The order of these events is a bit fuzzy. Granted, I'm trying to recall things that happened between the ages of four and five, but I should still be able to figure out more or less what happened when.
We moved into a new house (Dad, a very pregnant Mom, and I) shortly before Christmas 1983. My brother was born right after Christmas.
In February 1984, we went to my great-grandmother's funeral (See previous post).
In April, on my birthday (I found out much later), my dad told my mom he was leaving her for another woman. Divorce proceedings ensued, were finalized, Dad got remarried.
There are two things I still haven't forgiven my father for. One of them is that I didn't get to go to the wedding, and more to the point, that I found out about it after the fact. I was introduced to Jeanne after she was already my stepmother.
(We got off on the wrong foot almost immediately. While playing with one of those fifteen-foot retractable tape measures, I managed to break off the last foot or so, with the remainder whirring back into the housing. Jeanne guilt-tripped me, extensively, about it.)
Mom starts shopping around for churches to begin the religious education she felt I was wanting. The first church she selects is a United Methodist church in our hometown. It's the church that her college friends, Joy and Mark, attend. Joy, in particular, was a great friend to my mother during the divorce.
The original plan, she later told me, was to go to a different church every week for a while to get a flavor for the different possibilities out there. But Mom said she loved it right away, and kept coming back, despite her earlier plans.
Joy and Mark had been trying, unsuccessfully for some time, to have a baby. I don't think this is still the case, but apparently one of the major side effects of fertility treatments in that era was depression. Joy committed suicide in 1985. She sealed off the garage while Mark was at work and ran the engines of their cars.
I don't know how quickly the next bit happened, so I have no idea how scandalous it might have been. Mark started dating a woman and left the church, so the original reasons my mother had for picking that particular church were all gone. But we had been going for a year by this point, and my mother really seemed to love it.
At some point in 1985, Dad and Jeanne move north, to live in an old deer cabin on a largish chunk of woods about an hour north of town. Since Dad and Mom split weekends with us, my brother and I no longer went to church every week (before the move, Dad had passed us off to Mom on Sunday mornings on his watch so we could go to church).
I was a pretty aloof kid when it came to my peers, and now that I was attending only half the time at church meant that I never really made any strong connections to my peers until much, much later. The only thing that really got under my skin about the half-time arrangement was that the kid's choir director said that I couldn't be in choir if I could only make half the practices. Oh, good. One more thing to differentiate this nerd from the rest of the kids.
Starting in second grade, the UMC has kids sit in for the first part of the service - songs, announcements, choir performances, and then Moments with the Children (Moments with the Pastor from our perspective, I guess) before we were released to go to Sunday school (we got to skip out on the sermon, communion, and some of the really interminable stuff). Some weeks I'd be the only kid who went up for Moments with the Children who wasn't already at the front of the sanctuary for the kids' choir performance. I always felt like I was arriving late.
Other than an incident I'll recount later in more detail in which I embarrassed my mother, and getting in trouble once for stomping on an anthill during a Sunday School nature hike, the rest of elementary passed uneventfully. I'll pick this up later.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
History, up to 1984.
I'm going to leave some details fuzzy, since I'm giving you my real given name (my Christian name, as it were).
My name is Christian, and I am an atheist. I'm 27, and currently a college senior, majoring in Economics. I've lived in Michigan all my life, and if you allow for a fairly broad definition of West Michigan, I've lived in West Michigan all my life too. (I'd say everything west of Jackson, Flint and Saginaw is West Michigan. The state really is Detroit and Everything Else.)
My father was raised in a (programmed, unfortunately) Quaker church, and my mother was raised Episcopalian. They met in college. At some point my father started going to my mother's church - he said he liked the ceremony of it particularly. It's pretty pomp-and-Catholic, so I can see where he's coming from. He was a religious studies major, my mother was a teacher candidate, and Dad was considering seminary.
(I was really disappointed when I found out, at maybe age ten, about their original career paths. I had decided that the coolest jobs for your parents to have would be preacher and teacher. I was really disappointed that they turned out to be a secretary and an insurance underwriter.)
So Dad didn't go to seminary, but they did name their firstborn son Christian, after Mon's grandfather, and also (I suspect) as a nod to Dad's road not taken. And I've been Christian, no nickname or abbreviation, ever since, with the exception of one nametag-and-hairnet job where they decided my name was Chris.
I learned to read before my third birthday. This is not to brag, but to set up the next story.
Dad's grandmother died shortly before my fourth birthday. (And, alas, as a lifelong Tiger fan, eight months before the Bless You Boys beat those mustard-colored National Leaguers in the World Series. She didn't even get to see them go 35-5 in their first forty games.) We went to the local Friends Church for the service, and as we shuffled into the pews, I noted the cross at the front of the room.
Well, not really. I didn't know it was a cross, or what the symbolism of the cross was, nor that I was in a place where I was supposed to be particularly quiet. What I said was, "What's that 't' for?"
My mother started taking her two young sons to a Methodist church in town shortly after that.
My name is Christian, and I am an atheist. I'm 27, and currently a college senior, majoring in Economics. I've lived in Michigan all my life, and if you allow for a fairly broad definition of West Michigan, I've lived in West Michigan all my life too. (I'd say everything west of Jackson, Flint and Saginaw is West Michigan. The state really is Detroit and Everything Else.)
My father was raised in a (programmed, unfortunately) Quaker church, and my mother was raised Episcopalian. They met in college. At some point my father started going to my mother's church - he said he liked the ceremony of it particularly. It's pretty pomp-and-Catholic, so I can see where he's coming from. He was a religious studies major, my mother was a teacher candidate, and Dad was considering seminary.
(I was really disappointed when I found out, at maybe age ten, about their original career paths. I had decided that the coolest jobs for your parents to have would be preacher and teacher. I was really disappointed that they turned out to be a secretary and an insurance underwriter.)
So Dad didn't go to seminary, but they did name their firstborn son Christian, after Mon's grandfather, and also (I suspect) as a nod to Dad's road not taken. And I've been Christian, no nickname or abbreviation, ever since, with the exception of one nametag-and-hairnet job where they decided my name was Chris.
I learned to read before my third birthday. This is not to brag, but to set up the next story.
Dad's grandmother died shortly before my fourth birthday. (And, alas, as a lifelong Tiger fan, eight months before the Bless You Boys beat those mustard-colored National Leaguers in the World Series. She didn't even get to see them go 35-5 in their first forty games.) We went to the local Friends Church for the service, and as we shuffled into the pews, I noted the cross at the front of the room.
Well, not really. I didn't know it was a cross, or what the symbolism of the cross was, nor that I was in a place where I was supposed to be particularly quiet. What I said was, "What's that 't' for?"
My mother started taking her two young sons to a Methodist church in town shortly after that.
Hello and Welcome!
Yes, yes, another atheist blog.
I'm a sociologist at heart, so I do find the recent upswing in visibility of atheists interesting. I'm curious to see what direction it will take, and I find it troubling that I don't have the perspective I would like to have on the subject.
The reason I don't think my perspective is necessarily very good is that the fifteen years of my atheism include my own adolescence. At the beginning, as a twelve-year-old regular attendee of a Methodist church, I thought it was possible that I was the only one who thought that God didn't exist. I don't know what I could have told you about the state of atheism then; I thought I was alone.
I think this blog will end up reflecting the study of various subjects generally associated with atheism and other fields I find interesting: atheism as a movement, its demographics, public image, the historicity of Jesus, religious and irreligious mindsets, possibly some evolutionary biology, and the popularity of certain logical fallacies and straw men.
I'm a sociologist at heart, so I do find the recent upswing in visibility of atheists interesting. I'm curious to see what direction it will take, and I find it troubling that I don't have the perspective I would like to have on the subject.
The reason I don't think my perspective is necessarily very good is that the fifteen years of my atheism include my own adolescence. At the beginning, as a twelve-year-old regular attendee of a Methodist church, I thought it was possible that I was the only one who thought that God didn't exist. I don't know what I could have told you about the state of atheism then; I thought I was alone.
I think this blog will end up reflecting the study of various subjects generally associated with atheism and other fields I find interesting: atheism as a movement, its demographics, public image, the historicity of Jesus, religious and irreligious mindsets, possibly some evolutionary biology, and the popularity of certain logical fallacies and straw men.
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