My feeling on this is this: I was raised in a Christian environment and for years and years struggled to come to terms with what I saw as contradictions between what I was told to believe and how I actually experienced life. I kept getting frustrated because I was asking questions that no one could answer. It took a long time before I realized that the reasons I was not getting any answers was because I was asking questions that Christianity (and other religions) really weren't equipped to answer.
To make a long story short, it was not until I stopped going to church, stopped getting involved in Christian activities, and turned to the "secular" world of the sciences, that I actually started getting some meaningful answers to why certain things were happening in my life. Looking back I can see areas in my life where Christianity actually crippled me. At a time when I most needed to start expanding my horizons and come out of my shell, I ended up getting too intensely involved in a Christian group which discouraged such thinking. The fact that I was withdrawing even more and more from life did not seem to bother them as long as it was a withdrawal into the Bible and church! Unfortunately, it's the churches that stress such strict separation that are the most active at recruiting. I don't mean to offend anyone's beliefs by this, but I would say that what I have learned is that while individual Christians or even whole congregations might be very very nice people, as a whole they do not and cannot have my best interests at heart, simply because they are not Aspy and don't face the issues I face.
So I have been on both sides of the fence, and now that I am on the outside looking in, I see a lot of things that disturb me. I know what it is like to lose friends because I would not adopt their beliefs, and just because I understand why they feel the need to make the world over in their image and likeness does not mean that it is right for me to be remade into that image nor does it make it the less painful to do so. All too often I have seen Christianity used as a barrier. I have enough barriers in my life, and don't wish to add any more. Besides, the older I get the more I wonder why people would find Christianity's central teaching--that only the "saved" go to heaven and the rest of us poor slobs go to hell--attractive. I mean, it must be a terrible burden to think about all those perishing souls . . . this is supposed to be a joyous religion of love?