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1. 

   PuntyBunny
   Member

   I'll admit it. I was a child atheist. A little skeptic in larval form. Looking back, it was a weird childhood as far as the spiritual development went. My parents were both from Alabama but we moved north to southern PA when I was a kid, because my father got a job out there. My father was uninclined to discuss religion, or much of anything, but that's another story. My mother was actively hostile to religion, doing everything but spitting when we drove by a church.

   So we were settled in rural PA by the time I got old enough to realize there was such a thing as church & religion. And what a thing! A lot of pentecostals out there in the northern hollows. Not what I'd call a rational bunch. They went to church twice on Sundays & wed nights.

   Given this, it was highly strange that my mother signed me up for vacation bible school for a week one summer. Maybe she thought I'd develop a friendship with the girl down the road. Let me tell you all I remember from my 4 hours a day that week - we each had a board onto which we glued a piece of fabric, then we lit & blew out a great number of wooden matches, then glued them down in the shape of a cross on the fabric. you'd glue maybe 7 across, with the center one being highest & the outer 3 on each side slanting down slightly. Below that you'd make another row. After about 6 rows you have the long side of the cross & you've made a series of chevron patterns with the matches.

   I came home utterly, totally baffled. that set the stage for my lifetime stance of bemused 'what in the world are you thinking' toward organized religion.

   Posted 2 years ago #
2. 

   Elemenope
   Moderator

   I was a very young atheist as well, though my first trippy religion experience happened when I was even younger. It is perhaps the only conversation I remember with any clarity from kindergarten (and human memory being what it is, for all I know I've since filled it in with all sorts of extraneous details, but anyway, in the broad strokes...).

   One of my fellow kindergartners came up to me while were doing arts & crafts and asked me "Are you a Christian or a Jew?". And I said "I dunno. What are they." And she said "Well, Christians are poor but they're saved, and Jews are rich but aren't saved." And I asked "Saved from what?" And she said "I dunno. Bad stuff." And I said "Well, my parents keep me safe from bad stuff anyway, so I wanna be a Jew!" She was a little put off by this conclusion. Then I went home and asked my parents whether we were Christians or Jews and they said, "well, neither...". Thus started my introduction to religion.

   Which leads into a bizarre ironic postscript, because growing up by far the most common religious ceremony I'd participate in was a Passover Seder, because many of my childhood friends were *actual* Jews, as well as a few family friends. Any holiday with food is a good holiday in my book, and it's definitely where I developed my taste for horseradish. *Love* the stuff.

   Posted 2 years ago #
3. 

   Kodie
   Member

   I remember a time when my cousins were baptised. I don't remember how old I was, I couldn't have been already 9 even, and think maybe as young as 7. The cousins, 3 boys close in age with the oldest one year younger than me. I sat through the service and it might have been the first time I was ever in a church or old enough to remember having been. I didn't really understand what was going on, but I listened, and it was maybe the beginning of everything for me, not just atheism, but the part of me who will notice the ridiculous and store it in my brain for future use, or the kind of thing you nudge your friend while you're walking down the street to look at something funny or weird.

   I came out of that service with an unwittingly irreverent pun on the trinity that I was still young enough to think was hilarious. I tried to tell it at the party afterward to my cousins who I thought might also like it, but they didn't hear me the first time, and before I got to repeat it, I might have been just old enough to suddenly comprehend it was probably not polite to blaspheme about their extremely important ceremony! Not that I knew what baptisms were for, or what blasphemy was, yet I still realized that's what I was about to do.

   Posted 2 years ago #
4. 

   Professor Marvel
   Member

   Both my parents are agnostics, but my mom had to promise my paternal grandmother on her deathbed (long before I was born) that she would continue to raise all us kids as Mormons (dad's family had pushed handcarts to Utah with Brigham Young-- and most of our cousins are still quite devout to this day).

   So we dutifully attended church a few times a year-- my dad usually just went to the Christmas service-- and my three sisters and two brothers and I had to attend something called primary once a week-- kind of like Sunday school I guess, but it met during the week. We were also frequently visited by missionaries, but if we saw them coming in time we would all shout "It's the Mormons!!" and run downstairs or out the back door and leave the folks to politely suffer through their lessons alone.

   I don't ever remember believing in god in those days, or even having any questions about whether god existed until I got to Junior High (but then, unfortunately, during my freshman year at college I went off the deep end and became a born-againer myself for several years, and learned during that time that the Mormons were a Devilish cult), but I still had to go to all those Mormon meetings anyway. Back then the Mormon church in town was just a big, regular house on the corner with no furniture inside but folding metal chairs set up in the large living room upstairs where services were held and downstairs where primary and kids' stuff took place. Baaaad memories, those.

   But I clearly remember one primary meeting down in that basement in particular. The lady teaching the class-- who was the mom of a girl in my grade, and frequently claimed to be able to trace her geneology all the way back to Adam and Eve, and was therefore considered quite looney by everybody in my family-- was discussing the Holy Ghost (as the Mormons always call the Holy Spirit). Unfortunately, just days before my brother had asked me if I knew why the Holy Ghost was so holy. I said no. He told me it was because he'd been shot with a machine gun.

   And so, believing the subject to be something I knew a bit about, I raised my hand, and when Mrs. R___ called on me, I asked her if she knew why the Holy Ghost was so holy. I'll never forget the stricken look on her face when I told her the part about the machine gun. And she turned as white as a blood-drained Holy Ghost with multiple gunshot wounds herself.

   Tragically, within a year or two after that, my older brother was killed in a farming accident. I guess my mom figured that pretty much released her from her promise to grandma and any obligation to a god who would take one of her children like that, and so I never had to go to primary again. We stopped going to church completely, but the missionaries kept coming around-- in fact they still visit the folks every week, forty years later. And they still politely listen to the lessons. But I had the distinct pleasure of shaking my head at two of them just last weekend when they showed up on my front porch ringing my doorbell, and I just slammed the door in their faces without so much as a word.

   Posted 2 years ago #
5. 

   beyonddeities
   Member

   Shit, Relles, that IS trippy.

   Posted 2 years ago #
6. 

   UrsaMinor
   Member

   My parents were both fairly low-key Christians, but felt that it was important to expose their kids to religion. We attended church every Sunday (Dutch Reformed Protestant, for the record), but we would always arrive after the sermon, which my parents didn't care for. My brother and I were shuffled off to our respective Sunday school classes and my parents would have coffee and chat with the other parents.

   And it all rolled right off me. For as far back as I have clear memories, I have always been puzzled by people's belief in the Jesus story and all its trappings. But there is such a thing as societal pressure to conform, so mostly I sat there and nodded and waited impatiently for the milk and cookies after class.

   I remember being told at the age of 7 or 8 by someone in the church that only God was all-powerful and only God could do thus-and-such. I forget the exact phenomenon under discussion, but I very clearly remember asking the question, "But what about Mother Nature? Isn't she as powerful as God?" The question was neither appreciated nor satisfactorily answered- the best they could do was argue that "Mother Nature" is a fictional personification of or shorthand reference to the forces of nature. But even back then, I felt that the same charge could be leveled against their concept of God.

   Anyway, this incident drove home the idea that maybe I'd better stop asking questions and keep my head down until I could make my escape from church at the age of 18. It's pretty scary to be an eight-year-old and to realize that you're surrounded by adults who hold totally irrational beliefs and that they expect you to believe in them too. The only thing that ever felt more surreal to me was the catechism classes when I was 14. The arguments for believing in Jesus Christ as one's personal lord and savior were all along the lines of "1 + 1 = purple".

   Posted 2 years ago #
7. 

   PuntyBunny
   Member

   @El - I LOVE the simple childish view. "saved from what? Don't know.."
   @Ursa - I find it interesting you say your parents were low key, but you went to church every week. From the outside, going every week seems pretty dedicated.
   @Rellas - I'd love to see THAT family tree chart. all the way back to adam & eve? Impressive. What the heck did she have there? I'm thinking she had about 5 generations then sort of a cloud, then adam & eve.
   Man....in about 5th grade I remember getting into the biggest arguments with the girl in my class who's parents ran the xtian book store. She was my age but always wore skirts to her ankles. Wonder what she's like now.

   Being raised outside any faith, I look back now & see so much of it was not about faith at all, but about control. I mean, what does it really matter if you wear a long skirt? Or don't cut your hair? To god, how could it matter? It's merely a way to reinforce the habit of obedience.

   Posted 2 years ago #
8. 

   Ty
   Moderator

   In my experience as a child growing up in a very religious family, god seems primarily interested in what you do with your naughty bits. Everything came back to that. Dress codes, drug and alcohol avoidance, bad association, everything was tied back to, "If you do this, you will wind up HAVING SEX!!!!!!!!!"

   Also, if you masturbate, it makes god sad. By the time I was 13, I must have had god popping prozac like tic tacs.

   Posted 2 years ago #
9. 

   LRA
   Member

   I still remember a particular thing we used to do in Sunday School when I was about 7 or 8... we sang "I'm in the Lord's Army" and we pointed our fingers like we had a gun and shot satan:

   I'm in the Lord's army...
   <bang, bang>
   I'm in the Lord's army...
   <bang, bang>

   I may never march in the infantry,
   ride in the calvary,
   shoot the artillery,
   I may never fly over the enemy,
   But I'm in the Lord's army.

   Posted 2 years ago #
10. 

    Ty
    Moderator

    Wow.

    Posted 2 years ago #
11. 

    Jeremy
    Member

    I did the Lord's Army one too.

    For the grown-ups there was "Onward Christian Soldier". When the United Church of Canada removed that one from their hymn books for being too militant, my church sang it every Sunday for a month. It was our protest. We still wanted to be militant!

    I look back on this stuff in my past and I just have to shake my head.

    Posted 2 years ago #
12. 

    esoteric
    Member

    I don't suppose I have any trippy adventures...

    My parents would definitely be classified as non-religious, but they believe in some sort of unspecified something... high power... whatever. Never-the-less my family is traditionally (modern) Mennonite Christian, so we went to church, Sunday school and said a grace before dinner.

    I don't remember many exact thoughts I had about the whole thing. You know when you grow up with something, you don't really start to question it until a certain age or experience. I WAS pretty young when I asked my parents why, exactly, we were going to church, because I just didn't get it. They didn't have a very good answer, so we stopped. At that point I didn't know I was an "atheist".

    One specific memory I have is from elementary school, somewhere around grade 3-5. We were having a school "garbage pick-up" around the yard, and the team that had the most garbage won a prize. I distinctly remember thinking something along the lines of, "Okay God, I don't really believe in you, but if you're up there, please let me win this competition". We didn't, and that was probably a good thing! I was always a thinking kid though, my favourite books were the science experiment books at the local small town library, and my weekends were filled with tromping around the countryside, wondering how things worked.

    Posted 2 years ago #
13. 

    UrsaMinor
    Member

    @PuntyBunny: when I say that my parents were low-key Christians, I mean that they never stressed the whole Jesus-is-your-Lord-and-Savior thing, and neither one of them appeared to toe the official line of Dutch Reformed theology. We did not say grace at meals, or read the bible, or do or say anything overtly religious outside of church. No bedtime prayers for me, my choice of reading material was totally unrestricted, and the atmosphere was pro-science and pro-reason for the most part (with notable exceptions to pro-reason for politics, i.e. a Democrat and a Republican might perform exactly the same acts while in office, but the Democrat is trying to ruin our country and the Republican is trying to defend it).

    I always got the impression that my father was merely Christian by culture and had never really thought about it; he certainly did not appear to have any strong religious convictions. We never discussed theology, although we did have lots of talks about science and the exciting possibility that there might be intelligent alien life out there somewhere. My mother, on the other hand, is clearly very attached to the idea of a loving and benevolent father-god and doesn’t seem to assign much weight to the Jesus part. When people suffer random setbacks in life, she proclaims it to be God’s will and is really big on the “when He closes one door, He opens another” school of thought. I find this curious, as she firmly rejects the idea of predestination (she actually left the Dutch Reformed church over this issue), but still believes that God ordains certain events in our lives by fiat. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

    My mother definitely does *not* believe that you have to be Christian to go to heaven, only that you have to be a good person (defined, more or less, as someone who follows the Golden Rule). She has become much more of a regular churchgoer in the past twenty years, and has chosen, of all things, a liberal Baptist church that about as far to the left as Baptist churches can go. It is welcoming to gays and the pastor will cheerfully perform union ceremonies for same-sex couples, which she has tried to use as a selling point to get me and my partner interested in attending. We are both atheists and have made that clear, but every once in a while she will still mention some special church service or speaker that she is sure would interest us. I honestly don’t know what her motive for trying to get us into church is, as she does not believe that we are going to Hell for being gay or being atheists.

    Posted 2 years ago #
14. 

    Darwin
    Member

    I started having serious doubts when I was 8. I then completely stopped believing in God when I was 12. It was pretty hard getting here considering live in Pakistan, a country where 98% of the population is Muslim and pretty much nobody is openly atheist, if there are any atheists at all.

    Posted 2 years ago #
15. 

    UrsaMinor
    Member

    I'm sure there are other atheists in Pakistan, Darwin. They just have to be very, very quiet about it for their own safety. This used to be the case in Europe centuries ago- during the worst periods of oppression, you either professed to be Catholic, or were killed.

    Atheists are not popular in the United States today. If word gets out that you are an atheist, any political career that you aspire to is probably doomed. The public doesn't seem to care much what your religion is, as long as you've got one. OK, maybe they're a little shaky about the neopagans, but neopagans are still held in higher regard than atheists. Atheists rank at the bottom of every public opinion poll in the U.S.- less trusted as a group than lawyers, homosexuals or used car salesmen.

    I don't expect to encounter physical violence against me because of my atheism (not in this part of the country, anyway), but I do expect a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination. I can't imagine how hard it would be to be an atheist in a Muslim country.

    Posted 2 years ago #
16. 

    Darwin
    Member

    Well, I know one atheist in total. And I wouldn't really be so afraid to talk about being an atheist if I hadn't been born in a Muslim family.

    Posted 2 years ago #

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