<snipping a lot of clear good sense>
>
> But as you say Jeffrey, a back and forth on this
> topic, in this form, has happened several times before
> and is indeed a sedative. My intention was to
> encourage non-believers to share a bit of their
> intellectual bios, not call for yet another 'Two
> Minute Hate' session against religious thought.
yes. i would tell my own story, since i think of myself as a non-believer and call myself an atheist, but i'm too tired. and i could go on about my own thinking, but instead i'll tell you one anecdote that, looking back on it, i think has to be key in the death of any traditional religiosity in me.
i was hanging out at a friend's place, in like 6th or 7th grade, something like that. he and his family were the sort who went to the local pseudo-non-denominational church that had the bus that picked everyone up. ni fact, i think his dad might have been the one who drove the bus. anyway, he witnessed to me one day. i don't remember most of it, but i do remember sitting at the kitchen table in their trailer, which was i think a couple down from ours, and getting me to pray and accept jesus into my heart as my personal savior. right in the middle of this, prob in the middle of the prayer, the phone rang. i don't even know where my friend was, at this point; probably run off by his parents so they could bring me to the lord. anyway, the wife bustles over quickly to stop it ringing, and answers it. a few minutes later, when he's all done praying my prayer, she says it was my mom calling to see if i was there, and to say it was time for me to come home and get ready for dinner (or some such thing). the father explained to me that that had been the devil making my mother call, so that i wouldn't accept the lord.
and here my reaction was pure gut. and i don't think i even understood right at the time. i certainly wouldn't have articulated it the way i'm about to. but my feeling about it was more or less this: that ain't right. anyone or anything that could take my mother calling me home, my mother looking after me as a mother is supposed to do, and twist it around so that my mother became the instrument of the devil in her very caring for me, was sick. and i wanted nothing to do with it. and i never once went to church with them. and i spent an awful lot less wtime with them after that.
it wasn't about how "idiotic" they were, or how superstitious, or "irrational". it was a gut feeling about them and their religion being *wrong* . . . not wrong *about something*. just wrong.
my faith, or whatever it was, took a number of years after that to finally vanish into more or less nothing. but i am pretty well convinced that that episode was the mortal blow.
j
-- http://brainmortgage.blogspot.com/