Easter 1911, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York.
Credit: Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog.

My partner and I went to church today. More accurately, he went to church and I tagged along. He’s a minister and works every Sunday. Easter being a big day, and him even preaching today and all, I went for moral support.

When I attend religious services, I stand and sit appropriately, out of respect. Other than that, I feel like a dog in church. There are interesting sensations: frankincense lingering from the morning service, the smell and feel of old wood, vivid colors from the sun shining through stained glass, music and the song of human voices. When it’s my choice to do so, I enjoy such experiences in my own way, without feeling that I betray myself, or disrespect those around me.

I don’t remember how old I was – 13 or 14. My parents were getting ready to goto church. I wasn’t. They asked why I wasn’t getting ready.

I’m not going to church.
Why not?
Because I don’t believe in God.

I came out to my parents as an atheist that Easter morning 35 years ago. I didn’t go to church that day, nor for many years after that. It was a moral choice for me. I did not want to act out something I did not believe.

Throughout my school years, “home room” was the first classroom assembly of the day, before classes began. Attendance was taken and announcements were made. And we recited the Pledge of Allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I became increasingly uncomfortable with following this ritual. In 1975, my senior year of high school, I decided to stop standing for the recitation of the Pledge. When challenged, I gave my reasons: I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe in God. I didn’t believe that there was “liberty and justice for all.”

This precipitated intimidation and harassment to get me to comply. Other faculty and administrative staff came to home room to question me, and stand and glare at me while I sat during the pledge. Other students in the classroom shoved my desk and called me “godless, commie fag” (though they could not have known how technically accurate that was, since I wasn’t out yet). Word got out. I was physically threatened in the hallways between classes.

I knew it was my right to refuse to stand. I never discussed the First Amendment. I wasn’t refusing to stand just to make a point. I simply did not want to be compelled to act in hypocrisy to my beliefs and feelings. I didn’t think it was right.

Faculty and staff gradually relented. Harassment from other students continued sporadically. I don’t remember how long this went on before another student, a friend of mine, also refused to stand. She was also challenged, but she was not physically harassed or threatened as far as I know. Another day, another student refused to stand. By the end of the school year, the morning Pledge had been abandoned in my home room class. I assume it continued in others.

I didn’t learn until much later that the phrase “under God” was added just four years before I was born.

Related posts:

• Blog Against Theocracy, March 28
• Poem: Speak for Yourself (Blog Against Theocracy #1)
• Blog Against Theocracy #2: Childhood

Links:

• Blog Against Theocracy
• Americans United for Separation of Church and State
• First Freedom First

Technorati Tags: blog against theocracy

Credit: I Speak of Dreams

I’m an atheist. I was raised Catholic, but it didn’t take.

A Secular Education

I went to public schools. I was usually the “smartest” kid in the class. (I now know there are many kinds of intelligence, not all of which enjoy conventional rewards.) I was a teacher’s pet, a favorite of my peers (not).

To keep me interested, I was given more challenging assignments, advanced reading. Dr. Seuss replaced Dick and Jane, then science fiction and non-fiction replaced Dr. Seuss. When I finished my assignments early, I got to read or study topics of my choosing. I taught myself origami from books. I studied oceanography and marine biology. I read a book about Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift, and the then-new (in the mid-1960s) discovery of the mid-oceanic ridges and plate tectonics. I studied botany – flower structures and pollinators – on my own. I developed multimedia presentations on these topics and presented them to my class, and to whole class assemblies in the cafeteria.

I was a nerd. I was inquisitive. I was hungry for knowledge. I was encouraged to question.

So when I began to go to Sunday school, catechism class, I approached it the same way. It was just something else to learn, another course of study, another body of knowledge to master. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to question.

I was 10 years old, an atheist in formation.

What I Learned in Sunday School

There were three specific questions I remember asking, for which the answers were inadequate and unsatisfactory. In fact, this was when I learned they were wrong, no matter the authority to which they laid claim. My atheism was forged in Sunday school.

Our catechism textbooks had the same style as the Dick and Jane readers, a watercolor romanticization and idealization of some notion of childhood (a very, very white childhood). One of the paintings in the book showed a boy playing with a toy boat in the water. He was using a stick to push the boat, leaning out to reach, clearly in danger of falling in. Standing behind him was a guardian angel. You could tell it was an angel because you could see through it and it had wings. The angel was half reaching out toward him, but not reaching him.

Question: Will the guardian angel save the boy?
Answer: No.
Q: Will the angel warn the boy?
A: No.
Q: Then what good is it?! (Not my exact words, but to that effect.)
A: The guardian angel is there to take the boy’s soul to heaven.

Now this made no sense, on so many levels. Wasn’t the boy going to go to heaven anyway? Wouldn’t the boy’s soul go to heaven without the guardian angel? Was it going to get lost after he died? Was there some kind of spectral devil-wolf that was going to come out of the dark woods of the afterlife and consume the soul unless the angel was there to guard it?

That was Strike #1.

Then there was the whole baptism thing. For the uninitiated, Catholic doctrine of the time (I’ve heard rumors of revisionism, but frankly, there’s no point in me keeping up on current events in the Catholic Church) stated that, because of Original Sin, you had to be baptised to go to heaven. Which led to the following exchange:

Q: Do unbaptised babies go to heaven?
A: No.
Q: Why not? It’s not their fault.
A: Original Sin.
Q: Why are they being punished for something they didn’t do?
A: They’re not being punished.
Q: But they don’t get to be with God. (Okay, not really a question.)
Q: So where do they go?
A: They go to limbo.
Q: But that’s not heaven.
A: It’s not hell, either.

As a child I understood that denying reward was punishment. Neglect is abuse, no matter who your daddy is. The innocent were being punished for something they did not do. This destroyed any moral authority the church had in my mind. This was Strike #2.

Finally, the coup de grace, Strike #3:

Q: When I die and go to heaven, will my dog Smokey be there?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Animals don’t have souls.

Whoa. I knew my dog Smokey loved me. He was the clearest, purest source of unconditional love in my life. He expected nothing of me. He didn’t care what grades I got in school. He wanted nothing more than to run in the yard with me, chase me, pull off my sneakers, and wrestle with me on the ground. He was my protector, powerful, strong, and devoted. If I had a soul, then so did he.

And I didn’t want any part of their heaven. An eternity without animals was hell, not heaven. Just like the Twilight Zone episode.

So that was it. I knew they were wrong: logical and morally wrong. They were lying to me. I didn’t understand why, but I knew they were. They were not to believed. Everything they had claimed to be true was open to question.

So I did.

[Continued]

Related posts:

• Blog Against Theocracy, March 28
• Poem: Speak for Yourself (Blog Against Theocracy #1)
• Blog Against Theocracy #3: Adolescence

Links:

• Blog Against Theocracy
• Americans United for Separation of Church and State
• First Freedom First

Technorati Tags: blog against theocracy