>I think it would be interesting for non-believing
>list-members to share their stories of how they came
>to outright reject, or, as is the case with me, simply
>(without sturm und drang and snarky, anti-belief super
>irony) find no place for, religious belief.
It's hard to remember feeling this now, but when I was a kid I literally had the fear of the lord in me from being raised Southern Baptist. I remember walking home from elementary school one day and forcing myself to say "goddam" out loud. For the first couple blocks I couldn't get past "god....." About halfway home I got the whole thing out and by the time I got home I was a semi-pro swearer. That's probably the first day I completely rejected religion. Patti Smith really helped seal things a few years later when I saw her on tv singing "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine."
But I rekindled a strong interest in Catholicism when I was doing medieval studies. I love those late medieval/early renaissance paintings. Catholicism monopolized such wonderful flesh (torn and otherwise) and blood and bone imagery for centuries. One of my favorite books used to be "The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion." It's full of pictures of Jesus with genitalia highlighted.
So I rejected religion a long time ago, but I still find it's history fascinating. The other night I read an interview with J.G. Ballard who was saying religion came too early, before we were ready for it.
"the first necessity is to admit a long-suppressed matter of fact: that Renaissance art, both north and south of the Alps, produced a large body of devotional images in which the genitalia of the Christ Child, or of the dead Christ, receive such demonstrative emphasis that one must recognize an ostentatio genitalium comparable to the canonic ostentatio vulnerum, the showing forth of the wounds." from The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion Leo Steinberg (via Jeet Heer)
http://www.jeetheer.com/culture/christ.htm