…..temporary….

The civil rights movement for gay equality heated up quite a bit when the Supreme Court overturned DOMA. I was a Catholic at that point.  I was thrilled with the ruling.  I had a dear friend, a colleague, who was gay.  Through my friendship with this man, I met so many gays and lesbians and cross-dressers, and I fell in love with them all.  The gay culture was fun, exciting and creative.  Some of my best memories are from those fulfilling times I had with them all, back in the 70s.

But when the DOMA ruling came down, I was still a Catholic.  The Church was freaking out about this, and I could not understand why.  If a gay couple decided to tie the knot, why shouldn’t they get the benefits of that marriage?  I thought the ruling fell short.  I wanted the states that banned gay marriage to have the same reciprocity for legally wed gay couples which existed for straight marriages.  I could see my LGBT friends’ faces when that ruling came down.

I decided to look at the community of those in other Christian denominations, who called themselves gay Christians.  My first site on the internet was the Gay Christian Network.  I was stunned.  There were resources which led me to sites which delved into the so-called “clobber passages” in the Bible, which were used to justify anti-gay theologies.  There were other scholars with different interpretations of those passages,  and I learned more about the cultural context surrounding them.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled in the Obergefell case, I was for marriage equality.  I believed the Catholic Church was wrong.  My parish priest moaned and maligned the outcome, making sarcastic and unkind words about gay couples. I left the Catholic Church, walking away from eleven years of serving as a CCD instructor, RCIA leader, Extraordinary Minister of Communion and Lector.  I considered myself a Progressive Christian.

That decision led to other problems.  There is no Progressive church where I live.  I interacted with Progressives on websites, and I started reading books by Progressive Christian authors.  I had no idea how doing so would shake my entire worldview.  I had been raised as a Fundamentalist, but as an adult, I realized that Biblical inerrancy was a false doctrine.  It wasn’t logical.  I spent decades in many different denominations and ended up in the Catholic Church because I believed the Church was the deposit of “truth” with a capital T.  I had no idea if I was following God the right way or not.

I began to wonder if the Bible was even inspired at all by God when I began to explore how the canon came to exist.  I found out that scholars did not think Moses wrote the Pentateuch and the escape from Egypt was not a historical event. There is good historical scholarship which puts the very existence of Moses into doubt. The more I studied the origins of the Bible, the less confidence I had about the existence of God. These doubts were scary for me, because if God was not real, then Jesus was not a divine person.  I started to read the Bible more often, praying and pleading with God to show me what I was missing.

The end of last year, a dramatic family conflict ended with my deconversion.  It is too complicated to go into here, but the problem of divine hiddenness finally caught up with me. Suddenly I realized Christianity was fake.  I had never believed in any other god, and therefore I became an atheist.  I was 60 years old.  That change happened abruptly on January 1, 2016.

I was on my own.  I had no information about the prominent atheists who wrote and debated extensively. I did see Christopher Hitchens interviewed on a conservative news channel, but I never read his books. My atheism was the result of exploring Christianity. I found that ironic. I was on my own.  I was enormously relieved and excited to learn more about the atheist community.  For the first time, I explored science and cosmology and physics with enormous energy.  The longer I lived as an atheist, the more joy I felt.  It was exciting to learn more about the atheist community.  I devoured atheist books.  For the first time, I explored science and cosmology and physics with enormous energy.  The longer I lived as an atheist, the more I felt truly alive.  I felt liberated from anxiety and doubt.

This is a long post, and if you have gotten this far, thank you for reading.  Hereafter, my blog will be my views on issues or items from the vantage point of being an atheist.  I will likely reference other atheists, which will give you a clue about my reading and exploring habits. My explanation of where I was and where I am is as complete as I wish it to be at this time.

Bill Gothard entered our family after Scott was born.  (Google him if you have never heard of him).  Gothard’s teachings became a core part of what our fundamentalist pastor preached.  My parents became absolutely convinced that Gothard was a man who really knew how to apply Biblical principles to everyday life issues.  My father began to use Gothard’s teaching material after dinner, in our usual “family devotions”.  My parents became hard-core far-right conservatives.

They pulled Stephanie and Scott out of public schools and entered them into a private school with similar views.  The rest of us were out of high school by that time, and it was a good thing we didn’t have to leave public schooling, for sure.  One by one, as we watched our parents get sucked further into this new worldview, the older four of us began to withdraw from fundamentalism.  We went out into the world, discovered other ways of Christian thinking, and left our former belief systems.  My oldest sister Sandy left Christianity altogether and got involved in a community of “New Age” people, who found spirituality without Christianity.

Sue, Stacey and I stopped going to church.  We all had troubles in our lives, still believed in God, but didn’t prioritize church at all.  I won’t speak of them, but I will speak of myself.

I did the whole “sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll” stuff.  I had some really great times, and some really bad times.  One good thing was meeting my now-husband, Harry.  I got pregnant and we got married.  So many marriages that begin this way end in divorce, but we are about to celebrate our 35th anniversary.  When I gave birth to my daughter, I decided I needed to settle down.  I left those few wild years behind me and started going to church again.

I spent a good number of years in and out of all types of denominations.  I figured that if God is the author of truth, there had to be some church out there that had that truth.  I had so many questions that were still inside of me since my early childhood.  I became obsessed with finding God.  Who was he, what did he mean to convey in the Bible, how could I know with certainty that I was living in the truth of who he was?

The family scaffolding has shifted away from my early years, and now I will address my own life.  Future posts will center on my faith journey.

I haven’t finished my family history, and I haven’t been personally blogging because I didn’t finish my family history.  So much happened in the middle of putting my history into words on this blog.  It was difficult to continue it due to a major shift in my thinking.  I will get to that soon, I hope.

Life had settled into a kind of Christian normal for my family by the 60s  We went to school, went to church, and participated in both Christian and secular activities.  I was in my junior high chorus, and my two older sisters were in both the choir & marching band in high school.  We had friends with whom we spent time.

Then, in 1966, my mom gave birth to my baby sister, Stephanie.  She was born two months early.  In 1966, babies that small didn’t usually survive, and those who did had handicaps. Stephanie weighed in at 3 pounds, 2 ounces, and she was in the nursery for the next several weeks.  Her weight kept dropping until she was down to 2 pounds, 11 ounces. Our pediatrician came up with a formula that Stephanie could digest, and her weight turned around.  He saved her life.

When Stephanie stayed over 5 pounds, she was finally able to come home.  Because she was a preemie, and she had that specific formula to survive, my mom was up pretty much around the clock.  My mom became absolutely exhausted.  But we all adored Stephanie, and there was no shortage of love in her life.  When we older siblings were able, we helped with baths and diaper changes.  Still, in the days before Pampers, cloth diapers added to my mom’s already difficult laundry needs of a spouse & four other children.  I’m not sure how she made it through those first few months.  After Stephanie was out of the woods, our father told us that my mom had miscarried shortly before Stephanie was conceived, and that they had decided to try again.  So, the mental strain of a miscarriage and a preemie really wore my mom down that way, too.

Stephanie ended up with no permanent complications from her premature birth, but was a normal and happy baby.  We were all relieved.

Imagine our surprise when my mom got pregnant again!  That pregnancy was unplanned, and this time my mom went way past her due date.  In 1968 she delivered baby number six.  And so my brother, Scott, entered the world, the sixth child and the only son.  I think my mom must have gone through menopause or found better birth control, (she was 40 when Scott was born), because Scott was the last baby they had.  You can only imagine the attention Scott received, being the only boy!

Having another baby a mere two years after the miscarriage & exhaustion of raising a preemie, now age 2, sent my mom into a horrible post-partum depression.  It was so bad that she didn’t even get out of bed, except to use the bathroom.  The burden of cooking, cleaning, and dinner fell on my dad’s shoulders & my two older sisters.  I was in charge of the laundry.  My dad forcibly potty-trained Stephanie.  It was all pretty brutal.  I have no idea how my mom came out of it.  My parents did not believe in psychology.  Instead, they had Christian “counselors” they knew about.  I have no memory of any type of counseling my mom received, but eventually she came out of that dark place.

Because Stephanie and Scott were so much younger than the first four of us, we referred to them as our parents’ “second family”.  Their experiences growing up were much different than we older sisters’ experiences were.  My parents changed the location of the annual two week camping vacation, as well as gaining a whole new circle of friends with young children.  My dad, a devout fundamentalist, became alarmed at what he saw as a deterioration in society writ large.  He pulled Stephanie & Scott out of public schools, and enrolled them in a private evangelical school.  Both of them were pretty unhappy there.

My parents worked as janitors at the school in order to offset the tuition.  After a few years, my mom became the school’s bookkeeper. Now the main activities surrounded the school.  In all of this, my parents became even more conservative in their beliefs.  Not so, the rest of us.  But that is yet another story.  I’ll try to get to that earlier than I did this post.