I‘ve been writing my story about my experiences with religion thus far, and let me just say that we’re at the part of the story where the mind fuck begins. Remember how I talked about how simple life was before religion came into it? This next step in the journey ensured that I would never go back to being that pure child, untarnished from things that didn’t, shouldn’t matter to me, ever again.
I’ve mentioned before that I was interested in learning about why people believed in Christianity. Now, I had tried asking my parents, but it was a taboo subject when I was in primary school. It was acceptable to say ‘that rubbish! Don’t you even worry about that, love,’ and that was all. I didn’t know what people got out of it or how it was possible to believe in it in the first place. I think I had very good reasons for not asking my peers who did believe in it at school. Certainly, I hadn’t acquired the mature skill of tact yet either, so it was probably best I didn’t.
As a child with an atheist upbringing, what I needed was someone willing to sit down and talk with me about it and just answer my questions. Simple questions, such as what do Christians actually believe? How do they even take it seriously? What’s the point of the whole set-up and how do they benefit from these beliefs?
So, on the one hand, I had the adults at home telling me ‘it’s just stupid!‘ and nothing else, and the only other adults would be, for starters anyway, the ‘teachers’ at scripture at school. Not really what I would’ve preferred, but hey, when you’re a curious child, you take what you can get.
It was either in second or third grade that I began attending scripture classes. My parents were cool with it, but then, we’re not talking about catholic scripture classes, we’re talking about Church of England classes, which is where they plonk any ‘doubtfuls’ or ‘doesn’t really come from anywhere’s. I can’t remember if I’d asked if I could go, or if it was their choice. I don’t think my parents remember either, but I have since asked, and they both had agreed I was at an age they felt was suitable for me to go so I could make my own mind up.
I also went on in later primary school to go to a Bible Club after school once a week, but I won’t go into detail here because the experience was much the same as scripture and it’ll just bore you. The only thing I’ll mention about Bible Club is that if my maternal grandmother was staying at our house, my mother would make me take the bible I was given in a brown paper bag. Odd. I thought Grandma would be happy to see that? Looking back, I realise it may’ve drawn attention to the fact that I was never Christened, and therefore not something my mum wanted to spoil a lovely visit from her mother with.
It was a bloody awful lot to take in, can I just say that? I found it very hard to keep up with. I was taught about Adam and Eve and the talking snake. My reaction to this was pretty much, ‘bugger me, a talking snake!’ as the joke goes. I still didn’t get how people believed this, but it sure was juicy enough for me to keep listening and have some questions answered. In hindsight, it may have raised more questions than answers by the time we were through.
I found ‘god’s’ ‘logic’ very strange. To punish humans for all time because some chick ate a damn forbidden fruit. I didn’t have a clue ’til years later that it was an apple, because the teacher never said what it was. It used to make me wonder if Christians are still supposed to eat apples now or not? What if I eat an apple? I didn’t understand the point of the story where Adam and Eve, after eating the apple were like, ‘ZOMG!! I’m nakies!’ I listened intently to the part where ‘god’ made Adam out of a speck of dust. ‘Hmm, cool magic trick,’ I thought to myself. I still wasn’t getting why people believed any of it yet. That the ‘teachers’ would actually say all of this with a straight face. Seriously. I couldn’t come up with this shit if I tried.
We learned that we are all born sinners. We all did bad things at some stage. ‘Yeah, no shit,’ I thought. ‘So what? We live and learn.’ I’d never heard the word ‘sin’ before this day. At some stage, it was also casually thrown in that ‘if you don’t believe that xmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus, then you don’t deserve to celebrate xmas’. This is something that stayed with me all these years, and I’ll talk more about that another time.
Over time, I learned a lot about hell and how it’s a place ‘you don’t want to end up in’ with much finger-wagging. Never heard much about heaven. Funny that. When I did hear about it though, I used to wonder why doing the right thing because it was, well, right, wasn’t enough. Why did we need to be motivated by reward and punishment? I was already a mostly ‘good’ person really. Yes, we’d established we’d all done ‘bad’ things, but I knew at that age that that’s life.
Then I began to worry, ‘what if it is true and I go to hell?’ Over time, this became my fear. At first, I thought, ‘well, I’m mostly a good person, so it shouldn’t matter, surely? If hell does exist, I don’t think I’d deserve to go there..’ Until after a while when I discovered that you had to believe in ‘god’, to ‘ask Jesus into your heart’ (what the flying fuck does that even mean??) to avoid hell. I was never overly concerned about getting into heaven. Only avoiding hell, if it existed.
So, if I wanted to avoid hell, I had to believe, just in case. Only trouble was, I still thought this religion was a load of crap. I didn’t believe there was a god, I didn’t believe the tales. Yet, I knew nothing about death and became scared of what happens to us when we die. Which is funny when you think that before this exposure I’d never thought much about death or let it worry me too much. I was taught that ‘god’ can hear our every thought. This was when I became paranoid. ‘If he is real, he’s gonna be so pissed at me’, was my thought. Then, in my mind, I’d throw in the thought, just in case hell was real, ‘I do believe in you!’. It’s as though my mind was no longer my own. I potentially had my own little peeping Tom.
I didn’t want anyone in my head, spying on my thoughts. Making me second-guess every little thought I was thinking. I already had someone in my head, and that was me and my ol’ conscience. A buddy who’d always served me well and never failed me. It was no longer enough to be a good person.
It was at this stage of my life that I developed insomnia. For hours, every night. I became acutely afraid of dying. In time, I became afraid of dying in my sleep. I would lie in bed, alone in my room, picturing hell, thinking about how it would be if it existed. Of course, there was that other inconvenient issue that any kid with atheist parents who is being exposed to Christianity goes through; ‘if hell exists, my parents will go there! That’s not fair! They’re good people and I’ll never be able to convince them.’ So excellent to burden a child with that baggage. Thanks so fucking much, scripture. All I wanted was a few answers. I also never took these fears to my parents. They’d think I was insane. I think I was insane at the time.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was getting the answers, alright. This was what it took to make me consider ‘believing’ or trying to pretend to believe in my mind that I believed, in case I was wrong and ‘god’ was listening. The ultimate mind-fuck.
I don’t have these worries now of course, but the insomnia was a special little bonus I got to keep right up until this present day.
No matter how fucked up my head was getting from all of this, I still chose to do the right thing in my day-to-day life. Well, as much as any normal, primary school kid is capable of. I didn’t do it in case ‘god’ was watching; I did it because it was right and that was reason enough to do right. I chose to do the right thing, and took some twisted satisfaction knowing that ‘god’ had nothing to do with it.
Other Reading:
Religion
A Small Child, Free From Religion
You’re Not Listening to That God Bull
The Day I Found Out I Was a Freak
Christian or Atheist Teen?
Adult Spirituality – No Longer an Atheist
No Easter Bunny, No Santa, No Tooth Fairy
No Scripture For My Kids
