Oh lordy

Comrade PhysioProf wants to have a drunken confessional session, without the drunken and the face-to-face. Who am I to argue?

Can You Remember The Day That You Officially Became An Atheist?

Yes. First, some history. I was brought up religious by Lutheran parents, attending Sunday school and then church every week. I went to Episcopalian school--nuns and lay teachers (non-nuns?)--for umpteen years. I can still recite the books of the Old Testament, a couple of Psalms, and any number of hymns.

I believed the whole thing. In fact, I was quite the religious child. Loved the Narnia books when I was too young to get the religious metaphor; loved them even more after I did get it. My parents are socially liberal and so I never imbibed the whole hate-thy-neighbor branch of Christianity that seems to drive certain politicians. I thought Jews and Muslims and Christians all prayed to the same God, and we would sort out the tricky details when we were dead/in heaven.

I didn't have a problem with evolution; I thought it was real, and happened on the time scales science dictates. I just thought that God sort of oversaw the whole thing. I took the Bible as a parable, not a science text.

Arriving in high school, I started hanging out with a generally atheist crowd. They thought I was a curiosity item, but a really fucking smart curiosity, and so we engaged in a lot of high school Big Picture Aren't We Grownups Now debate. (CandidE--some of it in diners. Yes, we were that adult.) I learned that atheists were not immoral, as I had previously assumed; they learned that not all Christians were wingnut morans, as they had assumed. Belief: unshaken.

I started dating one of them.

Within a year or so, I made a terrible discovery. I tried to pray. And couldn't. The belief that had been a significant part of my identity and life for so long, that (seemed to have) weathered the endless debates, was gone. And really, really gone. As certain as I'd been only a week or two earlier that God was in his Heaven and all was right with the world, it was now utterly clear to me that he wasn't, and maybe it wasn't.

I didn't really register how deeply this conversion had shaken me, but I did pick a lot of fights with the boyfriend over trivial issues, and we eventually broke up. Hmm, transference much?

Anyhow. It took me a while to heal from the loss of this part of my life. There are some things I still miss about organized religion. The comfort. The music. The sense of shared community with fellow worshippers, and even with people in different faiths. The confidence that death wasn't really The End.

But plenty of things I've gained, too. Greater perspective on religion. A sense of urgency about getting experiments done, NOW (no afterlife!) A new understanding of morality as generated internally rather than externally. And a good lie-in on Sunday mornings.

Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

Never was.

How about the last time you spoke or prayed to God with actual thought that someone was listening?

I was 18. Doubt I prayed for anything profound. World peace, boyfriend, etc.

Did anger towards God or religion help cause you to be an atheist or agnostic?

Sex, maybe. Anger, nope.

Were you agnostic towards ghosts, even after you became an atheist?

WTF is up with the ghosts? What next, UFOs?

Do you want to be wrong?

You betcha! This shit would be much easier if someone were in charge. Sadly, I see no evidence that an Almighty Bureaucracy is at work.

Tag! Um, who didn't CPP and Doubledoc tag? I'm not sure about the religious leanings or otherwise of many of you, but I'll take a guess and say YoungFemaleScientist? Candid? Only if you feel like it. Or heck, Isis, you can go ahead and invert all the questions if you like. Good luck with making figures for this one though.