something queer going on

From the question-a-day meme.

August 6: Did you choose your current profession/job or somehow just end up in it?

Ended up in it by virtue of leaving academia at what turned out to be the start of a major recession, being unemployed for over two years, and discovering that while a Ph.D. in English is a disqualification for almost any other job, retail stores at Christmas will hire anybody.


August 7: Whether you grew up any sort of religious or not, do you, now on an adult level, still share the same faith or lack of one/attend the same church or denomination/practice the same spiritual system that you had growing up?

It's complicated? My mother, while culturally Christian, wasn't religious in any sense that I'm aware of, and whatever religious or spiritual beliefs my stepfather (who was Native American, of the Anishinabe people) had, he kept to himself.* But I was sent to church for a while in my childhood, for reasons I don't really understand and it's now too late to ask about. There was a church in walking distance from us (and I grew up very rural; this church was literally the only thing within reasonable walking distance of us), and I think my mother probably thought I might make friends there, or something. I was also sent to Bible camp during several summers, on what I guess were similar grounds: that I might make friends, that it was free (it must have been free), and that my mother wanted a break. (Narrator: Kit did not make friends at Bible camp. He memorized a lot of Bible verses, though.)

So I was, for a while, a believing Christian. The church was fundamentalist Baptist; I never acquired anything like a coherent spirituality or theology, and there probably wasn't one. I remember being very confused about how you were damned if you sinned, but if you accepted Jesus into your heart you were saved, so I ended up privately re-accepting Jesus as my savior every time I thought I'd done something bad. (Confession and absolution would probably have made more sense to me, but my mother's background was Protestant so she might not have sent me to a Catholic church even if that had been the nearby one.)

I stopped believing in my early teens, spent a decade and a half wishy-washily describing myself as "agnostic" and occasionally trying to have faith, and eventually became a convinced atheist under the dual influences of properly learning about how evolution works and reading some bits of the Bible that I'd never read before. It's all the fault of Stephen Jay Gould and the story of Jacob and Esau, specifically the story of how Jacob cheats Esau out of their father's blessing. I bounced hard off the fact that there was only one blessing, and decided that there was nothing loving or divine in the whole fucking book.**

So in a way, I guess I am in the same irreligious tradition as my mother, though I've probably struggled with it more than she did.


*There were some traditions he talked about a bit. But between his own trauma--he was forced to go to one of those boarding schools in the 1940s--and some things being secret, and the fact that he and I weren't close, that's all I know.

**I have no doubt that Jewish thinkers, in particular, have developed loving spiritual interpretations of the text. Part of my strong reaction came from the literalistic, fundamentalist Christianity I'd been exposed to, one that basically foreclosed interpretation. I mention this because I don't want to reproduce a common kind of atheistic anti-semitism, that itself pretty much reproduces Christian anti-semitism around interpreting the "Old Testament."

I missed a day, so I'm going to post about that day's topic today and defer today's topic until tomorrow.

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 )