cejensen
15th April 2012, 08:00 PM
From time to time as children, my Mom would take me, my brothers and my sister to church. Generally, I don't think she was particularly religious (recovering Catholic) but I have come to believe that she would go through periodic spiritual crises and drag us all to church. Later, there was a church bus which came to our neighbourhood and she would pack us off on it so she could enjoy a few hours of peace and quiet, while we suffered through Baptist Sunday school and services.
It wasn't until my first year of high school that I started attending church (youth group) voluntarily. A girl who took the same school bus as I did invited me to come check it out and I have to admit, that I really enjoyed the Youth Group, then the Choir and eventually started regularly attending Sunday services. I went from have very few friends to feeling accepted and loved by a large group of peers. Through this whole time, I never really question the teachings of the church, because I was somewhat raised with them. They were familiar and I was too naive to understand just how dangerous they were.
My first step towards Atheism was brought about by recognising three core teachings of the church which I could never reconcile:
1) I studied biology and the story of Adam and Eve didn't hold any water to the theory of evolution.
2) Original Sin was as foreign and irrational a concept as I ever heard. With so many 'sins' listed in the Bible, I thought it was overkill. The thought that unbaptised babies could possibly go to hell or purgatory, did not seem fair.
3) I couldn't believe that a loving god would create me gay, and then say that I am an abomination.
Like any viewer of a science-fiction movie, I suspended belief in portions of the Bible / church teachings until I could rationalise them with the secular / scientific knowledge I more intuitively knew was true. I tried to suppress my nature and fit my behaviour into the Bible-prescribed mould, although my thoughts would always wander back to evolution and 'abhorrent' thoughts about other boys. If I were to give a title to the first step, it would be "scepticism".
Upon graduating from High School at the age of 17, I joined the Army Reserves as a linguist. It was an odd sense of circumstances which lead to this. There is a military tradition in the family, but I wanted to travel and break out of the repressive grip of my suburban Chicago home time more than diligently pledge my life to my country in an uber-Patriotic act. I needed to 'find myself' and also find a way to pay for college, coming from a poor family and with only slightly above-average grades. With "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" being a recently enacted law, I wouldn't even have to lie about myself and my secret. It was during this time that I stopped attending church and began to meet more like-minded, free thinking individuals. Most of the soldiers in Military Intelligence were either paying off student loans, or securing state grants for tuition. More irreverent than your average GI, I found myself in good company. While enjoying this distance from my hometown, family and friends, I felt more and more able to be myself, to recreate myself and to be honest with myself. I knew the Christian upbringing I had treasured was false, yet I continued to believe in a Deity, grossly misunderstood by the majority. A benign, creative power / force, which didn't necessarily intervene, but cared for the Earth and its inhabitants. But I was also brave enough at this point to accept that there may not be a god. I also took comfort in the fact that I had once been a true believer, had been baptised and could always make a death-bed hop off the fence into eternal life. Step 2 was "Agnosticism".
I have been living in Australia since late 2000. In 2009, I moved back to live in the US for a few months leading up to my same-sex marriage in August in the state of Iowa, which had only months before made this a legal option for my husband and me. My mother's family is quietly and quite tentatively religious. My father's family, on the other hand, is very vocally and actively religious. Of my father's four sisters, not one attended the wedding. One aunt gave a valid excuse. Two aunts gave very poor, disappointing excuses. The fourth aunt said that she could not in good faith celebrate a wedding which is against her religious beliefs. Given my semi-religious upbringing and religious past, I accepted this and moved on (for a while). This comment stayed in the back of my mind for about a year, stewing. My aunt was on her fourth marriage. She is a former Jehovah's Witness and currently an evangelical Christian. This harlot, who I have a great deal of love for, chose a stupid, Bible-based, irrational, disgusting, bigoted teaching of the church and selectively applied it to her decision to attend my wedding because it was 'against her beliefs'. Apparently she agonised over it, as she should have. I happen to know that her own son is an Atheist, but I can guarantee that it would stop her from attending his wedding. Isn't it great when you get to choose which belief you're going to stand up for, and which you can casually throw aside? (Doesn't she know that Jesus would have / has already forgiven her for attending my wedding, but I will have a very difficult time forgiving her for not attending?)
My aunt's decision not to attend my wedding meant that all gloves were off. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) already impacts my life greatly. Enacted and supported at the behest of theists and theist organisations, at least this form of bigotry is at a very impersonal level. After calling all of my aunts in a very drunken and angry state, I send them a couple of very strongly worded messages on Facebook letting them know that they had finally broken me. Not in the sense that I had seen the folly of my way and would be returning to the church, but that I had decided that I was no longer under any self-determined, personal obligation to respect their beliefs. As long as the Bible was going to be used as a tool of my oppression, I would also use it as a tool to point out the hypocrisy of the church, and the stupidity of belief. Respect must be mutual, and my aunts' religion, among others, has not respect for my beliefs that evolution is true and that my husband and I deserve to be accorded equality under the eye of the law. Step 3) To begin living my life honestly, openly and critically. Step 3 is "Atheism".
It wasn't until my first year of high school that I started attending church (youth group) voluntarily. A girl who took the same school bus as I did invited me to come check it out and I have to admit, that I really enjoyed the Youth Group, then the Choir and eventually started regularly attending Sunday services. I went from have very few friends to feeling accepted and loved by a large group of peers. Through this whole time, I never really question the teachings of the church, because I was somewhat raised with them. They were familiar and I was too naive to understand just how dangerous they were.
My first step towards Atheism was brought about by recognising three core teachings of the church which I could never reconcile:
1) I studied biology and the story of Adam and Eve didn't hold any water to the theory of evolution.
2) Original Sin was as foreign and irrational a concept as I ever heard. With so many 'sins' listed in the Bible, I thought it was overkill. The thought that unbaptised babies could possibly go to hell or purgatory, did not seem fair.
3) I couldn't believe that a loving god would create me gay, and then say that I am an abomination.
Like any viewer of a science-fiction movie, I suspended belief in portions of the Bible / church teachings until I could rationalise them with the secular / scientific knowledge I more intuitively knew was true. I tried to suppress my nature and fit my behaviour into the Bible-prescribed mould, although my thoughts would always wander back to evolution and 'abhorrent' thoughts about other boys. If I were to give a title to the first step, it would be "scepticism".
Upon graduating from High School at the age of 17, I joined the Army Reserves as a linguist. It was an odd sense of circumstances which lead to this. There is a military tradition in the family, but I wanted to travel and break out of the repressive grip of my suburban Chicago home time more than diligently pledge my life to my country in an uber-Patriotic act. I needed to 'find myself' and also find a way to pay for college, coming from a poor family and with only slightly above-average grades. With "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" being a recently enacted law, I wouldn't even have to lie about myself and my secret. It was during this time that I stopped attending church and began to meet more like-minded, free thinking individuals. Most of the soldiers in Military Intelligence were either paying off student loans, or securing state grants for tuition. More irreverent than your average GI, I found myself in good company. While enjoying this distance from my hometown, family and friends, I felt more and more able to be myself, to recreate myself and to be honest with myself. I knew the Christian upbringing I had treasured was false, yet I continued to believe in a Deity, grossly misunderstood by the majority. A benign, creative power / force, which didn't necessarily intervene, but cared for the Earth and its inhabitants. But I was also brave enough at this point to accept that there may not be a god. I also took comfort in the fact that I had once been a true believer, had been baptised and could always make a death-bed hop off the fence into eternal life. Step 2 was "Agnosticism".
I have been living in Australia since late 2000. In 2009, I moved back to live in the US for a few months leading up to my same-sex marriage in August in the state of Iowa, which had only months before made this a legal option for my husband and me. My mother's family is quietly and quite tentatively religious. My father's family, on the other hand, is very vocally and actively religious. Of my father's four sisters, not one attended the wedding. One aunt gave a valid excuse. Two aunts gave very poor, disappointing excuses. The fourth aunt said that she could not in good faith celebrate a wedding which is against her religious beliefs. Given my semi-religious upbringing and religious past, I accepted this and moved on (for a while). This comment stayed in the back of my mind for about a year, stewing. My aunt was on her fourth marriage. She is a former Jehovah's Witness and currently an evangelical Christian. This harlot, who I have a great deal of love for, chose a stupid, Bible-based, irrational, disgusting, bigoted teaching of the church and selectively applied it to her decision to attend my wedding because it was 'against her beliefs'. Apparently she agonised over it, as she should have. I happen to know that her own son is an Atheist, but I can guarantee that it would stop her from attending his wedding. Isn't it great when you get to choose which belief you're going to stand up for, and which you can casually throw aside? (Doesn't she know that Jesus would have / has already forgiven her for attending my wedding, but I will have a very difficult time forgiving her for not attending?)
My aunt's decision not to attend my wedding meant that all gloves were off. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) already impacts my life greatly. Enacted and supported at the behest of theists and theist organisations, at least this form of bigotry is at a very impersonal level. After calling all of my aunts in a very drunken and angry state, I send them a couple of very strongly worded messages on Facebook letting them know that they had finally broken me. Not in the sense that I had seen the folly of my way and would be returning to the church, but that I had decided that I was no longer under any self-determined, personal obligation to respect their beliefs. As long as the Bible was going to be used as a tool of my oppression, I would also use it as a tool to point out the hypocrisy of the church, and the stupidity of belief. Respect must be mutual, and my aunts' religion, among others, has not respect for my beliefs that evolution is true and that my husband and I deserve to be accorded equality under the eye of the law. Step 3) To begin living my life honestly, openly and critically. Step 3 is "Atheism".