Me, the Human
June 26th 2009 19:25
In any discussion of morality, the gods are bound to pop up some place. So, like pulling your own teeth (a barbaric custom, but a neccessary one in some places,) let's get this over with quick, before I lose my nerve. It's bound to be less painfull in the long run.
I consider myself an Athiest. I was born into a Catholic family. When I was little, I laughed at religion. I complained about going to church, and always tried to slip some toys into my pockets before we went, to liven up hours of dullness. Now, my family is not excessively religous, but we attended church every Saturday. This was annoying to me, because all my friends went to church on Sunday, so I never saw them on weekends. For that reason alone, I developed a healthy contempt for religion.
It was not to last. By the time I was twelve, I was well indoctrinated. The area where I live is just bursting with religious zeal. It was unavoidable. Although my church, being Catholic, was very gentle, my friends went to different churches. . . Baptist churches. They told me all sorts of tales, tales to frighten, to sadden, to bend. When I mistook cloud-to-cloud lightning for alien spacecraft fighting a war in the upper atmosphere, my ten-year-old compatriots were happy to tell me that aliens were tools of the devil, sent by Him to sway Christians from the One True Path. I didn't want to believe it- seeing aliens made me unique- but they told me I had no choice. If I believed in aliens, I was going to hell.
This didn't matter to me at the time. Although possessed of a highly overactive imagination, I had no idea what hell was. They wouldn't tell me, either. But no matter what I did, it seemed, they would tell me that. When I learned that, through radiocarbon dating, you could tell me the age of a fossil, they told me that "God says that isn't true, and if you believe that you're going to hell." When my dog died, my Mum told me she was in heaven. I relayed this information to my friends, thinking they would be impressed by how I was starting to fit in. They were not. They told me that "animals have no souls. When they die, they're gone forever. There are no animals in heaven."
As the years passed, these things started to pile up. It began to seem inevitable that I should become an Athiest (though I didn't know what that meant). When I was twelve, though, some kindly adult finally told me what hell was like. I began to have nightmares about being burned alive, of having my guts ripped out by skeletal zombies. I dreamed of walking down the street, and the apocalypse would come. People would die of horrible diseases, and then I would sink through the ground while everyone else was flying up to heaven. So I got on board. I started praying every five minutes, silently begging God to spare me, to spare my family and everyone else who, I now saw, were sinning every minute of the day.
I developed OCD. Germs scared me. I hadn't completed my first catchechism yet, so if I died, I would die unforgiven. I was miserable, and I never felt safe. I had no social life. All these things, and more, I beared, forever dreaming of reaching paridise.
That's enough for today. I'm not done with this subject, but this post is getting too long. Believe me, I will repudiate the gods in a rational manner. It's emotional right now, but that's how I felt at the time. This story is far from over. . .
I consider myself an Athiest. I was born into a Catholic family. When I was little, I laughed at religion. I complained about going to church, and always tried to slip some toys into my pockets before we went, to liven up hours of dullness. Now, my family is not excessively religous, but we attended church every Saturday. This was annoying to me, because all my friends went to church on Sunday, so I never saw them on weekends. For that reason alone, I developed a healthy contempt for religion.
It was not to last. By the time I was twelve, I was well indoctrinated. The area where I live is just bursting with religious zeal. It was unavoidable. Although my church, being Catholic, was very gentle, my friends went to different churches. . . Baptist churches. They told me all sorts of tales, tales to frighten, to sadden, to bend. When I mistook cloud-to-cloud lightning for alien spacecraft fighting a war in the upper atmosphere, my ten-year-old compatriots were happy to tell me that aliens were tools of the devil, sent by Him to sway Christians from the One True Path. I didn't want to believe it- seeing aliens made me unique- but they told me I had no choice. If I believed in aliens, I was going to hell.
This didn't matter to me at the time. Although possessed of a highly overactive imagination, I had no idea what hell was. They wouldn't tell me, either. But no matter what I did, it seemed, they would tell me that. When I learned that, through radiocarbon dating, you could tell me the age of a fossil, they told me that "God says that isn't true, and if you believe that you're going to hell." When my dog died, my Mum told me she was in heaven. I relayed this information to my friends, thinking they would be impressed by how I was starting to fit in. They were not. They told me that "animals have no souls. When they die, they're gone forever. There are no animals in heaven."
As the years passed, these things started to pile up. It began to seem inevitable that I should become an Athiest (though I didn't know what that meant). When I was twelve, though, some kindly adult finally told me what hell was like. I began to have nightmares about being burned alive, of having my guts ripped out by skeletal zombies. I dreamed of walking down the street, and the apocalypse would come. People would die of horrible diseases, and then I would sink through the ground while everyone else was flying up to heaven. So I got on board. I started praying every five minutes, silently begging God to spare me, to spare my family and everyone else who, I now saw, were sinning every minute of the day.
I developed OCD. Germs scared me. I hadn't completed my first catchechism yet, so if I died, I would die unforgiven. I was miserable, and I never felt safe. I had no social life. All these things, and more, I beared, forever dreaming of reaching paridise.
That's enough for today. I'm not done with this subject, but this post is getting too long. Believe me, I will repudiate the gods in a rational manner. It's emotional right now, but that's how I felt at the time. This story is far from over. . .
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