by Currie Jean

Created on: January 12, 2009

I was excluded from actively participating in my parents' religion, Presbyterianism: instead, the religion was dropped on my head without my consent, and I was considered a part of it before I could possibly understand it or volunteer my inclusion. This is probably a familiar situation to many theists and non-theists.

I was baptized as a baby, so I have no memory of it, and had no choice in it, though legend has it that I made some rediculously funny faces at the congregation from over my mother's shoulder. I like to pretend I understood how silly it all was, even then.

I was later put in Sunday school, and told stories. I was made to sing alongside my peers, feeling gravely uncomfortable but not exactly sure why - all I knew was that something was wrong with this. Singing at school was fun, while singing with the rambunctions, madly-grinning old church ladies as they banged away on their untuned upright pianos was just... creepy.

I wasn't told anything even remotely interesting in Sunday School - it required very little intellectually, and nothing that I could relate to my own experience. Learning was sacrificed for storytelling with paper cutouts of strange bearded men in bedsheets. I was bored out of my mind, and worse, I hated having to dress up for it. Christianity stole half my weekends for a very long time.

My mom believed in god, but even more so, she believed in belief. She thought my brother and I wouldn't "learn morals" if we didn't go do Sunday school, she did me the great disservice of saying "God did it" when I first asked how the world came to be, and she enforced prayer at dinner time. To my mom, more than something objectively real, god was seen as an absolutely necessary element of social upbringing. God's "realness" was rarely discussed.

I don't remember ever liking church. Rather, I remember becoming gradually more willing to stand up for my point of view. After many fights not about me going to hell, but about me disappointing my grandparents, weeks of grounding and years of shunning and shaming, I broke free, and never went back.

I dislike the religion I was brought up in, but that's not why I'm an atheist - after all, disliking a fact doesn't make it no longer a fact, and my childhood intuitions could have been wrong. I'm glad they weren't, all the same.

I didn't realize that Christianity is based on a fairy tale until I was about twelve. I asked my mom a fateful question on the way to Sunday school with her in her car: "So, what's supposed

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