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Thanks for asking. My mother was raised Eastern Orthodox, immigrant city poor. She and her two sisters became Catholic, although I don't know if they actually had some sort of conversion or just started showing up at Catholic church. My mother never went to church in my lifetime and never mentioned any of that stuff. (My elderly aunt, who is very dear to me, is staunchly Catholic, although is open to Buddhism and Hinduism and teaches yoga! She is careful to simply say, "I think of you every day," and I nail her and say, "Come on, Agnes, I know you're praying for me." She used to come up to my area with nun friends and go to a beautiful Catholic retreat center by the ocean, and I'd go take her out for lunch. She told me that her nun friends said, "Your niece is too nice to be an atheist." Ha).
There were no crosses or anything in the house growing up. My father would torture my mother about a Christmas tree. I do think my mother was really a wounded child at heart, and he was poking at her wounds because of their mutual contempt. I remember once my father was taking off a day of work "because it's Yom Kippur," and then it turned out he got the wrong day, but he took it off anyway and went to the racetrack.
I asked him recently if messiahs and stuff were talked about when he went to temple with family before age 18. He says he doesn't remember anything except "They passed the Torah around and these old immigrant men who needed a bath kissed it, ugh."
When my parents married, it was City Hall somewhere. They never mentioned it or observed it. My mother apparently agreed to "raise the kids Jewish" but my father didn't get around to it. He is only interested in "Jews who fight back," and not interested in anything prior to World War 2 or 1948. He and his brothers all took boxing lessons so they could walk to school through the Ukranian Christian neighborhood and fight their way through. He was a featherweight champion in the Army, "Thunderbolt Davy of the Thunderbolt Division." I saw the clippings.
My high school boyfriend's family took me to Unitarian a few times. I remember the first time I went, the sermon was "The ethics of biofreezing." The church was a very wild modern building set into a hillside, designed by a famous eco architect, Malcolm Wells. I didn't like the dull singing of what I guess were routine hymns. The building was cool. (I believe they went to Unitarian because the parents were Catholic and Methodist raised and wanted "something" for their kids. In three years, my boyfriend and I never discussed religion or belief or anything. I assume he didn't believe).
My Catholic cousins had crosses all over the house and holy water things by the door. I was very disappointed to learn that the holy water was just tap water, not from another planet or anything.
My father was not bar mitzvahed. Apparently he fought and kicked and screamed when the rebbe came to the house. He can't remember if his three brothers were bar mitzvahed- they were all older. There wasn't the concept of bat mitzvah for his five sisters. All his sibs married Jewish and raised their kids Jewish except my Uncle A, whose first wife was Catholic and who whored all over the neighborhood while he was at war. My father said he always felt bad for his parents because he married non-Jewish. I am not sure why my parents married but it was always a really bad idea. I think he said they married "because all my friends were getting married, your mother was pretty and smart and could dance" (his criteria for women). "She went psycho soon after."
When I see crosses, I get a very negative feeling, and the pictures of hanging Jesus with bloody hearts and all seem gorey.
Intellectually I am tempted to go the atheist route...but I can't because it does not make sense. It all has to do with modern pride - ego and an attempt at being more sophisticated than the next guy..this in my opinion creates atheists..
Religion is also the culprit..because it is corrupt and lies. Most intellectually figure out that the universe thinks and that the miracle we live in is a devine creation...that there is a God....Atheists are striking out against man..not God...sadly they toss the baby out with the bath water.
My guess is that you need to figure out what you really think. First you said atheism doesn't make sense. Then you said sophistication creates atheists. Then you blamed it on religion, and claimed the universe thinks. Next atheists are striking out against man (where did that come from?).
<snip>I think that came from reading Madeline L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time," a major children's book by someone who became known as a Christian writer. In her book, there was "Good-Love" and "Evil-hate and no individual anything." Everything you did, good or bad, reverberated through the universe of energy. I think this was extremely formative for me, <snip>
We couldn't have come from much different backgrounds (I was raised in a VERY religious home), but that book/author was hugely important in my life as well. I remember my brother tattling on me for reading that book because he'd been warned at the school we attended that it talked about Jesus as being just one of many people who fought against the darkness of evil. Sacrilege!
I'm curious as to what the driving force has been in "your" life to choose atheism over any type of theism?
For me, it was a battle of science against religion. And eventually, science won. The battle didn't happen intentionally though.
I grew up in a very religious family and was exposed to many religious ideas. In my late teens, I studied a lot about Christianity and other religions. I was even fascinated by Greek mythology. All the while, I was also very interested in a lot of different sciences, especially astronomy, physics and biology.
Most of my life, I accepted that science and religion existed separately and were two very different ways of knowing. However, scientific knowledge always seemed to be much more observable and testable. Whereas religion was filled with mysteriousness and secrecy.
At some point, I began to question religion more. How do we know that the stories about Jesus are any more real than the stories about Zeus or Hercules? The only difference seemed to be that one of these stories was far more believed in by people in society than the other stories. I began to realize that religious beliefs were often based on faith and a desire to believe on the part of believers. But it didn't make sense that just because people want to believe in certain things that therefore it makes those things true.
Meanwhile, the more I learned about science, the more I understood about how life and the universe actually came to be. We know scientifically how humans evolved from other animals, how the brain evolved from mutations in DNA, how life came from chemical building blocks in space, how the heavens and earth were formed from nebulae, how the universe started with the big bang. So where does that leave God exactly? Such a being had less and less explanatory power for anything.
The tipping point was probably reading about Richard Dawkins' idea that "God" is a scientific hypothesis - and it should be testable, provable and falsifiable like all scientific hypothoses are. That was a "why didn't I think of that?" moment for me. I realized at that point that there really is no more reason to believe in a God than there is a reason to believe in ghosts or angels or leprechauns or cyclops.
That's when I became an atheist. However, I still do find mythology fascinating in its own way. And religion can teach us a lot of things about how people understood reality at a time when scientific knowledge was very primitive compared to what it is today. It will always be a part of the human story.
Last edited by BigCityDreamer; 04-03-2012 at 10:43 AM..
WHO says that someone is controlling the universe?.....who said that God is even interested in the concept of control...? Control is a man made idea..God is not physical as we know things to be...Control is all about cause and effect...force--- physics...God is beyond wanting to control...man is not.
I'm curious as to what the driving force has been in "your" life to choose atheism over any type of theism?
I haven't chosen anything. I don't know what is true, one way or another, regarding a/theism, and I don't know how to come to a certain conclusion. I continue to be interested in reading about, listening to, and pondering the possibilities, and am gradually coming to terms with the idea that I probably will never be able to come down firmly in any camp. I think what's most important is the principle that most religions/secular humanists seem to share of loving one another. Anything that would contribute to growing in that regard seems to me to have the most potential for being truly "divine".
I think that Einstein elucidated best was is most fundamentally important about being human:
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space and human consciousness. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. While no one can acheive this completely, the striving for such acheivement is a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security.”
I was at work the other day and one of my young co-workers said she didn't celebrate Easter. I assumed she was Jehovah's Witness since they don't celebrate holidays and I've worked with many JWs.
When she shared that she is atheist and her family don't celebrate Christian holidays it got me thinking about why people choose to be atheist.
I've worked with many atheists who say they attended church and made the decision on their own while others grew up with atheist parents thus just as kids growing up attending church, they followed their parents belief system.
I'm curious as to what the driving force has been in "your" life to choose atheism over any type of theism?
i typed a huge long thick post and it disapeared on me at the last minute
heres a quick summary
the god which is presented to us by mainstream religon is unappealing on many levels and is anything but loving upon objective analysis , the only reason i see for worshiping it is that if i dont , i will be punished for all eternity , that and the fact that a god isnt nesscessery to explain how we and our home got here
I was at work the other day and one of my young co-workers said she didn't celebrate Easter. I assumed she was Jehovah's Witness since they don't celebrate holidays and I've worked with many JWs.
When she shared that she is atheist and her family don't celebrate Christian holidays it got me thinking about why people choose to be atheist.
I've worked with many atheists who say they attended church and made the decision on their own while others grew up with atheist parents thus just as kids growing up attending church, they followed their parents belief system.
I'm curious as to what the driving force has been in "your" life to choose atheism over any type of theism?
The same 'driving force' that lead me to 'choose' aleprechaunism over all those varieties of leprechaunism.
That force, of course, being a paucity of evidence for leprechauns... and deities.
As a black male, my driving force has been how I've been treated and perceived in this christian society. I was raised a JW btw. I noticed that the same folks enslaving people were the same ones who taught them the bible. I noticed war, disease, and chaos followed the bible everywhere it went. I noticed that the god I had been raised to serve didn't really care about poor people, just the rich and elite. I noticed (but never could ask) god sending HIS people to kill and rape other people. The worst was when I turned 16, I told my mom I was done with church. That Sunday she drove all around town looking for me. Once she found me, she told me I'd better have my bags packed when she got out of church. I was put on the streets at 16. I don't hold any bad feelings to my mom for that btw. Church really brainwashes people like that. Remember Abraham?
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