I am an atheist, I am not ashamed to admit that. The only reason I do not go out and do something like get "ATHEIST" on my license plate is because I live in Nebraska and I would rather not get my car keyed. Don't get me wrong, people around here are very friendly and generally great, but there still is a stigma around atheists and many people don't understand what it really means to be an atheist and that atheists have the same potential to be moral upstanding citizens as everybody else and ignorance can lead people to do stupid things. That being said, I have not always been an atheist. My family is by no means religious in the sense of the hate-mongering right wing, but my childhood was filled with worship services, bible studies, youth groups and other community events based around our church. My mom is very religious, my Dad is much more of a passive believer and probably closer to a deist than a Christian, but he truly enjoys the sermons he has attended since meeting my mother over 22 years ago. I don't think this is a one way road either, it is pretty clear my Dad provides my mom with a grounding point for when she starts to get more emotional because his very nature is calm and neutral. My mom found Christianity in the 70s when dealing with some extremely hard life issues. Her faith got her through it and she never forgot that. I have often contemplated what my mother would be like, as a person, today, had she not met my father. It does sometimes scare me to think that she could have fallen in with right wing Christianity but I suspect that might have happened. But that is just speculation, the reality is that she maintains a deep spiritual sense of self, often holding similar values as the Christian Right, but she keeps religion in religion and out of unrelated things like politics. When it comes to politics she falls left of center just like my Dad and myself while her siblings and mother all sort of fall in with the Christian right, but without the vitriol. I describe all this because the point of this post is to illustrate how a persons viewpoints can change in their lifetime and how much they can stay the same.
Today I went back to my parents house with my sister to go through the various tubs containing our childhood memories, toys, pictures, in one case a bowl of 10 year old, still good tootsie rolls, and to throw out the stuff we no longer wanted and keep the stuff we treasured. We didn't finish and indeed I have made another post before about the first time we did this where I found my Sega Genesis, so this experience will gladly continue for awhile. About halfway through our second tub, my sister found a sheet of paper with a letter to the editor that I had written and was published in the town paper. I distinctly remember writing it, turning it in, reading it with great pleasure the following week and then reading the responses, as there were more than one, the following week and being rather disappointed. The letter wasn't terribly long, only one paragraph, very straight and too the point and it was in response to a previous week's letter about the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance. What amazed me as the memories flooded back to me and I read the letter, was that nearly every single word in it is exactly how I feel now and often defend when debating. There was one major difference though. The very first sentence and it was a stark difference. The first sentence was "Even though I am a devout Christian..." and as I looked at that again and was simply amazed at how much I have changed and how much I have stayed the same. Roughly 10 years have passed since I wrote that letter. I was only 17 or 18 at the time, quite capable of logically thinking and forming rational arguments but at that point the adolescent brain is still undergoing massive changes and is clearly not at the peak it will reach later. Looking back at that time in my life, it is after the first time I had doubts about Christianity, but I was still on my own journey and remained involved with Church functions so the statement that I was a devout Christian was still very much true and very much relevant. My spiritual progression, while overtime it was gradually sloping down towards atheism, still had its ascents. I started in the Methodist Church but my mother never felt very comfortable with the congregation and after a friend of mine from school invited me to a sleepover and to go to his church with him the next day, we did and we ended up changing to the local Baptist Church. None of this was based on the differences between the two ideologically, but rather the congregation of the Baptist Church was much more accepting and had many more kids my age, and my mother thought that would be beneficial. I was good friends with the one who invited me for many years, until early middle school, when kids began to change and go their own way. We never had a falling out but just didn't hang out anymore. I had other friends there though, the pastors son was my age and we became really great friends in Sunday school, he got me into football in middle school and we had been playing soccer on a select team, that is, kids chosen because they were good players and we traveled around Nebraska and Iowa playing other similar teams. There were two teams in our town of 6000 and both were pretty good. Each team had 5 members participate in the national 3v3 tournaments more than once and more than once the other team finished first with ours finishing second. Incidentally, my sister participated in the girl version in high school. Her team did fantastically and got the national championship too. I was so proud...and a bit jealous since I was not part of the players selected for the 3v3 team...but back to the issue at hand. I was friends with him to mid-high school, really good friends. We grew apart as well, but he is a good person, has a family now and I am glad. In my childhood I also participated in a group called "Awana" that met every wednesday for a sort of bible study and youth group activity that mostly consisted of memorizing bible verses and praying. I followed that through high school as well until around the time my health began altering my daily life. I stopped going to church, though my parents and sister still went regularly. This didn't particularly affect religion yet, the absence didn't really have anything to do with faith but everything to do with the rest of my life. It was about this time that this letter was written. In fact, I held many strong Christian views, views that are today considered pretty right wing, until I was at least 20, gradually changing as I experienced life and eventually when I came to realize I can be a good person even if I don't believe. Back then though, as I watched Vermont implement civil unions (2000) and the uproar that resulted, there began a huge conflict of my inherent sense for people to be free and my religious beliefs. Everything religion was telling me that this was an outrage. Everything logical was telling me that there was nothing wrong with two people loving each other. At the same time, the only gay person I knew was my mom's brother and I had maybe spent 10 total hours in my life with him so everything I heard about gay people, I believed. In the end I did what I do best, find a middle ground and settled on "give them a civil union, but stay the heck away from my traditional definition of marriage. You can tell from my other posts that I no longer feel this way. Civil Unions and Marriage is a Separate but Equal implementation and Separate but Equal does not work, ever. That wasn't the only issue either. To this day, despite knowing how a fertilized egg becomes a baby, why it is not killing a living being and every other sensationalized argument by the right, there is still a part of me that is "anti-abortion" so to speak. I don't particularly care what women do with their bodies, that is their business and not mine, but at the same time I know that if I had impregnated a woman and the pregnancy had progressed very far in, I would have an incredibly hard time not pursuing what would eventually be my son or daughter.
Throughout all of those significant theological changes though, one thing remained constant. My belief in the fairness involved in the separation of church and state. I am proud of the me from 10 years ago and I am pretty sure he would be proud of the him from 10 years in the future.
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