), (3) we slowly became closer in the spirit of truth, honour, respect, and purity (we took our time!), and (4) we had good people (married couples, some with families) in our lives to offer advice and give counsel. Our relationship hasn't been perfect, but a Christian relationship between a man and a woman on the road to marriage should look similar to how we've managed to do it (those 4 things weren't all, they were just what I could think of). I didn't grow up learning how to do this, in fact a lot of things I've heard over the years were downright cultish and a violation on a person's ability to make decisions for their self (that's another story). For you bro, it seems like the excitement of a new chapter in life, college, and you're adoption of a worldview that you've incorporated into your identity has been, well, existentially liberating, and I can understand that. You should just know that your perception and experience, as painful as it was in the past, does not always help you in understanding the reality of the nature of things.

Interested to hear your reply bro.