My story is probably not that interesting (until the more recent stuff) since I was never a believer. I vaguely recall kindergarten Sunday school and having doubts about the creation story. My family attended church off and on, due to my mother’s prodding. Mom might be considered Christian-lite and my dad is probably a weak agnostic. As a boy, I recall going to weekend cub scout event but if you didn’t attend the really wishy-washy church service you had to help in the kitchen (it was more fun anyway!). I left out “under god” during the Pledge in school (nobody noticed). A few years later, my mom made me attend confirmation classes but I thought it was a bunch of nonsense. Shortly after that we switched to a more modern Episcopal church where the minister would occasional swear and I even joined the choir (good snacks!). Too busy or not interested in church during high school. As a college student I never attended church but had a couple of strange experiences with the “faithful”. There was the student down the hall who sent 10% of his financial aid to the church and I remember thinking that was just wrong. There was a fundie classmate who was into the whole young earth creationist thing. This kind of blew me away since we were both in the cell and molecular biology program at a large research university. He refused to answer questions dealing with evolution and even showed me his exams with the zeros. I respected his determination but not the arguments. Up until this point I would probably consider myself a weak agnostic, other than a few run-ins with these characters, religion just had little impact on my life.

In graduate school I met a woman who was catholic. She was not that hard-core, though there were a couple of things she was strict about like not missing church and Lent. I cheerfully followed along, perhaps feeling like I did something “good” by attending church. After a couple of years dating, we married and had two beautiful, intelligent kids. Slowly the Catholicism was replaced by fundamentalist protestant Christianity. It started with a Bible study class which lead to Sunday *night* services and sometimes Wednesday prayer meetings, AWANA, Vacation Bible Study and other stuff. Our library is filled with books by CS Lewis, James Dobson, Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell and related ilk. I attend Sunday morning service but have made it clear that it is only to “keep the peace”. All of our friends are church members, so it is hard to develop more than superficial friendships. I can only protest in silly little ways; by *not* singing at church, *not* bowing my head during prayer in church, small contributions to the collection plate (to pay for the air) despite several pleas that god will bless us if we cough up 10%. I’ve told my wife she is free to get a job to pay her 10% but she is so tied up with bible studies that won’t happen. In an odd way this has made me much more liberal on many issues. We don’t attend any charismatic churches and I have told her that there will be serious problems if she moves in that direction.

So we have this impasse. I don’t know if religion has helped my wife become a fantastic mother but on other hand I know it has mediocre wife. To be fair, she probably feels the same way about me. We both know that if things were done all over again under the current conditions we never would have had a second date, so yeah, valentine’s and anniversaries are a bit awkward.

As my children are approaching the end of their high school years they will be under less influence from their mother. There are several looming issues pertaining to college. Their mother has really played up very conservative colleges. I fear attending one of these schools will lock them into a network of like-minded peers, alienating me even further. At this point, the kids have what they think of as a strong faith, is it my job to tear that down? This is a very difficult position, whether a secular or christian university, one parent is going to be disappointed. So in some ways I hope my story is a bit of warning to those consider being “unequally yoked”. From what I’ve observed, people tend to get more conservative in their religious views as time goes on, especially when children are involved.

I was raised a good Christian in a place where religion was a way of life. I lived in the province of Quebec which, at the time, was almost a theocracy. The laws of the province prevented the dissemination of birth control information and divorce was not possible. As a result Quebec had the highest birth rate in Canada. I was a member of a small minority of people who spoke English and were Protestant. I never understood why French speaking Catholics hated us as a group and I had to defend myself from attacks both physical and verbal.

I was as fervent a believer in God and Christianity as anyone. I loved the idea that there was a being who loved me and protected me from harm. I felt safe as long as I knew God was on my side and I tried hard to behave in a proper Christian manner.

Around the age of 9 I started to notice things that didn’t make sense to me. The people who were teaching me to be a good Christian didn’t seem to follow their own rules. I was not treated especially well by any of them. I thought they must be either very stupid or insane. How could anyone risk an eternity in Hell by not following the rules that God made? Since I was much younger and probably not as smart as any of the ministers or Sunday school teachers I reasoned that something else must be happening.

After a year or so of trying to figure out why the people in my church didn’t practice what they preached, the reason struck me one day. They didn’t want me to treat them the way they treated me. Then it started to make some sense. The threats of eternal damnation were their protection from evil.

Over the next 5 years or so I noticed more and more things in all religions that made no sense. I had the privilege of attending school with children from many countries who belonged to many different religions. That gave me a perfect opportunity to make comparisons. I had a few friends who were very interested in religion and we spent a lot of time reading the Bible. We stumbled on many passages that nobody in church ever mentioned. That made me even more suspicious of religious teachings.

By the time I was 15 I had become absolutely convinced that no religion had any basis for its beliefs. I rejected any supernatural explanations for what we see in the universe.

During my last year of high school I went to live with my older sister and her family. My sister’s family were Jehovah’s Witnesses and tried hard to convert me. We had regular debates on many subjects and I had to do a lot of research to defend my beliefs. As a result my atheist position became increasingly solid as one religious argument after another was shown to be false. I have continued looking into religions and to this day I have not found a good reason to believe the teachings of any one of them.

My parents never attended church, to my knowledge. They certainly never went while I was living under their roof. My Mother, I suppose due to her upbringing in North Carolina, had some screwy notions about Sunday, however. She had a standing rule, in fact, that we could not go out and play on Sunday unless we attended church. Otherwise, please don’t ask me to explain the logic behind it, we would be committing some kind of sacrilege. So, if I woke up on Sunday morning and it was raining, in which case I knew I wasn’t going to be allowed to go outside anyway, I just rolled over and went back to sleep. Otherwise, I hopped out of bed, dug out what passed for my Sunday-Go-To-Meetings and trundled off to whatever church we were directed to attend at the time. Usually a Protestant or Reformed Baptist of some sort or another. Definitely not EVER a Catholic or so influenced one. Again, something sinister there, to be avoided at all costs.

Anyway…

I was not cut out for religion. Just didn’t work, one with the other. They were forever trying to force feed me all these bullshit stories and ideologues and I was just as consistently asking them to please explain the unexplainable.

Your average conversation would go something like this:

“Okay, so where did his wife come from..?”
“The Land of Nod.”
“Okay, but I thought you just said that him, his now dead brother and his parents were the only human beings on the planet at the time.”
“Well, yes, but..”
“Okay, then who was this woman he married..? His sister?”
“Of course not, son. That would be a sin.”
“I understand, but that doesn’t really answer my question.”
“Some things you just have to take on faith, young man. It is not for you to question the wisdom of your elders, in any event.”

Etcetera.

Or..

“Really.. and how did they get all those animals on that boat? What did they feed them, anyway?”

And don’t even get me started on the Holy Trinity. Or angels. Or the Jews in bondage. (Amazing how the Egyptians, as a matter of fact, have no record anywhere of them ever being there. I mean, we’re talking about people who were so anal about keeping records that people who were actually expunged from history still somehow managed to get logged in. And, come on.. how many hundred thousand souls wandering in the desert for forty years and no-one noticed them passing by? Where’s their trash, for chrissake?) I mean, I went round and round with these people on these subjects, for years, with the same result each and every time. It was either something I was supposed to accept on faith or that which I, as a child/teenager/young adult had no business questioning in the first place.

And do not, for a single moment think that I didn’t look long and hard at this. Yes, I lived with Jesus Freaks in California, but it wasn’t just because it seemed like a kick to hang out with them for a month plus. I really did want to know what it was they were so enthused about. I really wanted to know if they actually had found an answer to all this. But, in the end, I came away, as I always came away, whether it be from a Baptist church, a Pentecostal Revival, Latter Day Saint or Jehovah Witness gathering, or any of a number of other attempts to understand this thing, with the same exact feeling. It was all bullshit. It IS all bullshit.

And, of course, in the intervening years, I have dug even deeper and found truths that none of them want anyone to be aware of. That all of it, every last syllable in fact, has been, in one way or another, borrowed from some other, far older, belief system, that, in most cases, it has supplanted. Jesus Christ, whether or not such a man even existed, is but an amalgam of several other like figures, right down to the day of his birth and the fashion of his death and resurrection.

But still they persist in their spurious claims that all of this crap is not only the true word of their myopic, angry and jealous god, but that their linear notions of time, space and humanity’s place in the Universe should take precedence over even clearly defined scientific realities. As if, for all continents and porpoises, knowable reality does not actually exist. (See: Creationism; aka Intelligent Design)