The Night I Stopped Believing

I remember, distinctly, the moment I had my doubts about God. It was 1967, and when I consider the year in retrospect, it must have been a very big season for atheist conversion.

I was in Catholic school, in Los Angeles. I was nine. I was just starting to read newspapers and magazines about current events.

My teacher, Sister Jude, had shocked the hell out of her little charges one Monday, by showing up in class without her strict habit, and with her hair showing. Nuns were traditionally covered from forehead to foot with long robes and veils— it was incomprehensible to imagine they had figures or hairlines.

Sister informed us there was going to be an open-air Mass against the war the very next Sunday. She no longer wished to entertain the top religious issue of our fourth-grade class, which was whether you could go to hell for playing with Ouija boards. No, she wanted to talk about Vietnam. She was questioning the big picture, and I loved her so much, that I wanted to read whatever she was reading, hear whatever she was hearing. I wanted to touch her hair.

I wonder if Sr. Jude still believes in God today— since she was the one who set me on my path of wondering, "If there is a God, why doesn't He stop the killing?"

I'm sure many of you remember the first time in your childhood that you became aware of mass suffering, and the way your little heart broke in incomprehension. As a sheltered white-kid American, I was only watching genocide on TV, or reading about it in books. My prayers and rosaries at night turned almost entirely to world events, and I barely managed to squeeze in my conventional pledges to not think bad thoughts about my chores, or to obey my mother without complaint.

The nuns in our school, St. Rita's, were under the sway of Sister Corita and the Immaculate Heart Order in Hollywood. This group was far to the left of what were called the "lay" teachers at our school, who were exemplified by our Parish Girl Scout Troop Leader, "Mrs. Scott."

Mrs. Scott, for example, was purple with rage— and also a little tipsy— over John Lennon's comment that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus. She demanded that our entire troop organize a record burning.

(I must insert here: although I was a Brownie and Girl Scout for three years, I never once went on a camping trip, nor learned one knot, or any outdoor activity. We took up no  cause besides burning infidel materials. We were taught to knit, and set the table correctly— that was it.)

But when Mrs. Scott would occasionally go AWOL, we played  our Beatles albums in the parish basement, and danced and screamed ourselves into what can only be described as an erotic frenzy. I peed in my pants to "Ticket to Ride" one afternoon, things got so out of hand.

I had three LP's and two 45's which I had bought with my own babysitting money— and there was NO way I was going to burn them. It wasn't my beloved John's fault that his music was more talked about than Jesus; he was just noting the obvious!

My last blog story about modern religion is currently reprinted on Alternet's news site, which has a much bigger pool of readers than we do here at my journal— including many liberal and self-described Left-Wing Christians. Like Sister Jude, perhaps!

One of them responded to my story with this critique:

It will take Christian insiders to reform the church. The fundamentalist bashers, like [Susie], will do little to change the Christian mind. It's easy to sit on your high horse and bitch. Go do something! Join a church and reform it.

I found this remark unintentionally humorous— and very Protestant! I truly do enjoy the variety of perspective, don't get me wrong. But this particular comment made me recall my 1967 "conversion" all over again.

I definitely was influenced by people inside the church— Sister Jude, for example, and my own mother's criticism and doubts of her strict Catholic upbringing. I was also influenced by people I despised in our church community, like Mrs. Scott, or the notorious Principal Sister Corinna, who one day smeared every 4th-grade boy's face with dog feces— no lie—  as a punishment for insubordination. If they were what "Godliness" was about, I wanted nothing to do with it.

But I was also influenced by outsiders. Lots of them, most of whom I can't name, and almost entirely in print and music. Little pitchers have big ears, and they also read under the covers with flashlights. I read newspapers and magazines with anti-war critiques, and some of the authors were crystal on the subject of their non-belief. They despised the imperialist displays of God and Country, and they recruited my sympathies. They were smart. They poked holes in things.

At the same time, I was only eight. I have a clear memory of getting on my knees, clasping my jump-rope-calloused hands together, and speaking to God one night at bedtime:

"I don't know if I believe in you anymore. But I am talking to you just in case you are. If you're really there, then I'll be sorry, and I'll join a convent when I'm grown-up, and make it up to you. But for right now, I'm not going to to Confession anymore, and I'm not going to believe in you anymore, and I hope you don't get too mad."

I kept that promise rumbling in my head for years afterward, that if my nubile agnosticism proved wrong, I would join the gnarliest convent ever, and scrub a million floors to get back in God's good graces.

It wasn't just Vietnam. Or John Lennon. It was everything, from my growing awareness of my own family strife, to discovering masturbation, to being inspired by the counter-culture breaking out all around me. I just didn't see what God had to do with it— it seemed like people themselves were the ones making our destiny, however glorious or tragic.

After years of hedging my bets, at fourteen, I had a turning point. It was an unprepossessing occasion: I was taken one evening by an older family friend to some kind of Unitarian Jewish get-together in Santa Monica— don't ask! It was a potluck.

Something about the onset of puberty, and speaking to a number of eclectic-thinking adults that night, it struck me that many of them didn't believe in God; they believed in what you might call "right livelihood," by a progressive perspective. They didn't have any lingering doubts. They had a heritage, but they didn't have a "faith." They were activists, not prayer-folk. As much as they were Jewish atheists, I was an Irish Catholic atheist. You could be both at the same time! I climbed out of my foxhole; the relief was palatable.

I had my last little "chat with God" that night. I spoke to myself, walking out into the Ocean Park air:

"Uh, this is ridiculous, but for the record, since I made this promise in a prayer, I'm breaking it in a prayer. I am not building or joining a convent. There is no there there. Thanks for the memories."

The critics who tell people like me to "go join a church" crack me up. I am a product of Church! I spent more time on my knees than they can ever fucking imagine. I told Jesus everything! Look at that earnest picture of me going my first Communion, and you can see everything you need to know about my faith.

I didn't get "off a high horse." I tearfully, and painfully, stepped off a cliff. I was terrified of going to hell, but even at my age, I'd had enough glimpses of people's private hell, and public blood-thirsts, to wonder if there was anything worse than the fire we create here on earth.

I was profoundly influenced by the nonbelievers who spoke out around me. Thank... goodness! — they were outspoken when my reality began to unravel. To grow up around writers and speakers who defied "God," and defied God-belief, saved me, truly. I would've been eaten up by despair, fear, and  self-loathing without them. Thank you Sister Jude, thank you John, Paul, George, and Ringo, Thank you, L.A. Free Press!

Science, history, and art, picked me up off the floor and gave me so much to hope for— a touching salvation if there ever was one.  I'll never be  an "outsider" to the Catholic religion— old cult members never lose the twitch!— but my years as their child-exploited soldier and victim are over.

I wonder, have any of you had a "Come to Atheism" moment instead of a "Come to Jesus" moment?

My lover, for example, was brought up atheist, and finds my history to be quite Gothic. And of course, I have many friends who are spiritual in various respects, but don't go to traditional churches, or proselytize. I even have friends who are Jesuits— wow, talk about great conversationalists.

—Just to be clear, I'm not interested in converting or "reforming" anyone— tolerance is my bag— but I'm eager to hear your stories of when you might have realized you didn't carry traditional "faith" anymore, or when your childhood notion of "God" exploded.

Did you pray when you were a child? Did you stop? Why? Are you in or out of the foxhole? I still have my Communion rosary.. and since today's the eve of All Saints, I think I'll wear it!

Photos:

"Susie received our Dear Lord in Holy Communion on April 30, 1966, at the Church of St. Isadore from Father Benson, Age 8."

Macy's, San Francisco, 1964,  where I am telling Santa Claus ALL ABOUT Baby Jesus.

Catholic Girl Scout Troop, Sierra Madre, 1967. Note lack of badges.

I was rarely photographed outside of Sunday Mass preparations. This is Easter, Riverside, 1966.

"Susie said her First Prayer, "The Our Father," with Mother's Help when 7 Years Old."

"On April 29, 1966, our Dear Lord showed His Mercy when Susie made her First Confession to Father Benson at 8 years old."

All  text from my Catholic Baby Record, "published with ecclesiastical approbation."

Comments

[dap]

From where I’m standing, it looks as if you might have found God and lost the Church. There’s a big difference, and thank you for finding your spirit within. Personally, I was raised a Quaker; we’re a pretty tolerant bunch.

[Greta Christina]

Beautiful post, Susie.

I was raised agnostic, so my deconversion wasn't from a childhood indoctrination of traditional religious belief. It was from the woo-woo beliefs I picked up when I was taking too many drugs in college. I have only myself to blame. :-)

And my deconversion was also a gradual dawning followed by a dramatic turning point. The gradual dawning came from all the reading I was doing about neuroscience and how the brain works, and the increasing realization that my belief in some sort of immortal metaphysical substance inhabiting my body was just wishful thinking, completely unsupported by the research.

The dramatic turning point came when I had general anaesthesia for (minor) surgery -- and realized that a small amount of chemicals injected into my veins had completely eradicated my consciousness and selfhood, far more thoroughly than sleep ever had or could. It was the most powerful experience of non-being I ever had (apart from being conceived and born, I suppose, but of course I don't remember that). After that, I could no longer convince myself that my consciousness and selfhood would somehow survive the total decay of my body and brain into dust and nothingness.

Very hard and painful at the time... but very liberating afterwards.

[Stan]

For what it's worth, I was raised atheist. Religion was like watching football in our house. It was just something that *other people* did on Sundays.

[Sandrino]

I did time in a Catholic school from 5th grade to high school graduation. These guys weren't just any priests, they were Dominicans. The same ones who thought the inquisition was a great idea. They apparently hadn't got the memo that the inquisition was over.

I remember clearly being told that only Roman Catholics went to heaven no matter how good a person you might have been in life. That never made any sense to me. Why would god be so cruel? After all who decides where and to whom you are born, if not for god? How could god punish a child that was born to non Roman Catholic parents and who didn't have the foresight to live near some missionaries who could convert him to Roman Catholicism? How fucked up was that? This from a loving, all knowing, all powerful god? It could not be like that.

In a way Catholic school itself is responsible for my lack of any religious belief. If I had not experienced Catholic dogma head on and seen the tremendous inconsistencies up close, I might not have broken free. I don't like the term Atheist. I don't believe in UFOs or the Tooth Faerie, that doesn't make me an Aufoist or atooth faerieist. I rather define myself by what I do believe in, reality, I am a Realist.

[Kate]

I was brought up Church of England, in England, which is a pervasive but vague culture. But, yes, I had my moment of coming to atheism, and it was related to the Guiding movement, too.

Aged about 9, I had written a prayer for the Remebrance Day service at the local church, and I had to read it in my Brownie uniform in front of the congregation. The thing is, I knew there was nothing of God in it: it was bad writing cobbled together from things I'd heard and what I knew I was meant to think. I honestly thought, as I opened my mouth to speak, that what I was doing was such blasphemy that I would be struck down by God and/ or denounced by everyone in front of me.

But I wasn't. Everyone seemed to be fooled by this tripe. So, suddenly, I had the sense that God just wasn't there.

[Naamah]

I wasn't raised to believe in the great celestial white dude so I had nothing to rebel against. And I never had any cognitive dissonance over the world's unfairness - I knew very young that the world was not a benevolent place. Yet I felt there was more to all this than we could see.

I built a spiritual life based in mythology. I studied exhaustively. Campbell, Graves, Frazer, these were my holy books. I delighted in discovering the continuity of deities from one culture to another, I found comfort in the myth of the dying god, and the presence of his mother. I felt filled with the strength of the hunting virgin, the blood-thirst of the war witch. I sought guidance from the crone. And I did not fear, because even death was just another of her faces. My faith was not shaken by the evil that humans do to one another. I did not assume that my deity was always benevolent or kind, or that it would dispense answers to prayers like some cosmic gumball machine. I expected nothing more than what I got. I was happy.

That ended. I suppose the story must be common enough. I had a bad couple of years in my early twenties. I can't bring home to you the ugliness of that time. Just assume that it was as cruel and as grueling as anything you've ever known. I had nothing. I was hurt and betrayed and left to bleed alone. Unknown to me, I was bipolar, and in an unmedicated death-spiral of depression. And during that time, I lost my faith. I don't understand how it happened, but it withered and died.

It broke me. I had panic attacks two or three times a day, terrified of death, of non-being. I would lie curled into a ball screaming myself hoarse. I cried when I could no longer scream. The worst of it would go on for an hour, two hours, at at time -- far longer than the literature says panic attacks usually last. Torture? Most people can't imagine.

I could barely leave the house or eat. Without the knowledge that someone was there, without knowing that I would survive this life and its ending in some form, I could not function. I lived with that for a year and a half, maybe two years. Obviously, something was wrong on a very deep level -- I needed help. I was just too poor to get it. Even $20 therapy from trainees was beyond my reach. I just had to walk on the broken leg until it healed. I had to walk alone.

I have picked myself up and gone on. I have seen death, seen how merciful it is, even as it is cruel. I have buried my mother and her parents all in one year, all after prolonged and horrific illnesses. I wish I could say that seeing their suffering end brought me peace, but it didn't.

I ache for the time when I could still believe. I miss the illusion of safety. I miss the feeling of connection, the wonder of discovery, the hope, that exploration of the numinous brought me. I miss it every day. I loved my goddess with everything that was in me. To find not just that she left me, but that she never was real . . . there are no words for that pain.

The eventuality of death still terrifies me. It still creeps up to whisper in my ear as I fall asleep, and I often shoot bolt upright in bed with a hollered "NO!" I have woken myself with strangled screaming. I try to sleep alone. I don't like waking my husband with my cries.

I admire other atheists their freedom. I envy the peace their clean break has given them. But my faith died and rotted, not clean at all, and for me, atheism has been a prison. It has locked me in my own body, a cage of senses. Before, I was fearless. The core of me was god itself, and indestructible. And now, now I'm just meat. I will go through this painful life alone with no hope of mercy or miracle. Someday I will suffer through a terminal disease, most likely cancer or Alzheimer's, and then I will die. And after that . . . nothing. How can that be enough?

I know there are some who would call me weak for wanting -- needing -- a deity. Fuck that. I was not raised by people who loved me well, I was not taught to love myself. I was abandoned over and over again by people I needed for over twenty years. And years of self-work and therapy have only managed to undo a tiny fraction of that harm. You're damn right I want to feel loved, want someone to be waiting for me when I go into the black. You're damn right I want there to be more to me, to us, to this, than this bitter life and whatever pitiful scratches I'll manage to make on it before I die.

If my eyes have been opened, I wish for blindness. I wish for the innocence, the stupidity, to delude myself. I did not wish for this, and I would undo it if I could. Therapy, medication, these things help, but will not restore what I have lost. The part of me that was amputated.

You who are content with your belief, or lack of it . . . never, ever forget that your peace is a gift. Cherish it. It is perhaps the only real blessing there is.

[Chris]

Well my father used to say of religion, "A lot of nice fairy stories." After he died, my mother had us (my brothers and sisters) do the "religion" thing in my father's church. Lutheran. At the time I did not buy one bit of it and still don't. My current way of living is mostly Zen Buddhist, though I do not spend much time in meditation. I do try to practice it in my daily life.

[Caligatia]

I have a lot in common with your commenter Naamah, it seems; I lost my security blanket to mental illness as well. I grew up Quaker, so there really wasn't any rebellion, I just couldn't believe in a deity anymore.

I kind of envy people who feel secure in their faith, even if that faith is in atheism. It must be nice to feel right. I don't think I'll ever feel that way.

[bifemmefatale]

I was raised catholic too and was intensely religious and spiritual. But even in grammar school, a lot of things didn't make sense. My break with Catholicism came in 8th grade. I really wanted to be a priest, but that wasn't an option. So I became a lector. I loved it. Then *someone* (a donor with $$) complained that I wasn't Confirmed and was too young. So they took me out of the lector program, but none of the grown men and women had the guts to tell me so. They let me know by sending me a schedule without my name on it.

I found the Goddess in high school thru "The Mists of Avalon" and converted to Wicca formally in college. I had gotten my wish; I could be a priest(ess) and I'd always liked Mary better anyway.

Several years of Pagan drama passed which I'll spare you. Suffice it to say I'm a sort of Buddhist-panentheist-agnostic now. I *think* there's something out there, but I think being a good person is more important.

[grnchile]

I was also raised Catholic and attended a school filled with nuns who at times resembled Sister Corinna (they must have all read the same "tips and tortures" newsletters).

My "come to atheism" moment was when I read "The Population Bomb" and thought that it made a lot of sense. At the same time we were being drilled on the Baltimore Catechism at school. The version that we studied included gems like:

Q: Is the pope infallible?
A: Yes. The pope is infallible.

This is the same pope that was lecturing the world on the evils of birth control. It wasn't a big step from believing that population growth was a long term problem to understanding that the Catholic Church was a big part of that problem.

The nuns were a secondary issue. If they were an example of the people I was going to meet in heaven, I wasn't interested. It astonishes me how many ex-Catholics I've met who came to the same conclusion based on their parochial school experience.

[The Promiscuous Reader]

I had no particular religious upbringing. I grew up in small-town and rural northern Indiana in the 1950s and 60s. My mother's family was Roman Catholic, my father's family Protestant (I still have no idea which denomination). My mother taught me say prayers before going to sleep at night, but she let me stop when she realized that "If I die before I wake" was too scary, and she never suggested a replacement, so the praying ended by the time I was 7 or 8. My father would take me to various churches and Sunday schools now and then, so religion never had the feeling of something exotic or forbidden. I began reading at 4, and quickly discovered Greek, Norse, and Jewish/Christian mythology, along with much else.

My "Come to Atheism" moment happened one night when I was 8 or 9. I was riding somewhere in the car with my father, and I was prattling about something I'd read in the Bible, as kids do about their enthusiasms; another night it could have been Dr. Seuss or Ulysses. But my father said suddenly, "Duncan, you should be aware that not everybody believes in God."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "they just don't feel the need to."

When I encountered the word "atheist" some years later, I realized it was me. (Just as I recognized "homosexual" at around the same time, I suppose.) I'm still very interested in some of the questions that religion poses and claims to answer, but I have ranged much wider in quest of answers. However, I see religion, including Christianity, not as something alien but as something utterly human, and so accessible to me, part of my heritage as a human being, like art or sex. This pisses off many Christians who like to believe (reasonably enough, it's a biblical claim) that believing in Jesus makes them different, even incomprehensible to outsiders. It also pisses off those atheists who want to view religion as an alien, autonomous, wholly Other phenomenon, so they can jeer at believers as mentally ill, un-sane, and the like. If only it were that simple.

[The Promiscuous Reader]

Oh, and P.S.: sometime in my mid-40s my sister-in-law, who was then devoutly Catholic, told me gleefully that she'd learned from my mother that I and my next brother (there are four of us; he's number 2) had been baptized into the Catholic church as infants. I was shocked, but what the hell -- that was apparently as far as the indoctrination went, and it didn't take.

[Todd]

I didn't have a "Come to Jesus" or "Come to Atheism" moment. I was raised in a secular Jewish household, not observant, no real faith. We went to Shabbos school but left the synagogue when the internal politics got ugly. I went through an experimenting with religions phase and eventually decided that it just wasn't worthwhile. Then I slowly started becoming interested in spiritual matters via unrelated hobbies (long story) and eventually became more religious. I don't believe in "The Big Guy in the Sky" in the regular sense. But I do practice my religion more diligently, go to shul and make zikr (both the Rabbi and Shaykh think I'm nuts), and am more serious about seeking the Divine Unity, the numinous, whatever Reality is.

My wife's change was more dramatic. Her upbringing was entirely secular. Her parents read the Bible and Quran with her to help inoculate her against them. Her mother's family is nominally Chinese Buddhist but doesn't really practice. Growing up in East Africa was strange. People were very tolerant about religion. They could not get their heads around the idea that she didn't have one at all, and neither did her family. She was always staunchly atheist. A few years ago she came to the end of herself and began going down to California with me when I went to visit the Shaykh. She listened politely and asked questions. There was never any attempt to proselytize. We joked about how she had the box with Shrodinger's Religion inside. Until she opened the box she wouldn't know if she was a Sufi or the Tariqa's Official Dog of an Infidel.

One day the box opened, and she was a Sufi. It's transformed her life in many ways, turned her into a darned good poet and inspired her to wear a headscarf. She thought the news would shock her parents. Her mother said she wasn't surprised. She thought her daughter would end up as a mystic of some sort.

[Nobilis]

Wow, lots of comments.

I make a distinction between religion and spirituality. Religion, being an entirely human creation, is fundamentally flawed and no more trustworthy than any other human creation.

Spirituality is a personal experience of and relationship with the divine.

[Richard ChauDavis]

I went from uncertainty in youth gradually to a firm comfort in and sense of the presence of God. I never really 'blamed' God as I thought it was our fault not his. I was uncomfortable with the idea of original sin but now I think the concept is just a misinterpretation of the fact that every human I know is flawed, myself included. I have noticed that churches seem to act as vaccines against God, sure every once in a while someone is infected but it seems quite a few are 'cured.' I do accept the concept of death as a liberator. Because it is very clear that we will die, it is easier to live the lives we want. The Bible has a lot good hints on how to do (and not do) that. Heaven and Hell are not a real issue, they are a boogie man used to frighten or conversely make false promises too congregations and individuals. I think they exist but not as presented. Anyway at 14, I drifted the other way and now have a different understanding

[Steve]

I'm picturing you trying to fit in at the convent......

Pat says I was born questioning. I think she's right. Although I remember being forced to go to church as a child, I don't ever remember believing.

[Lulu]

I was brought up Episcople, even though my Mom wanted my Dad (jewish) to take us to Schul(sp?). He didn't want to go to Temple. So, we (my sister and I) followed Mom to Church. (Mom has this wonderfully convoluted logic behind the religion choosing machinations which she sums up with her belief that we wouldn't be able to truly grok James Joyce without some sort of religious background. It occurs to me I've never actually gotten around to reading Ulysses. Is that irony or just apropos?)

And as an Episocopalian, I was pretty serious about it all. I prayed at home, but not on any regularized schedule (such as before bedtime), and I most definitely prayed at Church. My not-at-church prayers were earnestly conversational. My at-church prayers oddly formal. I felt virtuous in my memorization of the Nicene Creed, became an acolyte, walked in the procession, eventually got to help Father Lance during the pre-communion getting-the-stuff-out-of-the-holy-cupboard part of the ceremony.

So, when did it stop? Well, first there was the a Political Thought class in High School, reading Plato and noticing how very much of what he was about was what my understanding of Christianity was about. It made me feel like I had been lied to. Then, at around the same time Father Lance went on sabbatical, and the temporary religious figure who took his place, just ... i don't know: We didn't have synergy. I don't think I was even aware that I _had_ synergy with Father Lance, until it was missing. So, this combination of the ritualized aspect of my church-going all of a sudden becoming less patable, and a certain sense of disillusionment over what I had been taught, well over the course of a couple of months, I just sort of stopped believing.

[Trish Lewis]

I was brought up in the Christian faith and chose to believe at age 9. I had a LOT of doubts and talked with God about it, but took things on faith. I am now what most would call an agnostic. I think it's impossible to know either way. Existence is too mysterious to put in a box of faith or science.

[Yanada]

I was raised in a Mennonite family but, unlike my older siblings, I seemed to be immune to the Kool Aid. By the time I was 8 or 9 years old I was quite sure that all those bible stories I was taught in Sunday School didn't describe a credible deity. But still I felt there was something, it just wasn't like they said it was.

In high school and part of university I delved into science to try to explain what I felt. While I learned a lot about the world and the nature of physical reality, I didn't find the particular answers I was looking for. I then parsed world religions and later investigated New Age and though I discovered others also had similar feelings as me, their answers didn't resonate.

Like Naamah and Caligatia, my life has also been greatly affected by mental illness. It started when I was 13 but wasn't diagnosed until 30 years later. Unlike the other two, however, it didn't cause me to lose any faith because I didn't have any "faith" to begin. I only had a feeling of being connected to something that was beyond / more than me. That feeling never went away and it is what has kept me alive through all these years of mental anguish. Without it, I would have taken my life years ago.

In recent years I have read suggestions by psychologists that the need to believe in a greater power may be hardwired into our brains. I find this fascinating. Maybe what I feel isn't a connection to something beyond me, but rather a connection to something that is within me.

Even if it is a purely psychological phenomenon, I am ok with that and it is not a reason to be dismissive of my feeling. I can see the evolutionary advantages of this feeling as a survival mechanism for making it through tough times. It certainly works that way in my case.

I think religions are an attempt to externalize the feeling by constructing a mythology to wrap it in. Unfortunately, the mythologies get formalized and calcified, then religions become more about the mythology than the actual feeling.

[neill o'eugene]

I decided I was an atheist at fourteen, but ten years ago "Conversations with God" (and maybe a previous acid experience) rather convinced me of some kind of transcendant power. I work as a musician for both a jewish reform temple and a rather left-leaning catholic church and the problem is that both of them expound ideas that are totally at odds with the totalitarian ideology of the bible, and they just can't acknowledge that. (btw, though I was too young at the time, I also viewed Lennon and the Beatles as liberating forces when I hit thirteen).

[Linda Jones]

Wonderful post, Susie, and great comments. It's so interesting to see how we all stumble towards our truth, our joy or pain. My father was an atheist (as he ages he's becoming more agnostic) my mother a lapsed protestant. I think she felt a need to give my sister and I some kind of religious education, we travelled to several protestant churches each sunday, like taking a survey, for years until we ended up where she'd started back in the midwest, at a Methodist church. How my grandmother laughed at that one.

I remember being shocked to meet kids my own age who thought all the unbabtized babies in the world would go to hell. My own sister now bellieves this! We said the lords prayer every night when we were little, and I loved to sing the doxology. Church in general made me very nervous though, all that forced friendliness. I passionately believed...in something, though, and hated being told (by dad) that I was a meat robot (not a very nice thing to hear when you're 9 years old.)

Reading the Diary of Anne Frank at a tender age radicalized me, I think. How could "god" permit such atrocity? Also, I was seduced by the idea of an independent lifestyle, where I would make my own rules. I believe, now, only, in the human spirit, it's beauty and wisdom, and the possibility of unity through love. We have such a terrible power of choice. As far as death goes, I want only to fall without regret, like a leaf.

[Laurie Mann]

I was raised in the United Church of Christ, AKA the Congregational Church. Our minister in the 60s and early 70s was a little younger than my parents and was anti-war (when the war was in Viet Nam). My mother argued (via letter) with the minister over this, being a "patriot." So I learned early that parishioners could disagree with clergy and still not go to war over it.

I waffled on religion quite a lot late in my childhood and into adolescence. I went from being a believer to being an atheist and back again. Eventually, I fell away from religion completely. While Jim and I were married in my Congregational Church, he's an ex-Catholic and I'm an ex-Protestant.

Religion fills a psychological need for many people. The need to be told what to do. The idea that there's something more, particularly after death. I just don't have that need. Sure, the idea of dying is troublesome, but the concept of a "Christian" (or Muslim, for that matter) afterlife is much more troublesome.

[Roger]

My "moment" was also quite clear. At about the age of 12, I read a book entitled something like "How the World's Great Religions Began" (the exact title and author are lost to time). Though it was clearly written from a Christian perspective, it did a credible job of tracing the evolution of ideas that form the basis of most modern religions (good vs. evil, sin, prophetic vision, etc.) from Eastern religions of 5000 BCE to current Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The ringing truth that I heard (despite the author's apparent intentions) was that all religion is a product of humanity, not divinity. Thus collapsed any possible authority traditional religions had in my mind and I began calling myself an atheist.

As I grew to adulthood, I began to see that it is arrogant to be certain there is no god – just as it would be arrogant to be sure there is one. I further began to feel that there may, in fact, be more to life than meets the eyes, ears, hands, or calipers. At this point, I call myself an agnostic with theistic leanings. Oddly, I have also found a place for organized church in my life, but that is a church that includes Atheist and Agnostics, alongside Christians and Buddhists. I’m amused that part of your “coming to atheism” process included a Unitarian potluck, for I have now been an agnostic Unitarian Universalist for many years.

[Christian Mann]

Ohmigod: Susie dropped the "G"-bomb!!! I will send you the story of my relationship with God, Higher Power, the angry Jesus I met in Jesuit boarding school, et al. at a later time. Meanwhile, I'm reprinting the lyrics from Neil Young's recent song: "When God Made Me", which sums up so much of how I feel about the topic:

"When God Made Me"
by Neil Young

Was he thinkin' about my country
Or the color of my skin?
Was he thinkin' 'bout my religion
And the way I worshipped him?
Did he create just me in his image
Or every living thing?

When God made me
When God made me

Was he planning only for believers
Or for those who just have faith?
Did he envision all the wars
That were fought in his name?
Did he say there was only one way
To be close to him?

When God made me
When God made me

Did he give me the gift of love
To say who I could choose?

When God made me
When God made me

Did he give me the gift of voice
So some could silence me?
Did he give me the gift of vision
Not knowing what I might see?
Did he give me the gift of compassion
To help my fellow man?

When God made me
When God made me

[etho]

I went to Catholic school as a child, and I was, sort of, raised Lutheran. But I don't think I ever really believed in God. It always just seemed like a myth to me, a symbol used to represent a persons moral outlook, but not a literal truth. Admittedly, my "lutheran" parents never really went to church, and my dad wasn't really a lutheran anyway, and the catholic school I went to was, until I was in 4th grade, a fairly liberal affair, staffed mostly by Daniel Berrigan types rather than Pope Palpatine's. But the result is that I never believed in God. And actually, until 4th grade when that catholic school got taken over by scary fundie types, I didn't realize that there were people who did believe in the bible as being literally true. That idea still kind of weirds me out.

So, since then I've remained an atheist and become a Buddhist.

[Daniel Vojir]

Your thoughts about religion are spot on. I'm putting together a new wikizine and would love to have you contribute.

Views of my childhood were rather benign until I found out recently that I could have wound up a Duplessis Orphan: I was born of a French Canadian mother who put me up for adoption immediately - in an "Infant Asylum" in Chicago. If you want to read more, just go to my blog at http://thedevilanddanvojir.blogspot.com and find the post: "The Bad Samartans." The Iraqi orphan scandal had nothing on this!

Anyway, please keep up the good work.

Dan Vojir

I offer Ingersoll's Vow, from Robert G. Ingersoll, who was an atheist in a time when publicly admitting to any doubt about our culture's prevailing flavor of batshit insane superstition could get you killed:

Ingersoll's Vow
When I became convinced that the Universe is natural--that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world--not even in infinite space. I was free--free to think, to express my thoughts--free to live to my own ideal--free to live for myself and those I loved--free to use all my faculties, all my senses--free to spread imagination's wings--free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope--free to judge and determine for myself--free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past--free from popes and priests--free from all the "called" and "set apart"--free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies--free from the fear of eternal pain--free from the winged monsters of the night--free from devils, ghosts, and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought--no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings--no chains for my limbs--no lashes for my back--no fires for my flesh--no master's frown or threat--no following another's steps--no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.

And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain--for the freedom of labor and thought--to those who fell in the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains--to those who proudly mounted scaffold's stairs--to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn--to those by fire consumed--to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still. Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)

[Marina]

Hi Susie,
Thanks for the frankness of your conversion or 'lapse' as us survivor Catholics like to call it. (Less guilt!) I was a Catholic school girl in San Francisco's Noe Valley in the '70s who never ever even saw a gay male (or female, for that matter) knowingly until my first job at 16. Talk about sheltered! (And what an awakening! To find people who lived a lifestyle I had never heard of.)
I graduated with my Catholic school sisters at my insistence, after my parents divorced and no one wanted to pay the tuition, for myself or my sister. Sis was lucky to end up in public high school and have a more normal puberty experience than I did.
We were an all-girl high school, and although it was a blast because of my friends, I did wake up completely my freshman year. It started two years earlier at age 12, when I would go to church by myself on Sunday and worry about my parents' souls because I couldn't remember them bringing me to church except on Easter as a little girl.
My grammer school life was made up of mostly lay teachers, but the nuns were lurking...
High school had more nuns but less tolerance for skepticism, especially in religion class. I questioned everything, and in both my freshman and sophomore religion class, taught by the same nun, who, in my senior year, privately told me that I was the only student ever who made her question her vows, would cry in frustration at my questions. That said a lot to me. She was young and beautiful and took her final vows a few years after I graduated. And to think, I wanted to be a nun in third grade. Thank God for my own awakening!

I do have one question for you, Susie. How do you see the world without the Catholic stuff clouding it? I am fascinated by how people see the world who weren't raised in any organized religion. It seems a clearer view of reality and what is.
Thank you.

[shane]

I was (am) a few years older than you and was raised by a strictly Catholic mother, attending Catholic schools through college and taught from K through high school by nuns. I was a voracious reader and wildly curious about the world, and smart to boot, so despite the stranglehold of my mother and the nuns, and the awful threat of (literal) hellfire, seeds of doubt began to grow quite early on. But the thing that became the dealbreaker was the enormous disconnect between my first, innocent sexual interactions with boys and how that made me feel both physically and emotionally...and how I was SUPPOSED to feel about the forbidden, "dirty" things we did. The first time a boy touched my breast (I'm looking at you, high school boyfriend who's now a well-known movie director), I quite consciously thought (among other things), "Whoa. Wait a minute....how can this be BAD?" And at around the same time - I was 14 or 15 - I came across a little paperback copy of writings by Bertrand Russell that belonged to a sister of a friend, and that was a true turning point in my life, because for the very first time, I realized there was another, completely different way of THINKING, and of looking at the world and ourselves. Russell, of course, was an atheist, and every word of his that I read rang true. From that little paperback I received my first training in critical thinking, something my Catholic "education" surely wouldn't have provided. At 15, I stopped going to church, and I stopped believing, and that's when my true life and my real self began.

[Susan]

I was raised by ex-Catholics who felt nervous about their children not having religion (even though they went to no church at the time) so they sent us to various Protestant Sunday schools to learn about the Bible, Jesus, etc. What I learned at these Sunday schools was to pray for what I wanted, and to pray to thank God when I got it. So one day when I was 8 years old, after a great afternoon at the circus with my Dad, I went into the woods near our house and got down on my knees to thank God for a wonderful time. Suddenly DOUBT krept into my mind: My father took me to the circus. He paid for the tickets, he spent the time with me. What did God have to do with it? The whole God thing didn't make sense. Besides, that business about God always watching over you and knowing what you did and thought was a bit creepy.

A few months later at Christmas my mother decided it was time to tell me the truth: there was no Santa Claus. I was rather relived because I immediately made a vital connection: "Oh! So there's really no God either, is there!" She was a bit taken aback, as she was not entirely ready to let go of god yet. But it began many family discussions about God and Santa Claus, leading us all to become happy atheists who believe that God and Santa Claus are symbols of the best parts of each of us.

[David Maclaine]

The closest thing to a deconversion experience I ever had was akin to Greta's experience with anesthesia; an interlude during an illness when I was young in which for few seconds time ceased, the world having gone on without me while I had no awareness of time passed. Because the world each of us lives in is essentially the pool of our own consciousness, we tend to have trouble imagining the annihilation of that central reality. At a young age I found myself forced to accept that fact,and from then on arguments in favor of God have always lacked the emotional ground in which to grow. Of course a lot of people have the experience shared by some of your readers that they need belief to compensate for growing up unloved, and I was lucky there too, to have two loving parents. I was loved by my earthly father and don't see the need for a heavenly one. I was not raised in a religious environment, although I was baptised Episcopalian; my mother took us to the Unitarians as soon as she found out they existed, so we could fulfill the social need of somewhere to go on Sunday--our neighborhood was mostly Catholic--with the minimal obligation to believe any concrete doctrine. I never could grasp any of the logical contradictions of Christian dogma, was shocked when the Catholic neighbor kids insisted that Jesus was not just the son of God but also GOD. When I got around to reading the Bible I was not moved to admiration; the angry and abusive Old Testament God was way below my family's standard for reasonable, caring behavior, although I can see that he'd be quite plausible to people raised in less benign circumstances. Nor did I see God's guiding hand beneath the tumult of human life. I owe my existence to the worse natural disaster in American history, and would prefer not to think that it was divine guidance that brought about my existence at the cost of over six thousand lives. I've never been able to fathom people who assume that you can't build a moral framework without instructions from an all-powerful authority figure; again, it seems from outside,as though people who feel that way have projected their own unquestioning acceptance of family authority and its surrogates onto the outside world. I see nothing unsettling about building that a moral code and a system of social obligations on what humans can work out for themselves about their own needs. For a great many people religion seems to be one of those needs, and I tend to see our religious systems as some of the most amazing, somtimes dazzling, creations of the human imagination. The non-existence of God is as unproveable as his existence--nice try, St. Anselm, but no cigar--but it seems clear to me that God is very real indeed, as are Mr. Micawber, Huck Finn, and Don Quixote. The fictional is often more real to us than the factual, and we differ widely in the role these creations play in our daily lives.

[Greta Christina]

"I kind of envy people who feel secure in their faith, even if that faith is in atheism."

I'm sorry. I just have to say this:

No.

Atheism is not a faith.

This is a common misunderstanding, but it is a misunderstanding. Atheism is not the 100% certainty that there is no God. Atheism, for pretty much every atheist I've met, is the belief that the God hypothesis is an extraordinarily unlikely one, unsupported by reason or evidence, and that we can reasonably discard it as a hypothesis unless some really good evidence comes along to support it.

It's the belief that the God or gods of the current major religions are about as probable as Zeus or Thor or the Flying Spaghetti Monster (may we all be touched by his noodly appendage!)... and that we can discard them all as pretty much equally unlikely.

Not even Richard Dawkins is a "100% certainty" guy. The "absolute faith that God doesn't exist" atheist doesn't, as far as I can tell, exist.

[Naamah]

My mistake. Read "belief," then. I do understand the difference, absolutely, and would have used the word myself, but I'm afraid accuracy eluded me in my . . . distress.

Though I have met atheists who professed that they were 100% certain of the non-existence of god. That's not me, though, so I can't say if that's absolutely true.

I, personally, would be much more likely to believe in Thor than in the Christian God. I don't relate to the Abrahamic religions at all. Thor? Odin? Freyja? That I can get behind. Heaven sounds boring. Send me to Valhalla! At the very least, I could probably get laid there, and the food would be decent.

[Sue Katz]

My Jewish parents couldn't afford to belong to the synagogue, although one year they tried to send me to Sunday school. I puked in the bus on the way to class and decided that if there were a god he wouldn't want me to be sick every weekend, so I disembarked at that point in my religious education. My only contact as a kid with organized Jewish life was a paying job, singing in the Shabbat choir. I don't remember one moment in my life when I believed in god.

I was lucky to study Marxism in the late 60s, for it satisfied my need for an overall context, or, shall I dare?, an ideology by which to make sense of life. After my father died - his family had never been able to afford to give him a bar mitzvah when he was young and his father had been a socialist fighting the Cossacks - my mother joined a synagogue. I don't know if she found god, but she did find a boyfriend with whom she schmoozed until she died.

[Nina]

I grew up in the Dutch Christian Reformed church (a branch of Protestant) in the Chicago suburbs. My father was very religious and involved in the Christian community, my mother less so. I always had to go to church, sunday school, and youth groups every week. Even in a young teenager, I planned to save my sexuality for marriage, and prayed for the kids who had to drink and do drugs to have fun.

As my teens progressed, however, I started to doubt the church due to the actions of its followers. The Christian kids i knew in high school were largely nasty, small-minded, hypocritical and the biggest partiers. Most of my friends were Muslim, Hindu, atheist or agnostic. I couldn't accept the notion that all these wonderful people were going to hell, and that i'd be stuck spending eternity with only Christians. I decided at the age of 17 that the church was no longer a spiritual home for me.

I have never been one of the people who vehemently attacks or denies organized religion, I understand that it is a framework that still works for a lot of people, including my family. It's just not for me. I still consider myself a very spiritual person, but would rather communicate with the divine in my own words. My prayers now take the form of my healing practice of Reiki and massage, in the communion of sex, in dancing and laughter, juicy friendships, and in noticing and being fully alive in the world around me.

[Nonsensei]

"Not even Richard Dawkins is a '100% certainty' guy. The 'absolute faith that God doesn't exist' atheist doesn't, as far as I can tell, exist."

Of course they exist, you just haven't met one yet.
May I introduce you to...Me.
And yes, I'm 100% certain.

Special for Naamah:
Fact: what you know...
that you have proven to yourself.
Belief: what you know...
that you could prove to yourself, but haven't.
Faith: what you know...
that you cannot prove to yourself.

Namaste!

[minstrel boy]

i always had a serious load of doubt. i grew up on one of the more isolated (physically and economicly) indian reservations in arizona. we still followed the ceremonial path, but nobody actually believed in a time when animals talked with human voices, or that spider woman was up in the sky weaving time on her loom. we didn't believe that if we didn't dance at a certain time that the rain would not fall. we danced because we were alive and the people we were. we danced.

our schools were like a long comparative religion course. different missionaries would take on the education of us heathen kids for a year, once or twice two years, before the isolation and poverty would send them back to real life. some of them were decent folks who were sincere in trying to allow us to learn real stuff, mostly they were busy trying to leave us with a sense of their real and only jesus.

it was vietnam during tet where i lost all semblance of belief. i looked at the shattered bodies of my friends, the immense and indescribable destruction that modern weapons are capable of wreaking and decided that even if there was a god, any supreme being that has that kind of brutal and horrific action involved with their perfect plan for mankind is simply and utterly unworthy of any worship. i also resolved to refrain from the "and please don't squash me like a bug" prayers. i decided if there was a god, then fuck them/him/it/whatever.

it's been a weird trip for me as an atheist. i've managed to cling to my unbelief even while spending over fourteen years clean and sober in AA. usually i just don't talk about it. when pressed i say stuff like "i don't argue with results, i'm here and sober after all these years." but i don't confront the believers. i wish they would quit confronting me.

i allowed my kids to explore every spiritual path they wanted to explore. mostly they decided that staying home with me on sunday and watching football was more fun than going to church.

my biggest reminders for believers is that when you talk to god, it's prayer. when god talks to you, it's schizophrenia.

when they come up all concerned at an AA meeting to let me know that god has a perfect plan for you i simply ask, "but what if his plan is to keep fucking with me?"

i sometimes wish i could believe. sometimes i even try to believe. but i dont' give them any money, and usually they manage to offend me with their spiritual arrogance (like the time the tantra weenies were talking about the wonderfulness of "male witholding orgasm" and i said "dude, if i can't come, i ain't going.") before i get too far wrapped up in stuff.

mostly i take a page from lincoln and say "when i do good i feel good. when i treat others with compassion and gentle respect i am treated better by them. if that's a religion, that's mine."

[April]

What a lovely conversation! I've believed in some version of Divinity my entire life. I seem to be quite unusual in that I've never not been able to believe in some underlying magic and unity to the Universe that is beyond human comprehension. And every form that belief has taken contributed to my healing and evolution emotionally and psychologically. I've had more than my share of tragedies in my life from early childhood. Every version of God--and my personal relationship to God--has given me the strength and resilience to not only survive, but find a way to thrive and give something back to the communities suffering the same traumas that I did.

My version of God right now is that there is an underlying energy or consciousness to all matter in the Universe that can make life more beautiful when consciously drawn upon. Everything is God, including me and you. I believe it's my evolutionary directive to become as conscious as possible of every aspect of my life, learn to love as deeply as I'm capable, and assist in raising the consciousness of humanity. If there's any philosophy that seems to be headed in the direction I'm going it would be the Integral Philosophy of Ken Wilber and friends (although he's as much of a dysfunctional guru as the heads of many spiritual communities and I'm squirmish about the hierarchy of evolution they espouse).

I was indoctrinated in Baptist and then Pentacostal Christianity. Two pretty intense extremes. The first, like my dad, was rigidly conservative and very absent of emotion. I went to a Baptist Christian school until 6th grade and didn't know rock music existed until that year. I didn't know homosexuality existed till my late teens (then shortly thereafter discovered I was bisexual). The second, like my mom, was incredibly passionate, joyful (at least on the surface), magical, and emotionally dysfunctional (we had multiple pastors betray the congegration and every single one of the girls in our youth group was pregnant before age 18). We had a rock band instead of an organ. People danced, spoke in tongues, gave prophetic messages, and actually healed people (including myself).

On the dark side, I lived a life of intense guilt. As an unusually empathic person, I took the suffering of Jesus deeply into my own heart, believing he went through all that he did in the stories I was told because of my own sinful nature. I never judged other people in the same way though, I think it was a combination of the church, dynamics at home and a propensity for masochism.

I began have mystical experiences as a Pentacostal in my teens and have been in the pursuit of mysticism ever since, although not always consciously. If you look at the mystics in any religion, they are the rebels, the outsiders, the ones who wrote of their relationships to God as lovers. There's a reason so many of us are drawn to the poetry of Rumi. Mystics have a raw, passionate connection to the Divine. They believe everyone has a direct connection to God, the antithesis of religions that tell you to go through priests and gurus.

I also desperately needed God the Father in my life at that time because I had been abandoned by the men in my life who should have protected me from my mother and I needed an escape from the traumas of my home life with her. God was my Daddy for awhile. Church was the only place I could experience joy and the community was extremely supportive when I had my son at 17. I did a lot of emotional/psychological healing there, until the scandals started coming to the surface.

Then I moved out on my own in a bigger town and started college. I began drifting back and forth from the church in my early 20's, going through the usual young adult search for myself and a self-derived understanding of the world, then I took a Comparative Religions course at the university. That course changed my life. I saw the macrocosmic picture and realized it didn't matter what I believed as long as I lived a life of love. Each path provides a set of tools for people to understand themselves and their place in the world. Most of the tools and original teachings are inherently good but people can manipulate them and use them to harm others. I consciously took on Wicca for awhile, because I needed the energies of the Mother Goddess(this time was also filled with lessons in feminism and my personal sexual revolution). I had mystical experiences induced in all sorts of ways: peyote, acid, ecstasy, body modification, sex, meditation, dance, ritual, prayer, spiritual or energetic connection with another person, etc.

Then I took another life changing university course in Consciousness. I learned about the mysteries of quantum physics and the conclusions we're coming to that all of life is one universal energy taking different shapes. My idea of the Divine became more impersonal. I had done a lot of emotional healing--including overcoming a mental illness--and I no longer felt connected to any spiritual practices or anthropomorphic versions of God. This is when I stopped praying. I had always prayed and my prayers were personal conversations with God. I prayed in my journal, I prayed in shouts at the ocean, I prayed in song and poetry. I prayed all kinds of ways, using God in my bouts of desperate lonliness for human connection and dark depression to keep me from feeling utterly alone.

Now my spiritual practices and sacred activism are about serving my human family. If everyone is part of God, I am serving the Divine by serving people. I'm involved with several nonprofits in various capacities and have a personal web project through which I share art blessings with others. I hope to become an art therapist and work with women and children in crisis. I guess my prayers now are the intentional energies I put into my acts of love towards others.

Thank you for the thought provoking posts, Susie. You never fail to make me think and clarify my feelings about big topics.

Blissings, April

[Lloyd]

Nice post. Interesting that this gets more comments than the usual post about pedophile Republicans or butt plugs.
My parents had both been raised in strict religious homes -- my dad's family was Reformed Latter Day Saints and my mom's was Southern Baptist. They each rebelled against their upbringings. They met in a Unitarian church in the nineteen-fifties. They both still felt that they needed something, hence the Unitarians. Growing up the word 'God' was not mentioned very often in the family, except when we went to family reunions. I remember asking my dad when at one family reunion when I was 6 or so if I had to say grace before eating. It was bizarre and scary to me -- like we were summoning ghosts, or something. He told me to just bow my head and be quiet -- that there was no point in antagonizing our hosts (or getting his brothers and sister started again on the subject of my religious instruction).
Through it all, my parents were vague about their beliefs. My dad summed up his with an "I don't know." My mom hers with "I think there has to be something."
Long story short, Susie, You stepped off a cliff, I steped off a low curb.

[Sally Miller]

Susie, I read with interest your posting on your religious beliefs/conversion/past. Currently I am working on a new novel by Mykola Dementiuk called "Holy Communion," which follows a seven-year-old boy through the four days leading up to and including his first communion. It is a powerful book which deals with cruel nuns, sadistic girls, several adult male sexual molesters, and the beliefs the Catholic Church tries to instill in its little children. I don't think the Catholic Church will like the book, but ex-Catholics will surely relate to much of it.

As far as me, I was baptized a Presbyterian and raised as a high Episcopalian during which time I led a children's choir, taught Sunday School, and hung on to the beliefs of the church as an emotional anchor through my high school years. College at Oberlin exposed me to other beliefs, also through a comparative religion class, and though I thought Jesus had many good ideas, I rejected the idea of "god" and later raised my four children to be atheists.

Then further along in life, in my fifties, I met someone who had been visited by aliens, and this re-wakened in me an interest in extraterrestrials. From here I met author Jim Carten, author of "Pilgrims and Strangers on the Earth," in which Jim, in a scientific look at Bible events and verses, gives a new understanding of how these could actually have taken place, but described by "a technologically primitive people interacting with vastly superior but benevolent mentors and teachers."

Suddenly I didn't have to reject my upbringing any more! I could accept the teaching of Jesus and all those people in the old testament through the eyes of a modern woman fully believing in outer space and all it holds! I gained some insight into the large stone heads, the pyramids, stone hedge, miracles, and all the religious beliefs of other people from other lands and cultures.

Because I believe in natural healing, I am also in tune with the power of light, the power of energy, the power of the Universe in healing. Do I believe in God like I was taught as a child? No. But I do believe there is something WAY beyond me, that's for sure. It was to this greater force that I appealed when I was diagnosed with Stage 3 ovarian cancer over 11 years ago, and it is to this greater power that I occasionally appeal when I flounder on my own.

Church? I firmly believe that most churches give a person a social network in which to operate, but beyond that, are often detrimental. I have no need for a church that crams specific beliefs down one's throat, particularly if that person is a child. I try to be tolerant of others' beliefs as long as they aren't pressed on me, and I've found the study of all religions enlightening along the road of life.

Sally Miller, Flemington NJ
SallyMiller.com

[Jerry Avins]

That's very well put, Suzie. There's nothing fundamentally sillier than a proselytizing atheist -- whose soul is to be saved? -- and you didn't proselytize. You did write very clearly where you stand and why. Thanks.

I'm lucky. My parents were immigrants who fled persecution as Jews in eastern Europe. There was never any question of forgetting my roots, especially being old enough to know what was going on in Europe in the late 1930s. (Auschwitz surprised many Americans when it was liberated, but we had known what was happening there for years.) My family often -- not always -- went to synagogue on holidays and I attended bible school. Although my grandparents had kept kosher (my maternal grandfather stopped when his wife died) neither of my parents were inclined to. I wasn't raised to be an atheist, but I wasn't raised not to be either.

I grew up in a house where three languages were in common use. My mother had been an infant when she got to France on the way here, and she stayed there throughout WW I. She and her sister spoke French; my aunt and my father often spoke Yiddish (which my mother and cousin understood well) and all were spoken to me. Everybody spoke English with little or no trace of accent. My father alone knew Hebrew well enough to translate. He and my aunt both knew Russian, but I never heard either of them use it. They had left it behind.

Being Jewish was a matter of culture, not devotion, but the culture ran deep. I read a bit of English on my own and with my cousin's help by age 4-1/2. I can fix the date because that's when my sisters were born. Maybe I bugged the adults with reading too, because I was sent to a neighbor for more formal instruction. There was a mixup that went unnoticed for months; the neighbor taught me to read and write Yiddish. (My command of English text kept improving, so nobody at home noticed.)

The turning point came at age 12. I was sent to Hebrew school to prepare for my Bar Mitzva. The first few weeks went well, even though the idea behind it didn't really sit well. I figured I could suspend my distaste for organized religion in return for all those Bar Mitzva presents and learning yet another language. The letters came easily. All I really needed to learn new were the diacritical marks that stand in for vowels in elementary texts. (Advanced texts leave them out.) About the third week, after the equivalent of Dick and Jane (hayeled and hayaldaw) stories, we were assigned a long puzzling page to read for the next session. I raised my hand: "Mrs. Danzig, where is the translation?" She answered, "You don't need to know what it means. You only need to know how to daven (pray)." I took my books up to her desk when the class ended and said, "I won't need these any more" and walked out.

My mother was livid. She insisted I continue, but I refused. When my father got home, she insisted that he insist and he did. I told him that he could compel attendance, but advised him to remember that I got the last word -- my Bar Mitzva speech. He smiled and said that he was sure that I wouldn't commit any outrages -- it wasn't in my nature. [background: a Bar Mitzva is a rite of passage to adulthood.] I assured him that I would merely offer an apology -- to the rabbi, teacher, congregation, and invited guests. I would apologize for standing before them and saying things I didn't believe -- see? it had grown on me without my realizing it -- in a language I didn't understand. I would ask them all to forgive me; not as an adult who intended to deceive, but as a child whose parents had threatened to spank him if he didn't. My father considered for no more that 20 seconds -- it seemed like an hour -- and opined that that was the sort of thing he could well imagine me saying, and that moreover, I was right. Although he was disappointed at my choice, being Bar Mitzva should inherently be my choice alone. My mother invoked her right to insist nevertheless and to require my father to back her up. He agreed with a stipulation and a plea: "When the day comes, I won't be there, and I hope he has the grace to change 'parents' to 'mother'." That ended it.

Since then, I go to synagogue only as an invited guest. I feel strongly that those who go to pray have a right to expect that all those who attend regularly share their outlook. Attending only to enjoy the liturgy would be like gawking at free entertainment and dilute the worshipers' experiences even if they don't know it. The local rabbi disagrees. He said that God doesn't care what anyone thinks, only what they do; that my attending would please Him. I said that I won't be hypocritical even if God wants me to be. We're still on good terms.

P.S. I've known Sally Miller for a long time. I knew her husband and her mother. Each of us thinks the other is a bit strange. We like each other.

[Frank Richards]

Yeah it all totally resonates-I grew up at the same time with the same religion, went thru all the sacraments and the propaganda ,said all the prayers only to feel like a complete ass a few years later as my world began to break around me and i wondered how i could have been such a complete fool to prostrate myself to the myth. Sure i was just a little kid so what did i know- still somehow it hurt to feel so duped. Funny, a foster brother i was living with at the time- early seventies- had a complete opposite reaction and became a super fundie. This was at a time when many frantic parents were actually trying to "de-program" their kids out of religious conversion. All this, i believe, the rejection and the embrace of religion, was tied to the huge cultural and political chaos of the time- just wierd how it played out differently among different people. I envy you 'cause i didn't grow up with the progressive influences that would have made it all so much easier- i had to pick among the seemingly random signals that were flying at me thick and fast- a repressive home environment mixed in with some voices of sanity- cool H.S. teachers. Brings back lots of memories- nice blog entry!

[Joy]

Great post. I was raised by devout Catholics and went to Catholic school from first through twelfth grade. My three sisters and I were all outspoken feminists and much of the Church's teachings drove me nuts. It wasn't until an event after my mother's death my senior year in high school that I could totally let go of all the negative, unfair and sexist beliefs that had been baked into me since childhood. I visited my mother's grave by myself for the first time a month after she died. It was a large cemetary, covered in deep snow, and I walked around for over an hour trying to find her grave. I prayed out loud to my mother to guide me to it. After that didn't work I prayed to God. Guide me to her grave. Nothing. I dispensed with my inherited faith that day and I found that life without God, or at least the only version of it I'd ever been exposed to, was a great relief. I was free to detox from my Catholic upbringing. I no longer rebelled against the Church hoping that I was right. I broke from it completely.

I am very thankful for that day. To be completely free of the fear of Hell left me free to explore. I am now a deeply spiritual person. I marvel at how simple the truth is - forget yourself, destroy the ego and love pours out of you. It has nothing to do with faith. Just forget yourself, the "little me" and you don't have to believe, you know.

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Absolutely, I had a very similar "atheist conversion" moment. I was raised by right-wing fundamentalist Christians, and grew up on a steady diet of bible studies, The 700 Club, "Focus on the Family" and Pentacostal prayer meetings. And like Susie, I gave it my all: did volunteer work as "service," community outreach, bible study once a week, praying every night -- I was the very model of a budding Young Christian Woman. (TM) But inside, I felt pretty empty, like there was "no there, there."

Fortunately, I was also an avid reader with a curious mind and love for mythology, other cultures, science, literature, etc. I got exposed to other worldviews without even trying too hard, which forced me to question what I'd been taught. And over time, I simply couldn't reconcile my inherited "faith" with anything that was real to me. Years later, I was talking to my mother about my loss of faith. She simply couldn't understand it, since her "conversion" (after her best friend was killed by drunk driver) was this epiphany wherein she felt an enormous burden lifted off her shoulders and felt peace inside for the first time in her adult life.

My gentle response: "That thing you felt when you accepted Jesus? That's EXACTLY how I felt when I accepted my own lack of faith: a tremendous sense of relief that I didn't have to pretend anymore, and could relax and be my own agnostic/atheist self. I felt peace."

The poeple who urge us to join a church and effect change from within don't understand one simple point: we can't effect any kind of change if we don't believe.

[D-Bar]

Great article, and great comments! I myself had been raised Catholic and attended Catholic school, and likewise had my own "conversion" experience at about 12. I was at the state spelling bee, and one of our nuns was also there, ferverently praying while using a rosary. I started thinking, like why would any God care who wins this spelling bee? I also started realising that the nuns were some of the most sadistic people I had come to know, and that their behaviour was a direct contradiction to their professed beliefs. I did some research and found out that aside from the Gospels, there's only one independent mention of the existence of Jesus in ONE edition of a book by Josephus that was added into the text in a different handwriting. Around 33 AD there were around 50 other Jewish historians living in the area, so don't you think it peculiar that not one of them mentions Jesus? The hypocrisy of the Church is also mind-boggling. An acquaintance of my mom, who's gay, said he recently went to his (Catholic) church and that there was a sign on the door saying gay people were not allowed inside. What next, a ban on drunkards, liars, and viewers of porn mags? If church is supposed to be about saving the souls of sinners, shouldn't these people have front-row seats? The whole sex abuse debacle is another example of the hypocrisy in the Church, and thank God I wasn't affected by it when I was growing up, despite the fact that I was an altar boy and attended Catholic schools until I graduated from high school. But the mental and emotional abuse was more than enough. I dreaded going to school. I'm now an atheist bordering on agnostic, and I'm researching alternative religions. Wycca doesn't sound bad; I mean, dancing around a campfire naked at night in the woods really does sound like good, clean fun. A lot more fun than sitting in some stuffy church for an hour.

I got suspended from Catholic school. At an eighth-grade dance. I was told I was dancing too close to a girl. Father said, “Leave a little room for the Holy Ghost!” And I said, “Are you kidding? After what he did to Mary?”

Atom (stand up comedian)
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The fact that women who endured twelve to sixteen years of Catholic schools are not all virgins or prostitutes is a miracle.

Martha Manning, Chasing Grace: Reflections of a Catholic Girl, Grown Up
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Following the Vatican declaration that women cannot become priests because they do not resemble Christ, sources reported that Colonel Sanders declared he would not employ anyone who didn’t resemble a chicken.

Jane Curtin
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