December meme: my atheism
Dec. 16th, 2013 05:45 pmI missed a day, so I'm going to post about that day's topic today and defer today's topic until tomorrow.
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shadowvalkyrie asked me to post about being an atheist who is interested in religion.
I didn't start calling myself an atheist until I was in my late twenties or early thirties, although for a long time before that I would have described myself as "not religious." My parents weren't religious, although we were culturally Christian in the sense of celebrating Christmas and Easter in a thoroughly secularized way. However, my mom started sending me to Sunday school when I was a school-age kid. I'm not sure why, but I think it had a lot to do with my mom realizing I had no friends and hoping I could find some there. Since religion wasn't the point, she sent me to the only church anywhere near our house (I grew up in a very very rural area), which was Baptist and, as I see in retrospect, super fundamentalist. I also went to Bible camp a few times; either it was free or I got a scholarship, because there's no way my parents could have afforded a sleepaway camp.
I didn't make friends, though at Bible camp I won all the prizes for memorizing Bible verses. I believed pretty fervently for a while, but by the time I was a teenager that was over. I stopped attending church for a variety of reasons, one of which was that it emerged that the pastor of the Baptist church had been horrifically abusing his wife and children.
I was indifferent verging on hostile to religion as a teenager apart from a brief Goddess-worshipping pagan phase (I blame Marion Zimmer Bradley for that), then went through a period in my twenties where I very much wanted to believe, but couldn't. ( click here to read more )
shadowvalkyrie asked me to post about being an atheist who is interested in religion.I didn't start calling myself an atheist until I was in my late twenties or early thirties, although for a long time before that I would have described myself as "not religious." My parents weren't religious, although we were culturally Christian in the sense of celebrating Christmas and Easter in a thoroughly secularized way. However, my mom started sending me to Sunday school when I was a school-age kid. I'm not sure why, but I think it had a lot to do with my mom realizing I had no friends and hoping I could find some there. Since religion wasn't the point, she sent me to the only church anywhere near our house (I grew up in a very very rural area), which was Baptist and, as I see in retrospect, super fundamentalist. I also went to Bible camp a few times; either it was free or I got a scholarship, because there's no way my parents could have afforded a sleepaway camp.
I didn't make friends, though at Bible camp I won all the prizes for memorizing Bible verses. I believed pretty fervently for a while, but by the time I was a teenager that was over. I stopped attending church for a variety of reasons, one of which was that it emerged that the pastor of the Baptist church had been horrifically abusing his wife and children.
I was indifferent verging on hostile to religion as a teenager apart from a brief Goddess-worshipping pagan phase (I blame Marion Zimmer Bradley for that), then went through a period in my twenties where I very much wanted to believe, but couldn't. ( click here to read more )
