How I lost my faith

[jillithian]

I'm not sure how the topic came up, but this weekend my mom and I were chatting and I had mentioned to her that I didn't remember when or what happened that I had changed from the little girl who loved singing songs in Sunday school to the Humanist I am today.

I remember in 8th grade during my confirmation classes my dad made me go to that I was devoutly non-religious already and, when assigned a paper about what happens when we die, I went into great detail of how worms slowly digest your brains. We lived in Germantown, Wisconsin, at that time.

I also remember Sunday school in 6th grade at the Lutheran church up in International Falls having singing contests with my fellow Sunday schoolmates to see who could sing the longest without a breath in that "Gloria... In excelsius deo..." song in the chapel.

Luckily, Mom, remembered. She said that I had told her that it happened in 6th grade. We were moving from International Falls to Waukesha, Wisconsin, the month before my birthday. My parents decided that I'd get a pool party at the Holiday Inn a month early so that all of my friends in the Falls would be able to come. In the process of moving down to Waukesha, I missed a few weeks of Sunday school.

In my 11 year old brain, I had figured that since we missed church and Sunday school for a good few weeks there, and nothing bad had happened, there must not be a god.

Five months later, we moved again to Germantown, Wisconsin. There I made friends with some girls who were huge fans of the growing "grunge" music scene - one of whom gave me a copy of Nirvana's Nevermind album. I bring this up because Nirvana's song "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle" inspired me to find out as much about Frances Farmer as I could during middle school. I even read Frances' autobiography "Will there really be a morning?" in which there is a section about how she wrote her infamous essay entitled "God Dies". She was a little girl and had prayed to God to help her find her hat, which she later found, but her friend's relative died and God hadn't prevented that. She thought that the huge disparity between the two occurances must mean that God was dead. This story just sounds like it enforced my earlier notion.

Incidentally, if I ever find my pre-teen daughter reading that book, I will have a heart attack. Definitely not appropriate reading material for, well, pretty much anyone.

I'm not writing this to convince anyone of any argument either way. I just have been thinking about this and the funeral I went to this morning added additional fodder for my brain processes. I also wanted to get this down in writing if I forget again.

Comments

[verucagonff.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing.