Following up a bit on yesterday’s post, I once was trapped in a van with somebody who was incredibly religious and figured out a way that God gave the okay to shoot people with a glock if need be.

This guy’s wife also liked sex “on top”, but that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, we got into a discussion regarding God, faith, evolution, and atheism. He was doing his best to figure out why it was that I didn’t believe in God when, at one point in my life, I was doing puppet ministry and was the favorite teen in the local Methodist church.

When we somehow got to the death of my father, he pounced: “Do you blame God for your father’s death?”

“No, I blame his 30 years of chain smoking. He died of lung cancer.”

In fact, I never once thought, “Why, God, why?” It was so patently obvious that my dad poisoned himself over a very long period of time and suffered the consequences. I’m not saying I don’t miss him, but I’m sure not about to try to place blame elsewhere.

The same will probably happen soon with my mother who is overweight, diabetic, suffers heart palpitations, and continues to smoke. No anger need be directed towards the heavens if that passing comes to be.

During our conversation, we were hitting on creationism vs. evolution. I found myself saying the following: “Have you ever thought that maybe evolution actually happened and was set in motion by God? If you go with that slant, then we can all just agree to study evolution and not worry so much about its point of origin.” Yeah… I went and applied intelligent design “theory” before even having heard the phrase. Go me. I differed a bit from ID in the fact that I was suggesting that evolution still took its own course after its supernatural jumpstart. I wasn’t suggesting that humanity was a known goal.

My point, really, was to make this guy think that maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t thought about all the possibilities. That, to me, is the first step in free thinking. Our conversation didn’t have any long term impact on him, though. The guy drove like a maniac, so I wasn’t keen to get stuck in the van with him too often in order to reinforce these new thought patterns. Plus, he had a glock.

When I was a teenager, I attempted the same thing within my own family. I one day asked my at the time very Catholic mother, “How do you know that the Bible wasn’t written by Satan just to mess with you?” The reaction to that was not pleasant. Role playing games were thrown out, heavy metal music and paraphernalia was destroyed, and I was no longer allowed to skip church. Had she stopped for a moment, she could have realized that such a scenario relies upon the existence of Satan which, ostensibly, means there’s a God to which we would have to answer regardless. But no, the reaction was that such a thing was not possible because the Bible is the word of God. And there was no questioning that.

That was the moment when I stopped believing in God.

I put on a fine act for several years after that, counseling at church camps, making puppets talk about Jesus, joining the friggen choir. I professed to be “born again”, attended Christian music concerts, and was active in youth groups. At one point, a minister told me he thought I was destined to be a minister myself. Mostly, I just wanted attention. What kind of godly child would have his camp kids wear bras under their shirts all day only to end the evening with a rendition of “The Bra-dy Bunch” wherein they remove said bras and fling them over their heads? (And, equally terrible, I had to cajole female campers into lending them to us.)

Hmmm, probably shouldn’t have admitted to that last bit.