Joanna
Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
> On 10/23/06, Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> <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/
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