On Looking for God - It Wasn't Necessary
When I was a child, the Christian deity was thrust before me, or at least the idea of such a thing was. What did I know? Adults told me lots of things and, since I was a child, I believed them. So, when they told me about this God, I had no experience from which to doubt their words. I didn't look for a God; One was presented to me.
That started when I was five or six years old. I attended classes at a church near my home, where nice ladies used flannel boards and picture books to show me things about God. I heard lots of stories, told in language I could easily understand. I had no reason to doubt those nice ladies, so I believed what they told me.
About the time I was 12, I had questions, though, for the nice ladies, who were sometimes replaced by nice men in our Sunday School classes. By then, I was a voracious reader, and had managed to read through the entire Bible, both Old and New Testaments. I had questions. Apparently, some of those were not appropriate for my age or something, because answers were not forthcoming. Still, I accepted what I was being told, more or less, but was beginning to feel skeptical about some things I was being told.
Skip ahead a few years, and I was an adolescent boy in High School. I still attended those classes, but they were now taught by a "Youth Pastor," a nice enough young man. My questions became more difficult to answer, I guess, because I still was not getting satisfactory answers. In the meantime, I was still reading and studying the Bible. One time, there was a verse memorization contest that had a prize of free participation in an upcoming "missionary" trip to an Indian Reservation. So, I memorized the entire book of Matthew, just to make sure someone else didn't get that trip. When I started reciting it by memory, though, I was declared the winner after Chapter 3. I still didn't get answers to my questions, though. But, I sang in the choir and sometimes sang solos during services.
In my senior year of high school, I was approached by the church's pastor, who told me that the Board of Deacons had decided to offer me a full-ride scholarship to Wheaton College in Illinois if I had a plan to become a pastor. I guess that was based on my continued study, etc. After thinking about that, I declined, saying that I planned to become an Electronics Engineer and would be attending a different school.
Over the next few years, I found my own answers to the questions I had. None of those answers had anything to do with the God I had been introduced to as a small child, though. The more I learned, the less I was able to believe along those lines. Eventually, after study of other religions of the world, it was clear that I could no longer believe in any sort of deities or other supernatural stuff or beings. I had become an atheist at the same time I became an adult.
So, where did I look for God? Nowhere. God was presented to me on a platter, again and again. But, I had questions that could not be answered logically. So I looked for answers elsewhere, and found them. And that's my story.
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I left religion at 13, and never looked back. But my religious upbringing was the very soft United Church of Christ, the Congregationalists, so there was far less dogma (beyond the seemingly obligatory Apostle's Creed).
The fact is that even in early church school I found the entire thing rather unbelievable. The trinity pretty much ended my relationship with religion. One can only think "what the fuck?" after hearing about that.
I never read the entire Bible, but I tried once. Numbers disabused me of that enterprise. I tried Leviticus, and it was not much better. Maybe I should have skipped around a bit. Maybe Job, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, or one of the more poetic books would have gotten me through. But this was the King James Version, whose language was obsolete on the day it was written. I put my confirmation Bible back on the book shelf, and have never picked it up for wholesale reading again.
Religion means nothing to me now other than recognizing that it is a huge cultural worldwide negative influence. I despise religion for what it has done to humankind. However, I do not despise those who believe.
But the clergy should know better! They are the ones who are supposedly educated in this stuff. All one has to do is listen to the apologetics from people like William Lane Craig and one instantly knows that they are absolutely, positively full of shit. Then, there's the outright religious scammers who have taken over the GOP. The overwhelming evidence for this is their seemingly universal support for an evil apparition like Donald J. Drumpf. And they tell their flock of sheep that god actually supports that orange shitgibbon.
Oh! And these same people also believe that Jesus is coming back after a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East. Or something like that. And they are in fucking power!!!
Sorry for rambling.
