From Christian to Atheist: Part 5

At the point that I was a senior at Royal High, I had effectively stopped being a Christian. I still believed in a god, and an afterlife, as well as a whole lot of other things, like ESP, ghosts, UFOs and chances are if it was even vaguely “mystical” I was a believer. I even gave the Bible a selective pass on some of the things in it if there were explanations that fit what I had come to see as within the psychic/mystical. Ezekiel’s visions were UFOs, Jesus could perform miracles…but so could many other “mythical” people of the time. If monks could fly, Jesus could walk on water. If there was Kool-aide to drink, I drank it.

Around this time the Jesus movement was really getting big on campuses all over the States. They had high jacked the coffee house/hippy vibe and created a kind of “cool” atmosphere for young Christians. Hell, they even took Beatles songs like Nowhere Man and tried to make that carry a Jesusy feeling.

Now it’s important to understand, before I go further, that I was done with Christianity. While I might have been near certifiable regarding all the other crap I bought into, I had realized the Old Testament was full of holes and The New Testament was nearly as easy to dismiss. That was not a ride I was going to buy a ticket for again. So naturally, at some point along the way I discovered that the person I thought of as my best friend had bought it “hook, line and sinker”, and somehow had not bothered to tell me about it. I was not a happy camper.

Talk about a catch-22. Jim couldn’t have honestly come out of this without looking bad no matter what he did. On the one hand, he’d kept the whole thing from me, and on the other hand, I wasn’t going to drink from that cup again. Period. Ever. A "Kobayashi Maru" situation with no cheat possible. As it turns out, there were several other members of the circle we ran around in that had been sucked into the abyss along with him. I think the effect could have been less bothersome (or hurtful) if I had been invited near the start of the thing and simply turned it down, but that didn’t happen, and truthfully, I don’t know that I would have responded any better.

I thought of Jim as my best friend, but I honestly don’t know that Jim felt the same way. I was certainly on the list of his friends, and maybe near the top, but perception is usually a one way street. I would often find myself being brought into things he was doing after they were already in motion. Again, I have to be careful here because what I saw as so, might have not been so. I was not a very good reader of social situations. 

But I felt betrayed, and it was the beginning of a string of events over the next few years that would ultimately cause me to close the door on that friendship. As I said, I don’t know that he stood a chance.

What all that did was make me uber aware of the things I saw in the Christian community that were false, and cautious about the overly “happy” nature of Christians in general. There was everything in that movement that clambered cult or brain washing to me. The idea that these kids (or any adults I saw involved in the Jesus movement) were any better off or different was silly. I went to school with them, and push come to shove, they hadn’t really changed all that much. They had just decided that now that they believed in Jesus, they were happier than everyone else, and while they could cheer about forgiveness, they were still the same in most other ways. I didn’t buy it, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

I really was done with organized religion by this point, but I wasn’t done with belief, and I still had one more major influence that I haven’t talked about yet. This last influence was the one that would set me on a path toward atheism, because this is, I think, the first time the word came up in any conversation for me. Next time, I talk about Linda.

From Christian to Atheist: Part 4

In high school, I was on a full roll with the whole ESP/UFO/Supernatural thing. I remember one of my teachers and I having a talk about it after class. Robert Pierle was my history/social studies teacher at Royal High School in Simi. I liked him. He managed to make history and social issues interesting, and to some extent repaired the damage a social studies teacher at Sinaloa managed to do. We were talking about the things I believed, in this case, ESP and telekinesis, and he wasn’t buying my arguments. The problem for me was, I still had no evidence for any of this stuff. I had bought many books on how to develop ESP and psychic powers, how to contact the dead, how to test for ESP (even managed to get a deck of Zener cards from Duke University) and still nothing. He told me that when I got my proof, or could demonstrate one of these abilities, to come back and show him. Then, and only then, would he accept it, because then I would have evidence.

Royal is where I was when I started losing my belief in Jesus. I still attended church, and still enjoyed Rev. Talberts sermons, but as I examined religion, and explored other areas of belief, I found it harder and harder to hold on to the basic beliefs of Christianity. Given how far out some of the other things were that I latched onto, it seems odd that an old staple like Jesus would crumble, but Jesus didn’t survive the conflict with evolution and the age of the earth. I had long ago accepted that evolution had occurred, and that there was no historical Adam and Eve; no Garden of Eden. It took me a while to put all that together and realize that without those two things, and without original sin, there was no real reason for Jesus or his alleged sacrifice.

One night, shortly after sundown, I went outside and stood in my back yard next to the juniper bushes on the patio, and while I was thinking about religion, Jesus, God and a few other things, I said, out loud, “I don’t believe Jesus is the Son of God”. It was the first time I admitted this aloud, and waited a beat for any special effects like lightning strikes, but none came. I was no longer a Christian. I still believed in a god, though he was morphing out of necessity. After all, I had just fired his son, and that kinda left me with the understanding that the Bible must have a few holes in it if it was wrong about Jesus (which is what the entire second act of the Bible was all about.) Of course I also had major issues about many of the events in the first act as well, so no surprise that it was all falling apart rather quickly.

During this time, I started picking up other ideas about gods, powerful beings and what happens after death. God started taking on a less defined form and became more an entity of power. There were people who were advanced spirits and such. All of this was still mashed up with ESP, UFOs and way too much other stuff to account for it all. If my beliefs had been on a map, they would have covered several counties, if not a few states.

My last year at Royal became an important one in all of this. I met my future wife Linda, and found myself feeling abandoned by my best friend, both of which played their part in my continued move toward atheism. I still attended church, and still, even with my belief system all over the place, was a believer, just not a Christian. A bit more to go before this story is done.