To Lark:
Sure you can ask
I am the child of two atheists who were themselves raised as moderate Protestants but lost their faith in their teens. I never visited any religion classes at school except maybe for a year at elementary school and did ethics and philosophy instead. One of my friends at elementary school was the daughter of the local pastor and I remember running home to my Mum after playing with her one day going: "Mum, Susanne says I will go to hell because I'm not baptised!" she didn't mean anything by it, I'm sure, she just stated it in a matter of fact way, but I remember this as one of my first encounters with religion. Religion was never a topic at home. It was considered something other people did. Like eating salt and vinegar chips instead of paprika flavored ones. I was raised by a single mum who is a likely ENTP and a science teacher, by the way. That might have contributed.
I had a few class mates later on who were moderately religious, but in my part of the world (rural northern Germany in the eighties and nineties), it is not very much a part of the public arena.
Then I went to the USA for a year as an exchange student and omg, what a different world that was. I lived in Indiana. My host family was deeply religious, Lutherans. They send their kid to a religious private school. When I told them I had bouht a book by Mark Twain, their answer was "But, wasn't he an atheist?!". They told their son he descended from Adam and Eve and that was all he needed to know. They were also very conservative in my European eyes on many other issues and had little to no interest in intellectual debate. Kind, but very simple, down to earth people. One of my teachers was a very intelligent and well read conservative and a joy to debate. So I know not all conservative Cristians in America are like that. But that year seriously traumatized me.
As I grew up I gave a lot of thought to philisophical questions and even tried to reason my way towards spirituality in my very early twens, but it was no use. I hit a mental brick wall whenever I wanted to take the path of reason and the burning bush just wouldn't appear before me. I eventually gave up on that venture as I became older.
Today, I have one or two very moderately Christian friends and one crazy ENFP who prays to Mother Earth and regularly sees a witch for some fortune telling. So I consider myself pretty tolerant after all.