Due to the overwhelming feedback from my Belief-O-Matic entry, I thought I’d go ahead and post a bit about my religion.
To begin, let me say I am the child of atheists who raised me in the bible belt. My mother hails from Presbyterian stock and my father from Lutheran. In fact, my father moved into a monastery when he was 15 and lived there until college, becoming an atheist shortly thereafter (ingrate). In any case, they were both card-carrying atheists by the time me and my brother came along.
And so needless to say I got mixed messages growing up with them in the South. Outside the house, “atheist” was synonymous with “communist” and the end destination of both certain beyond a doubt. Inside the house, the local holy rollers were ridiculed as ignorant rubes and others of a more sedate religious bent were not taken any more seriously.
One striking example of the Baptist-Atheist conflict had to do with the bible study classes arranged by my elementary school. A rolling classroom van pulled up to the curb and we were walked out in classroom groups for bible study once a week.
Then: Crisis. My parents found out we were going to bible study.
Worse, they found out that in bible study they made us say outloud that we believed in Jesus Christ. Well let me tell you, their card-carrying cases quivered as they called the school to pull me and my brother from that den of ignorance. My father, a professor, had already been the subject of numerous editorials written to the town paper, folks lambasting him for teaching evolution at the college level, and so they already knew me and my brother and they already knew we were going to hell.
That being so, school officials had no qualms about where to put us when our classmates were in bible study: detention.
Is it any wonder that my first career goal was to become a nun?
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