I would like to apologize for my writing style it’s not easy for me to write in English.
I think I was an atheist since the age of 4! I have just finished reading The God Delusion (in French) and it was a real pleasure from beginning to end. I’ve read the chapter on children and religion and I was wondering what the probabilities were for an atheist child?
I will try to explain my position:
I was born in Belgrade in Ex-Yugoslavia in 1980 (under Tito, so we weren’t very keen on religion but we weren’t really communists either. In my understanding living was easy with just some basic rules and a lot of fun, and not so much work and suffering). In fact the only people I knew who went to church were Charles Ingals and his family. I lived till my 8th year under the misconception that this was the case everywhere else on the planet (for me history consisted mostly of: 1.Dinosaurs, 2.Ancient Greece, 3.Middle ages, 4.WWI and II, 5.Socialism). When my father explained to me that a lot of people in Europe still went to church, it was quite a shock!
One of my first memories is my sudden understanding while lying in bed at night (I was 4 or 5, because in my memory the kitchen table is 3m high!) that I was going to age and die! I started to cry and scream and my parents woke up and took me out of bed and sat me on the kitchen table, while I was still screaming. Finally I managed to explain: “I don’t want to get old! I don’t want to die!” and my mother said very calmly: “Don’t bother yourself with that now, you are not even half of 10 years old and you are going to die in dozens and dozens of years. It’s so far away!” And it worked! I calmed down and it did seem a really good reassuring reasoning for a long time (it isn’t working so well now that I’m 29 though…).
When I was 8, a boy (13 years old) in my school committed suicide. The whole school was talking about it and the girl sitting next to me said “he did it because he believed in life after death”. I was completely thrown! While I did understand why it was easier to kill yourself if you believed that, I just couldn’t bring myself to understand how he had arrived to that conclusion: it seemed so very strange! Life after death: ????? When you die you don’t live anymore, it seemed to make perfect sense to me! (just so you know I had a real nice protected childhood and I had never seen death at that time, not even a dead animal).
I arrived, at 11, in Switzerland, and all my classmates were Christians (although not very practicing ones) but at first I was very afraid. I just wasn’t used to religion in my daily life and I think I became a bit fundamental… I was scared of churches and priests, I was certain they didn’t like me… My father used to call me “the vampire” because I flinched at every cross! But then, I got used to it…
Do you think it was possible for a 4 year old to think that or have I been brainwashed? Or is it all a constructed memory?
I think I was an atheist since the age of 4! I have just finished reading The God Delusion (in French) and it was a real pleasure from beginning to end. I’ve read the chapter on children and religion and I was wondering what the probabilities were for an atheist child?
I will try to explain my position:
I was born in Belgrade in Ex-Yugoslavia in 1980 (under Tito, so we weren’t very keen on religion but we weren’t really communists either. In my understanding living was easy with just some basic rules and a lot of fun, and not so much work and suffering). In fact the only people I knew who went to church were Charles Ingals and his family. I lived till my 8th year under the misconception that this was the case everywhere else on the planet (for me history consisted mostly of: 1.Dinosaurs, 2.Ancient Greece, 3.Middle ages, 4.WWI and II, 5.Socialism). When my father explained to me that a lot of people in Europe still went to church, it was quite a shock!
One of my first memories is my sudden understanding while lying in bed at night (I was 4 or 5, because in my memory the kitchen table is 3m high!) that I was going to age and die! I started to cry and scream and my parents woke up and took me out of bed and sat me on the kitchen table, while I was still screaming. Finally I managed to explain: “I don’t want to get old! I don’t want to die!” and my mother said very calmly: “Don’t bother yourself with that now, you are not even half of 10 years old and you are going to die in dozens and dozens of years. It’s so far away!” And it worked! I calmed down and it did seem a really good reassuring reasoning for a long time (it isn’t working so well now that I’m 29 though…).
When I was 8, a boy (13 years old) in my school committed suicide. The whole school was talking about it and the girl sitting next to me said “he did it because he believed in life after death”. I was completely thrown! While I did understand why it was easier to kill yourself if you believed that, I just couldn’t bring myself to understand how he had arrived to that conclusion: it seemed so very strange! Life after death: ????? When you die you don’t live anymore, it seemed to make perfect sense to me! (just so you know I had a real nice protected childhood and I had never seen death at that time, not even a dead animal).
I arrived, at 11, in Switzerland, and all my classmates were Christians (although not very practicing ones) but at first I was very afraid. I just wasn’t used to religion in my daily life and I think I became a bit fundamental… I was scared of churches and priests, I was certain they didn’t like me… My father used to call me “the vampire” because I flinched at every cross! But then, I got used to it…
Do you think it was possible for a 4 year old to think that or have I been brainwashed? Or is it all a constructed memory?
