The Road to Being a Humanist (Or "You're Going to Hell, Lady!")

When I was a little girl my mom and dad taught me this bedtime prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

            Parents for generations have taught their children this prayer, and maybe for some of those children the prayer was a comfort. But for me, the overactive imagination child who created fictional characters in blank notebooks and would kneel over ant mounds for hours and watch the ants as they went about their little ant business, this prayer was disturbing, and perhaps my first hint that organized religion and a belief in an invisible man in the sky might not be for me. “If I should die before I wake”? Wait, hold the prayer. I mean, what the hell? Every night after I fell asleep was a chance that I, through no fault of my own, might never wake up? That blew my little child mind to smithereens. Might be why I have always dreaded going to sleep. Even today, I have to be utterly exhausted to give into sleep.

            Then there was Vacation Bible School, Baptist style, the summer my dad left for Vietnam. I was six-years-old, impressionable, and wanted so much to please the adults and be a good girl, so for a solid week in the summer of 1968, at 9 a.m, I dutifully walked down the road from my grandmother’s house to attend a little white clapboard church where I was indoctrinated by adults, some of who probably had never even finished eighth grade. There were Popsicle stick crosses to glue together and colored macaroni bead necklaces to string interspersed with tales of God drowning people in a great flood, the death of babies if their parents forgot to put a red X over the door, and a burning bush that talked. None of it made any sense to my pragmatic mind, but I was just a kid and all the adults seemed to believe what they were telling me, no matter how preposterous it all sounded, so who was I to question? Then after all the stories and the crafts, we’d sing as loudly as we could:

Jesus loves the little children.

All the children of the world.

Red and yellow, black and white,

they are precious in his sight,

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

That fall I started first grade in deep south rural Georgia and there were no black children anywhere in the entire school. I knew blacks lived in the town because I had seen them. I had also seen black children. On the first day of first grade, I registered that I was awash in nothing but a sea of white faces, but I couldn’t quite put two and two together. I just knew something wasn’t right and I didn’t possess the vocabulary to enable me to express what I was feeling. One day not long after while my mom drove- we were probably going to put flowers on my grandfather’s grave- my grandmother pointed out a run-down red brick building and she informed me the building was where the black kids went to school. My school building was new and crisp and fresh with new text books about Dick and Jane and a grass carpeted playground with all the latest play equipment. The black children's school looked as if it was slowly crumbling along the edges and the playground consisted of a weed-choked, dusty dirt plot with rusty, broken swings and slides. Jesus loves the little children?  I knew something was wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on it. So it got buried like a seed.

           

            We moved the Crete when I was in third grade and we lived downtown for a year. The upstairs Greek lady was very nice to me and would invite me to her apartment for grape preserves. She had a different looking cross in her house hanging on the wall and every time I rode the bus and it passed a church all the Greeks on the bus would cross themselves, and I learned to do it by watching them. I can still do it expertly enough to fool any Greek Orthodox Bishop. I didn’t equate the hand movement with religion; I just thought it was a polite way to say hello to the church as we passed by.

           

            Fast forward to Texas a few years later. Sixth grade. The school bus didn’t come past my house so Mom paid a lady a small weekly sum to take me to and from school in her fifteen passenger van. I wasn’t the only kid on that van, because driving it was how the lady supplemented her retirement income so the van was packed with kids. Some even sat in the aisles on the floor. When we’d get to school the Van Lady wouldn’t let us off the van until we had prayed to Jesus, then every afternoon when she picked us up, we were again led in prayer. Then one day she introduced us kids to a young, long haired, hippy looking man and his equally hippy looking young wife who started telling us kids about “being saved” and how we were living in the last days, and one day soon a rapture was going to happen where all the righteous in God would be caught up in the clouds to return to him before God unleashed a multitude of evils upon the world. They explained that the only way we could return to God was to “be saved” and that entailed saying a prayer in which we asked for forgiveness and invited Jesus into our hearts. Poof! That’s it. Magically we would be transformed and have a one way golden ticket into the clouds for the rapture. I pictured the saved people flying up into the sky while a lot of confused people left on earth watched as the saved floated away like helium balloons.

           

            The poor Jews, Hindus, atheist, all those people who had lived before Jesus or lived in remote parts of the world and were never “saved” would be tossed into a fiery pit of eternal fire and damnation.  Once again, maybe the adults knew what they were talking about and I was just a dumb kid. The Van Lady gave me little Bible tracts to insert in doorways and hand out to my neighbors. The tracts were always cartoons depicting how one evil person, who not only smoked and drank and did drugs, but also fornicated (I wasn’t really sure what that was, but it sounded pretty bad). By the end of the cartoon booklet the evil person knelt to accept Jesus as his/her savior and he/she was  transformed in the blink of an eye into a shiny new person who had Jesus in their heart. And that made Satan pretty angry.

           

            Since my dad was in the military and we moved so often, I was desperate to fit in somewhere and I began to respond to the Van Lady and the Hippy couple and feel a “burning in my bosom” (admittedly a still flat bosom). By the time the Van Lady invited me and some other kids on a weekend retreat with the young hippy couple, I was ecstatic. Why my mother ever let me attend that weekend is beyond me. She didn’t really know those people. Today it would be unthinkable for a parent to allow a child to go off for a weekend with people they barely know. At the retreat we sang songs, sat around a bonfire and roasted hot dogs while the hippy guy talked about Jesus and played guitar, and I got saved. But the doubts lingered and I thought that since I had doubts I just wasn’t being a true believer. It must be my fault. It couldn’t be God’s fault because God was perfect. So I struggled with my child faith and passed out more tracts and even built a fort and tried to convert the neighborhood kids. But no one seemed really interested. After about a year we moved, and since my new house was closer to the school, I could walk. Van Lady and my conversion became a distant memory.

           

            A few months later Mom and Dad decided we’d go to church and they started taking us to a church building that in a previous life had been a fried chicken restaurant. I could almost feel a thin coating of leftover cooked grease lingering in the air and on the pages of the hymnals. Everything was okay until one Sunday about three months later when a woman proceeded to fling herself on the floor in the middle of the service and started babbling nonsense. Mom later told me that the woman was “speaking in tongues.” We never went back.  And that was the end of my limited childhood exposure to religion.

           

            Later, after I grown up and married and had two children, my then husband became interested in the Mormon church and I felt an attraction to their family values, especially since my own marriage was rapidly disintegrating. Maybe they could help me save my marriage. Here, I must digress, because I still have friends who are members of the church. I am not trying to make fun of or undermine their faith. It just didn’t work for me, but I’m glad it works for them. I’m just as skeptical of Baptist, Catholic, or Islamic fables, so don’t feel singled out.

           

            I was baptized into the Mormon church, my ex was baptized, and when my oldest son was eight, he was baptized. The more I learned, the more the old doubts from my childhood roared back to life. Golden plates that were translated in a hat? An angel? Underwear that was supposed to protect me? Secret ceremonies? Different levels of heaven that I could only get into with the help of a husband?  Maybe I just needed more faith. So I became very active in the church, teaching teen classes, and giving my testimony openly, while my then-husband graced the church doors sporadically due to his work hours.  One month after I gave birth to my third baby, I decided to have my tubes tied to prevent any more pregnancies. The patriarch of the church found out and berated me for my decision. That was the first crack. It was my body. Who was this old man to tell me what to do with MY body?

            It slowly fell apart from there over the next three years. I found myself divorced with three children to take care of and a nagging sense of a God who had turned his back on me mostly because I was just a lowly female.  I was angry for years. Desperately angry but I didn’t know who I was angry with. Until one day I decided not to be angry anymore. I started calling myself agnostic because I didn’t have any answers and I knew I didn’t have any answers. But I also knew that other humans, some not as intelligent as me, didn’t have any answers either. From my experience it seemed that most of them were just pretending they had answers. For some reason, my acknowledging this calmed my internal voices a little for a few years.  The final straw came when a Baptist preacher refused to marry me and my now husband in his church. It stung a little but I now thank that preacher for what he did for me. He allowed me to truly question what it was that I believed. Not what the Baptist preacher believed or what the Vacation Bible School lady believed or what the hippy preacher believed or what the Van Lady believed or what the Greek lady believed or what the Mormon patriarch believed, but what I, Teri, believed. It was a process, but one day I woke to find that I didn’t believe in any god with a capital G, and an internal peace washed over me.  One I had been searching for my entire life.

           

            People ask me how I can NOT believe. They are incredulous because my not believing causes them discomfort.  I don’t understand how what I believe should matter to them or even be any of their business. They ask me if my life is empty. They ask me if I’m scared to die. I answer by saying that THIS is what makes life works for ME. My life is full and peaceful.  I receive comfort from kindness, openly questioning, and from continual learning. I’m not scared to die, well, not any more than the next person, because I know that I won’t know that I’m dead, just as I didn’t know that I didn’t exist before I existed. This is the only Merry-Go-Round I’ll ever ride, so I try to squeeze every single drop of wonder and happiness and meaning out of every single rotation before I’m returned to cosmic stardust. I search for beauty in newly bloomed flowers, in cotton wisp white clouds, in bright stars against an ink jet night, in a fire reddened sunset, or the loving touch of another human being. I cry, I rejoice, I hurt, I long, I create, and I live. Every single day I understand more and more how interconnected we all are across time and space. We are each a ripple that contributes either positively or negatively with our thoughts and our actions to the chain that is life itself. We are here to learn and apply what we have learned and that’s about it. If we don’t learn and contribute positively, then we have wasted a precious and rare gift from the unexplainable ever-expanding universe, and that is the only fiery pit of eternal fire and damnation that exists

Signed,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Humanist