There are a million stories about why people left their faith behind, and this is one. It came out of the blue from an old college friend, Steve Wagner, who emailed me after reading my post on the “should-atheists-be-nice-to-Christians” poll. I reproduce his email with his permission:
I voted with the 87% on the “should we kiss ass to Christians?” poll.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: When my family moved to Seattle I was 8. My brother, Bobby, was 6. Our mother packed us off to “Bible School” at a Presbyterian Church almost right away. She would send us off with no breakfast, figuring that we could “eat” at snacktime. We knew no one there. One day Bobby was hungrily looking at the cookies and Kool-Aid that was there for the brainwashed kiddies’ snack. Bobby whispered to me, “I sure would like one of those cookies!”Unfortunately, the teacher overheard him, and that enraged her. She made Bobby stand up and repeat what he had just said loud enough for everyone in the class to hear – and then she made Bobby and I both stand in front of the class and sing “Jesus Loves Me” over and over again, until it was time for the break. (Why I was being punished for something innocent Bobby had whispered I don’t know – just Christian logic, I guess).Then when the break arrived, the lovely young zealot made a big to-do about giving all the other kids the cookies and Kool-Aid (“Oh, look, we seem to have some extra – who would like those?”), but made sure Bobby and I got none.Ridicule Christianity? That very day I realized any God or Jesus who would let some demented teacher torture two little boys deserved no respect—and I’ve been ridiculing Christianity ever since. Thanks, Bible School teacher!
You don’t get the cookies and Kool-Aid (which conjures up images of Jonestown) unless you believe: what a metaphor!
It’s (almost) a shame there is no hell; that bitch would roast nicely there.
Its at least even odds that the incident never happened.
And as an argument for atheism, its ludicrous.
I could equally say that because atheists in the “old country” tortured and killed some of my relatives, that atheism is false.
So if you grant the “nasty teacher” argument, I win the “murderous atheists” argument.
The flaw in your argument is glaring, but I’ll leave it to someone who’s not pecking away on their phone’s keyboard to explain why!
You win no such thing.
a) Mark didn’t argue for atheism based on that comment, so minus points for understanding threading on the Internet;
b) The post didn’t imply this was a disproof of theism, so more minus points for absence of elementary reading comprehension (a ways to go yet before you’re ready for 6th grade reading class);
c) Big minus points for virtually calling the post a lie;
d) Even more minus points for using transparently stupid logic to “disprove” atheism with only the thinnest justification for doing so (one based on lack of reading comprehension, I might add).
Your troll failed, as the first response to your post (this one) already called you on it, so you can’t derail the conversation. And if it wasn’t a troll, then I pity you all the more.
The original post does indicate that the unfair treatment by the sunday school teacher was what lead Steve to lose his faith. The problem I have with this is the implication that if the bible teacher had been kind, nice and fair (and some probably do fit this description) he would still be a believer.
There is nothing wrong with exposing Christian hypocrisy wherever it occurs but, in terms of reasons for losing faith, I would be more interested in hearing from the people who learned their christian beliefs in a supportive,loving non-hypocritical environment but nevertheless came to realise that all the evidence points to the fact that the world we live in arose through the natural laws of physics and not through the whims of some deity.
The experience is what matters to a child.
I am also an atheist from age 7 on, (born unwanted into a heavily CATLICK abuse family), and I always envied the two other groups of atheists:
1. the ones who came to atheism because of logical thinking or facts in or after puberty,
and most of all 2. the group who was not indoctrinated into a religion and never had to waste their time getting out!
By the way, some individuals react to such shaming by becoming fanatical and hypocrites – also at an early age.
A. Of course that is what he arguing for. Who ya kiddin?
B. Of course it is not disproof of theism, but he certainly intended it to be.
C. What do you mean “virtually”? I thought I was pretty clear that I think it is a lie.
D. And of course the argument no more disproves atheim than his disproves theism.
Its all BS.
The whole point of his post was to “poison the well” on Christianity and pump up atheism
Christianity has poisoned its own well throughout history and now all that is left is a surreal sludge. Oppressive controlling religions seek to subvert the individual’s purpose using ultimate threats of devilish retribution. The main thrust of religions today seems to be death threats whether here or the hereafter. As there is unlikely to be a hereafter then they will settle for melt down where ever they can cause it.
OK, I’m at the PC now. What J.J.E. said, plus, specifically about the specious “murderous atheist” argument: Christianity is a belief system that posits an all-loving God and his redeemer son, and comes with all sorts of injunctions about how believers should behave, from the ten commandements to “love your neighbor as you love yourself,” “turn the other cheek,” and “he who treats the least of his brothers well, does the same unto [Christ]”. A nun priest or Sunday school teacher who behaves sadistic, physically or mentally, toward a defenseless child is clearly defying several tenets of their professed faith. This hypocrisy can quite easily plant a seed of doubt about anything else the faith has to say, if its very teachers are defying its teachings so blatantly.
Now consider the KGB agent in the Stalinist Soviet Union who is torturing a priest who has been caught conducting secret masses. The priest is being persecuted not because atheism has anything to say about how believers should be treated, but because religion is a challenge to Stalin’s particular brand of communist totalitarianism. The KGB agent can electrocute the priest’s genitals and rip his fingernails off one by one, and this behavior is neither consistent nor contradictory to atheism, because atheism isn’t a moral code. The KGB agent certainly isn’t exhibiting any kind of hypocrisy (assuming he himself is an atheist).
Perhaps your’re confused by the fact that many atheists are also humanists, and somewhat coincidentally, humanitarians too. People who reject God belief are often the same kind of people who, say, donate to UNICEF or MSF. On the other hand, an atheist who rapes children or bombs abortion clinics can’t be used to expose atheism as a “lie”, because atheism has nothing at all to say about a person’s moral code, in spite of what some Christian propagandists would like you to believe. You can be good or bad without God, but it’s not atheism per se that’s calling the shots.
Your argument fails because the KGB did not just kill Priests. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin set up and implemented a system that killed MILLIONS of believers BECAUSE THEY HATED RELIGION and they wanted to eliminate it. Millions of those they killed had no power, no property, and no influence and were no threat to the state. The atheists just wanted them dead.
But thanks for the admission that no deed…no matter how perverted…is inconsistent with atheism.
That is probably a major reason why they Officially Atheisic States always become mass mudering obscenites.
No basis for morality.
And its why they will self destruct.
And its why you will lose.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about, Rocky. Do you not know that the KGB was founded after the murder of Trotsky, both of which were ordered by Stalin himself? It was descended from the CHEKA, established just after the October revolution when the Western countries attempted to invade the USSR in order to strangle the revolution at birth. By the way, I seem to remember that the ex-seminarian, Stalin, possibly one of history’s greatest mass-murderers, voted against the Bolshevik take-over of power in 1917. The CHEKA organised the repression of monasteries and the clerical orders, because they openly supported Kerensky and the invading White Armies; it was an arm of civil war.
Stalin’s attitude to the Church veered, as in almost all his policies, between repression, toleration and opportunism; schooled in the episodically barbarous history of Russia, he was inspired to usher in the midnight of the last century during the 30s, killing or exiling any possible rival, from all quarters, the most famous of whom is Victor Serge. It is frankly infantile of you even to consider writing the sentence, ‘Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin…killed MILLIONS of believers BECAUSE THEY HATED RELIGION…’; it lacks historical context and demonstrates complete ignorance of the differences between the three; it fails to analyse the policies especially of Stalin to any degree at all, hence the rationale for his murderousness, and represents a complete non-sequitur.
Nevertheless, the Soviet and later Russian leadership did learn a few tricks from the Russian Orthodox Church; from where do you think they purloined the idea of carrying huge intimidating, iconographic photos of the Politburo etc. around Red Square?
I didn’t say the KGB murdered millions. I referred to the system set up by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.
They all had a part of it at various times.
Who cares if the all supplied their own variations?
MILLIONS were still murdered, which you don’t deny. That they all had their own reasons, was of no comfort to the dead, who were killed because of their hatred of religion. Your “historical context” and name calling is simply excuse making.
And I haven’t even mentioned the additional millions tortured, enslaved, and intimidated.
Who ya kiddin?
Pwned!
Thanks, JJE and Pete!
Naw.
Xians have been slaughtering Pagans, Jews, Moslems, tribal peoples, and mostly each other for 2,000 years.
They are so far ahead in the body count department that they’ve retired the prize.
One of the bloodiest wars in history was the Taiping rebellion which killed 18 million people. It was started by…a xian and his cult.
@Rocky Morrison
Re: the “nasty teacher” argument. I would like to add the comments which point out that atheism does not imply any moral content, which is certainly true.
You should look at Christianity, at the birth of its power, in what I consider to be the most important century in Western Europe, the fourth, when the Athanasians (the proto-Catholics) were battling the Arians and administering the funeral rites of Paganism. This is what Saint Hilary of Poitiers (known as the hammer of the Arians) said of his bloody times:
If even the hammer of the heretics, at the dawn of the temporal, not spiritual, authority of the Church, could metaphorically pinch his nose at the stench of internecine Christian blood-lust, isn’t it obvious that venality, hypocrisy, intimidation and murder are inherent in, the original sin of, the Church triumphant and empowered?
On the contrary, Officially Atheistic States killed close to 100 Million People in the last century…far exceeding the death toll for all those killed in wars, for many reasons other than religion…politics, money, general power…in the past 1000 years.
In fact, farther back than that.
(Source, The Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press. Yep…the atheists killed because they hated religion, and atheism was integral to Dialectical Materialism.)
I’d argue that Stalin wasn’t at all atheistic — rather, he set himself up as a god-ruler, and like most other would-be monotheistic religions, his personality cult was violently jealous of other gods. Unless you can find some evidence in current states with very low religiosity (e.g., the Netherlands) that points to them becoming hotbeds of genocide as a result?
It’s even odds it never happened because?? Christians would never do that? One response I got from an old friend was that Bobby and I were lucky – his wife, and her sister, were molested by priests when they were young girls. And, as we all know, covering for their pedophile priesthood was done by the Catholic Church as methodically as the inquisition, the crusades, and the encouragement of, and coddling of, war criminals throughout history. But we were talking about Presbyterians – they must be different, right?
JonesTOWN, FFS. JonesTOWN.
Fixed, thanks, but there’s no need for obscenity.
“Why I was being punished for something innocent Bobby had whispered I don’t know – just Christian logic, I guess”
Substitutionary atonement?
Professor Coyne,
It’s ‘Jonestown.’
Have any of you here been following the Atheist Testimonies over at Pharyngula? The RCC has the passing on of the disease of religion down to a fine art but even they fail sometimes as the testemonies prove. In other cases those who would bring children to Jesus simply haven’t a clue. I attended a CofE* primary school in the sixties. Modern CofE schools are quite big on indoctrination because the church have belatedly caught on that their religion is dying on its arse. Back in the sixties it was taken for granted that most kids were brought up to be CofE and so the school had so little interest in religion that they didn’t even have anyone qualified to teach RE** As a consequence, the local vicar would come in once a week to teach RE. He taught us about Christianity by writing stuff in Latin on the blackboard and making us copy it out. Maybe he was a closet atheist, I will never know.
*Church of England.
**Religious Education.
I must admit the “Why I’m an Atheist” postings are amongst the many that I tend to skip over on Pharyngula these days. Unless they’re really short, I just can’t get too interested in other people’s stories about their non-belief (though I’ve enjoyed reading people’s experiences at the hands of evil Sunday school teachers in this thread!)
My secondary school was nominally C of E, and it was one of the few times when being a Catholic was useful: I could skip prayers and hymns at the start of assembly along with the Jewish kids and Muslims if I wanted to. Not quite sure why RC was regarded as so incompatible, but I wasn’t about to question it!
I love the WIAAA posts. My favourite are the ones where someone was totally surrounded by religious people yet still never believed any of it, thinking they were all nuts. I’d love to study the differences in such people that mean they are completely immune to religion. It also reinforces my belief that there have always been atheists, even if they kept quiet about it.
Read the current one. It will break your heart.
I visited the site and read this: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/05/05/why-i-am-an-atheist-mouthyb/
Indeed, very sad.
I know RCC is bad, but these southern-baptistas is real bad ..
‘He taught us about Christianity by writing stuff in Latin on the blackboard and making us copy it out.’ That’s because it was not RE (Religious Education); it was RI (Religious Instruction).
And I used to think RI = “Rigorous imprisonment” 😀
In my previous life when I used to go on mission trips to Mexico every year, only the families who stayed for the church services were allowed to get the food and clothing we were giving out. The leaders were very strict about that. It’s why we always waited until after service to hand out the items – because otherwise people would take the things and leave without going to church. Everyone knows spiritual needs come first, and THEN we can worry about helping them meet food, clothing, and shelter needs.
The bible school teacher? Maybe Steve should thank mom for sending him to a christian brainwashing academy without breakfast.
“That very day I realized any mother who would send two little boys to a christian brainwashing academy without breakfast deserved no respect —— and I’ve been ridiculing motherhoood ever since.”
OK, Steve never actually said that, but it’s plausible he might think it.
Steve?
I hear that brainwashing is more effective when the victim has an empty stomach, but that’s kind of sinister. The mom was probably just cheap.
I don’t know about cheap, but mom didn’t like to hassle with young children when there are so many other things to do in a day. I’ve known lots of good mothers, though, so I didn’t dump motherhood like I did religion. In fact, there was a happy ending to the hunger campaign: My brothers and I were later dumped at the Presbyterian picnic – also unfed, and knowing no one. Most of the parishioners jealously guarded their food, except for one family who warmly welcomed us, fed us, and gave us a ride home afterwards. The little 9-yr-old girl at the table liked my 9-yr-old brother, David. Ten years later she mailed David a card with a button inside that read “Fornication Is Fun!” and her phone number. A very welcome unintended consequence, long after the fact.
Oh now that is a delightful story. Ironic. Subversive. Just what one wishes would happen at every church picnic (or other equally boring social occasion). 🙂 One should treasure such moments, they don’t happen very often.
Stories like this make my heart hurt; makes me want to hang my head out a window and just cry. Shaming and humiliating two little boys whose crime was hunger? Yeah. Another of Christianity’s finest hours.
It makes me want to pick up a club and give some individuals a good round of christian loving.
Christian logic…added to my oxymoron list.
Just in front of Christian love.
Fishes and loaves! Kool-Aid and cookies? Blasphemy and blaspheyou too. Roast in Jello.
This is exactly why I can not subscribe to the notion that we must treat religious beliefs with respect. Beliefs have consequences, and often the believers intentionally target the ignorant and naive (children) for recruitment into their horrible religion. Horrible because of the way these people treat children both psychologically and physically. Imagine growing up believing you are an unworthy, evil, and a damned sinner…unless of course, you believe and behave as these adults tell you too.
As a child, I didn’t stand a chance of escaping this horrific abuse. I was born into a family whose parents were Christian and Calvinistic to boot. My father was a Presbyterian minister. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was generously practiced (though how this would ensure I became one of the “elect” escapes me). I distinctly remember the “board of education”. It was drilled with holes in it to make it more aerodynamically efficient and increase the force of the blow. I suppose the appeal was to make the punishment less physically demanding on the adult while maintaining the appropriate disciplinary level of pain. And humiliation (another big component in discipline).
“Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him” (Prov. 22:15, KIV).
Words many evangelical Christians live by.
How afwul; Calvin was the absolute worst. I never could understand how anyone could worship someone so obviously vile and evil – he actually makes Augustine the Hippo look like a saint in comparison.
This is too good – exactly what religion is all about!
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the “Doctrine of Discipline” regarding children, read the following as an example
http://bible.org/seriespage/board-education
Favorite part:
“After a quiet and unemotional discussion about proper behavior in church, I applied the doctrine of discipline to the part of the anatomy God designed for that purpose. Then I held him as his sobs subsided, assuring him of my love and explaining that I wanted him to remember how he should conduct himself in church.”
“The Intelligent Design of the Human Ass”.
Well, of course it is for their own good!
How could child abuse not be over represented in a religion like xianity when your holy book preaches that children are such worthless nonentities.
Throughout much of history, right up till not very long ago even in western countries, children were so often considered to be of little or no value, until they reached a “useful” age. Heck, that kind of thinking is still to be found in even 1st world countries.
§
Hey those boys got off easy! I was repeatedly told I was going to burn in hell unless I quit masturbating and accepted Jesus Christ as my Personal Savior®!
This story reminds me of Sister Frances at my Catholic primary school. We must have been about 7, and a boy was leaning back dangerously in his chair. Sister Frances said something like, “I hope you fall back and crack your head open on the desk behind you!” Fine words for a nun! I think even at that age it was clear to me that this religion lark wasn’t all it was cracked up to be (not just from that, but from the general sadism meted out by the sisters), but it was a few years before I could walk away from it.
I know a great joke about the Jonestown massacre, but the punchline is too long.
Rim shot!
Yes, I can relate to Steve’s story. Mine happened in a Southern CA Methodist Church Sunday school when the teacher asked us what we wanted for xmas. One of the younger kids quite happily said she wanted a specific doll (whatever was popular that year I don’t remember)”more than anything in the world.” Well, that teacher immediately lit into the poor child exclaiming that by using that phrase god would think that she loved the doll more than him. Though this happened over 50 years ago I still remember sitting dumbstruck in that Sunday school room thinking all the time that I, as well as all the other kids in the room, understood exactly what the little girl meant. How could a powerful god not understand something so innocent & simple as a child wanting a doll for a present? I didn’t question the existence of god at this point, just that something must be really, really, wrong with god & his followers. After all, how could adults worship someone that couldn’t understand their own children?
It seems that if there was a poll for “Why are you an atheist?” attending Sunday school would be quite close to the top!
Hmmm, I was an atheist before I ever went to Sunday school, but it certainly never began to persuade me of god. For some reason I knew the Lord’s Prayer which impressed them, but I only went a few times before I simply told my father that I wasn’t going any more. My mother was an atheist so he caved and my brother and I never went again.
I got sent to Sunday School (in England) at one stage, probably at the insistence of my maternal grandfather, since both my parents were hardly religious at all. I think I’d already heard about the age of the earth and evolution at school by then, so the stuff we got in Sunday School I found rather hard to believe, especially the miracles. I did feel quite guilty about not believing it though. Until one day I decided that (a) it was nonsense and therefore (b) since it wasn’t true it was perfectly okay to disbelieve it and I didn’t have to feel guilty about anything. I still remember the feeling of relief.
Oh, and we had a weekly ‘Religious Education’ hour at school but I can hardly remember it, we weren’t examined on it and I don’t think anyone took it seriously.
Always a key point for me. If your god is so ignorant (weak, reprehensible, etc.) why in the hell would you worship him? You should fire him if he is that stupid, and round up a possey to bring him down if he is reprehensible enough to punish a child for such a thing.
Yeah; I’m waiting for sequels to God of War with Kratos vs. Jesus and so on.
A frustratingly sad story, but with a happy ending.
And a very good example of why it is appropriate to ridicule religious beliefs.
That’s funny – that’s exactly how most missionaries around the world act. “If you believe our bullshit we’ll give you something; otherwise we’ll let you die on the streets.” That is the general christian notion of charity and why I support no christian charities – they’ll take your heathen money and use it as a tool to brainwash people.
Yeah, missionaries.
1.Styles of sculpture, music, and dance used to vary greatly from village to village within New Guinea. Some villagers along the Sepik River and in the Asmat swamps produced carvings that are now world-famous because of their quality. But New Guinea villagers have been increasing coerced or seduced into abandoning their artistic traditions. When I visited an isolated triblet of 578 people at Bomai in 1965, the missionary controlling the only store had just manipulated the people into burning all their art. Centuries of unique cultural development (“heathen artifacts,” as the missionary put it) had thus been destroyed in one morning.
One of the worst things I’d seen in PNG is how the folks frequently say “Only the white fella can do that; we’re too stupid.” Yet another triumph of the missionaries. It’s also obvious that the missionaries were happy to pit the tribes against eachother. You just can’t trust those Liars for Jesus.
The post reminds me of Michael Haneke’s film, White Ribbon (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149362/). I recommend it.
Catholic school cured me of religion.
How well I remember Sister Anus Dei trying to explain how it’s all sex and sado-masochism even though it never explicitly says so.
lol, Sister Anus Dei.
A Sister of Perpetual Indulgence?
To be fair, most Christians don’t go along with that type of behaviour. However, we constantly see atheism in an individual explained by a reaction to bad behaviour of Christians, or a failure on the part of the atheist to properly understand God’s loving intentions. The solution, therefore, is for Christians to display the “fruit of the spirit”.
In my case I wasn’t personally mistreated. But along with all my other contemporaries I was presented with tales of Jesus as a great moral teacher and the moral lessons of the Old Testament, given as facts and lessons to be heeded, without any hint that there might be an alternative. As it happened I couldn’t help noticing that, firstly, where was this god that supposedly watched over us, and secondly, there was something morally dubious about quite a few of the Biblical lessons.
Therefore I did develop within myself a sense of an alternative and walked away from Christianity – something that I’d never been asked if I wanted – by the age of eight.
So the Christians are right. It is our experience of Christianity that causes us to reject it – and not just inappropriate behaviour of Christians, either. I consider that, given the circumstances of my first involuntary contact from religion, I’ve never actually been a believer.
Given that they have a head start in indoctrinating impressionable minds, one would think that Christians would consolidate their advantage by demonstrating the existence of God, or explaining how Biblical morality corresponds with sound ethical theory. I’m joking, they couldn’t do that even if they tried.
The alternative is coercion, either friendly or unfriendly. We atheists should be thankful for the inappropriate behaviour of some of the religious.
Some really good points here that some can rise above indoctrination. Yet so many become enveloped and smothered by the fairy tale of God.
Thanks.
I posted my thoughts on Christian indoctrination and its failure a few months ago, here:
http://headbutterofthegods.com/2011/12/09/thoughts-on-christianity-part-1/
Reminds me of the time our (very religious) teacher told us to use a list of words in sentences. To save energy (and show off a little) I was using more than one word in a sentence, and two of the words were “Jesus” and “spices” so I wrote “In the time of Jesus, people used a lot of spices.”
Mrs Galbraith called me up to her desk and told me – more in sorrow than in anger, or so she seemed to be trying to convey – that I had Broken one of the Ten Commandments – Taken the Lord’s Name In Vain. I was still young enough for this to be worrying, and I resent it to this day, that she had in effect laid a trap for us (especially considering that if that is TTLNIV, then so is saying “BC” and “AD”.) She didn’t punish me, but neither did she offer me any way to atone. I guess the implication was that I was now going to Hell.
Fortunately my parents told me – but not to tell her – that she was talking nonsense. I hate to think of the plight of children of religious parents in this kind of situation.
The same woman insisted that the sun is the centre of the universe (which was known to be false even in 1957) because uni-verse means “one centre” (which it doesn’t, and doesn’t imply anything about the sun).
I had a very similar experience growing up in Christian schools in Oklahoma with my two younger brothers. If one brother did something “wrong”, the teachers turned against the other brothers as well. It reached a boiling point when a friend of one of my brothers skipped school, a heinous offense. His family was wealthy and contributed a lot of money to the school, so they couldn’t punish him. Instead, they punished my brother for “knowing” that the “sin” was going to be committed and not reporting it (note that they did not punish the actual “sinner” at all, and the horrible offense involved is a 12 year old skipping school). Then they also started lashing out at me, because my little brother was so “bad”.
This was what finally convinced my parents to take us out of that awful school. But I was more frustrated than relieved, since I’d been telling them for years by that point how the school played favorites with the rich kids. Being 14 and having told your parents for years, “Everyone at this school is a terrible, terrible person,” only to have them agree when something happens to your brother is pretty fucking infuriating.
That’s how they get family to turn traitor to other family members and be one with the cult.
A minor quibble: Did the teacher have any reason to think that Steve and Bobby were unbelievers? Perhaps I’m missing something here.
In any case, this reminds me of my upbringing in a missionary-focused evangelical church where the concern was that converts from poorer places in the world were “rice Christians” – wealthy westerners would come bearing gifts and people would only convert for the material gain. It didn’t stop the practice of bringing such gifts though.
Yes I do do think you are missing a very glaring point indeed.
This interesting article certainly brought back clear recollections to me. Although neither of my parents bothered with church attendance we were taken regularly by one of our God-Mother aunts. It was horrendously boring and although my sister and brother stopped going a while before me I continued out of my liking for my aunt. At about 8 years old I also withdrew. Every Christmas our local catholic church would bring gifts into the school. There was always a hierarchy of favourites and the quality of gift became less and less subject to favourability. When every child had received a gift apart from me, I was made to stand up upon my chair. The priest pointed to me. He declared loudly that the boy who got nothing today doesn’t go to church. My teacher then came up to me and put a Fez hat on my head. Oh how funny it was and how they all laughed. I felt lonely and sad and 55 years later the picture still remains clear to me. There is an inherent spite rooted deep within religion. I didn’t get the Fez hat joke at the time and was actually pleased that I had got something. As far as religious people are concerned I do not feel any antipathy towards them. However, I have yet to hear a credible explanation as to why educated people in society around the world still buy into the delusion of faith.
That’s pretty horrible being singled out like that, no matter for what reason and especially for a child.
Do you still have the fez? You should have asked them for a cigar and a smoking jacket that goes with that fez 😀
If the teacher had asked how Jesus turned the water into wine, he could have said, “Jus’ like that! Ah ha ha!” (Don’t try to work this one out, Americans, it a cultural thing.)
I was sent to Sunday School by my pretty-unreligious parents.
I cannot remember what I was doing, but I was probably cracking a joke or something, when the ‘teacher’ said to me – “Shut up, fatty”.
I was quite a shy kid, and slightly overweight at the time. I still remember the humiliation over 40 years later.
Reblogged this on emmageraln.
This is a bit off the thread, but related to the whole question of responding to Christians. I just read an article in the paper that quoted Terry Bradshaw, and let me tell you, these comments deserve all the ridicule one can muster up…
After several statements about his conversion, Bradshaw talked about the fact that he’s currently working on reading the bible in 90 days. On the Old Testatment he says, “I’ve never seen so much killing in my life…I question all the killing in the OT, but you know what? (God) had to get rid of all the people that down in time would come back and destroyed the very essence of why He was there. He got rid of all the sinners and all the people that He knew He wouldn’t be able to trust. Heck, He didn’t even let Moses cross over the Jordan, and He loved Moses.”
Looks like he traded brain on drugs for brain on religion and got no improvement.
On Christianity and children, I highly recommend that everyone here read The Good News Club by Katherine Stewart. It hopefully will get people in every public school community to be aggressively active against this use of public schools to evangelize the 4-14 age range. There is a part of the book where a parent who is running one of these clubs tells observers how to explain original sin to children by using her own 5 week old as an example. It’s horrendous.
It’s interesting the number of people who become atheists after maybe just one bad experiences with the religiosos in their life. My experiences were pretty benign, even though I grew up the very religious deep south. I think one of the big reasons I became an atheist was seeing all of those different churches, each so confident that they had the right answer . . .
Likely, perhaps, that that one bad experience is a catalyst for an incipient atheism.
In my case, it was our priest’s bad behaviour (he snubbed my then recently bereaved grandfather) that meant we stopped going to church, which certainly paved the way…
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Come on guy’s, it’s metaphor. Good olde fashioned Bible style. The cookie symbolizes “thy neighbor’s wife.” Or more accurately, thy neighbor’s wife’s…ahem…cookie.
Still, a twisted teacher and a predictably sorry moral. Believe or else, all of that forgiveness and compassion stuff goes right out the window.
In these ‘How I stopped being religious’ posts, I’ve never seen one which came close to the experience of me and my elder sister and brother; that Church, for adolescents, was plain extremely boring. We had better things to do, like pretending to our parents that we were off to Mass, and, instead, simply wandering the streets of our equally dull suburb for an hour or so.
I was brought up in England in a mainly Irish RC parish, but, quite unusually, the priest was English. Bejasus, were his sermons soporific. The local doctors would send their patients to him as a cure for insomnia. No rakish Irish cleric for us, with the burgeoning bulbous nose and the cracked veins in the cheeks, betraying his penchant for a jorum down the social and the odd wee dram round at Mr. and Mrs. McLaughlin’s. No, tedium never-ending and quasi-High Anglican solemnity and rhetorical insipidity and ineptitude perfected. We had to escape.
Oh yeah. Aside from not believing any of it, Sunday School (in my case an English Baptist/Methodist/Congregational Sunday School) was boring – and kids have a very low boredom threshold. I resented wasting an hour of my life every weekend when I could be out playing. I think I only got sent to placate my maternal grandfather, and I eventually managed to talk my way out of it to my parents.