From Christian to Atheist: Part 3

In 1966, I graduated from elementary school and moved on to Sinaloa Jr. High. One of the things that happened at Sinaloa was that my reading level was evaluated as being very poor. Lucky for me, though most people would have suggested that I was just lazy or “slow”, others considered the possibility that some students just needed honest help in learning to read. The Science Research Associates (SRA) reading program created by Dr. Don H. Parker in the 1950s was available in my new school and I was enrolled in the class.

I am dyslexic and that has affected my ability to read my whole life, the effect of which was, I was a slow learner when reading was involved. I am sure that before Sinaloa, I read, but I suspect it was mostly school assigned works and comics or cartoons. SRA changed all that, and I am sure that my new found interest in books helped me along my way to questioning the world around me, including my religious beliefs.

Somewhere about this time I discovered a book called “How to Make ESP Work for You” by Harold Sherman. I would guess that it was mom’s book, but I don’t remember. It was all about how to use and develop your ability to do ESP, and I bought it hook, line and sinker. This was the beginning of my years as a believer in ESP and all things supernatural, including UFOs and other non-sense. I wasn’t alone, of course. Millions of Americans would admit to thinking there was something to this UFO explosion, or that ESP was something they might have experienced themselves. I was just another member of the junior league of paranormal wackos.

Oddly, this didn’t seem to change my core belief in a god, and Jesus was still the central character in my religious story. But now, I had developed a strong interest in reading. I ordered books every month from the Scholastic Book Service and this period was also the beginning of my interest in science fiction. Add to that my continuing interest in space and science, and things were bound to get really convoluted.

My parents, my brother Paul and I had also started going to another church around this time, and that was also a game changer. The Shepherd of the Valley United Church of Christ was a more liberal church than the Southern Baptist ones I had attended earlier. Bruce Talbert was the minister, and I enjoyed his sermons which were laced with humor and seemed worth listening to. The result was that I was in a place and time when I could explore other ideas, and explore I did.

Though I wasn’t aware of it then, I can look back and see that I really was a believer. I believed in belief.  I just hadn’t nailed down the rules that I was going to live by yet, but they were there in the rough. Somewhere along the way, I had developed a science based rule that insisted that all my beliefs needed to be plausible at the very least, and probable at best. This is one of the things that caused me to work so hard at proving ESP, finding legit reports of UFOs, and exploring the supernatural for life after death proofs. The biggest problem was that my source material was too often lacking in scientific rigor. Popular books by authors who would sell their mother as Bigfoot if they could get a book deal out of it, writers who were true believers impervious to reason or proof, or publishers who would print the most outrageous lies to sell magazines and books were too often where I got my material, and that always makes for poor conclusions. I still had a way to go before I was willing to even think about giving up on religion, and now, I had mixed in so much more.