RE: What Religion, If Any, Were You Before You Became An Atheist?
January 29, 2011 at 12:40 am
(This post was last modified: January 29, 2011 at 12:43 am by TheDarkestOfAngels.)
I attended the Mormon Church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) with the rest of my family early in my childhood for the same reason every child attends anything - because my parents told me I had to go so I went. I eventually figured out how to get out of going because I never honestly felt like I had any reason to want to be there. Eventually, I figured out why and I became the person I am now, religiously ever since.
This would have been when I was about ten or eleven, give or take. I didn't tell anyone until years later but the reception of that news went rather well and none of my relationships or friendships changed. My friends, as I've discovered, have a similar outlook and are either atheists themselves or agnostic, which didn't surprise me given that I've known them for years, but it was interesting that I had gravitated to these people and only found out after.
When my mother remarried she began to attend a methodist church with my new step-father, so my immediate family is no longer Mormon but certain aunts, cousins, and grandparents still attend.
This would have been when I was about ten or eleven, give or take. I didn't tell anyone until years later but the reception of that news went rather well and none of my relationships or friendships changed. My friends, as I've discovered, have a similar outlook and are either atheists themselves or agnostic, which didn't surprise me given that I've known them for years, but it was interesting that I had gravitated to these people and only found out after.
When my mother remarried she began to attend a methodist church with my new step-father, so my immediate family is no longer Mormon but certain aunts, cousins, and grandparents still attend.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
