Fight The Darkness

In an effort to explain my views, I’ll make a few posts that are auto-biographical in nature. I’ve done this largely as an exercise for myself to try to see where my attitudes have been influenced not necessarily by reason, but by environment.

I was raised in a middle-class home in Tucson, Arizona, and after a brief fiasco with a private school for gifted children, I attended public schools. (I really hated those eggheads at that school.)

Back in the day when they used to do IQ tests, both my parents were solidly in the so-called “genius” range, as was (am?) I. (Now I know better, of course. My parents and I weren’t really smart, we were just good at taking tests.)

My mother died when I was too young to remember her, and so my household consisted of myself, my father and his parents, who moved in with us after my mother died.

My father is college-educated, and his post-secondary education consisted of studies in Meteorology, Geology and Law; however, his “career” was more one of self-employment. He owned and ran both a greyhound kennel and a chinchilla farm.

My grandfather was a mechanic. He’d worked his way through the Great Depression as a mechanic and heavy equipment operator and worked on, among other things, the Jersey-side of the George Washington bridge (then known as the Hudson River bridge.)

After the Depression, he moved back to Missouri and opened his own auto garage and motor lodge.

My grandmother was (mostly) half native american. Her mother was a mixture of different indian nations, although officially she was a Potawatomi, as are my father and I. She also had some French ancestry that came from the early French fur trade in the northern US and Canada. Her mother died when she was quite young, and she and her twin sister were sent to live in one of those nefarious “Indian Schools.” These schools, run by Christian Missionaries, existed largely to eradicate the native culture and induct the children into Christianity.

Tall, red-haired and very caucasian-looking, my grandmother may not have experienced much discrimination in her life (after she got out of the indian school, that is, where the other kids taunted her because she was “white”), and later went on to be the first college-educated person in my family, earning her degree in education and becoming a school teacher.

My grandparents were both committed Christians, and raised my father thusly. There was one story that was related to me that really has had a long resonance in my mind. I learned that they had been members of one particular congregation (or, I suppose you could say, “sect”) but had to change to a different one because the one they belonged to didn’t permit singing in church, and so they had pick a different one so they could sing.

On the surface, that might sound like a trivial thing, but it wasn’t to me. That one incident has forever in my mind sealed the absurdity of the trappings of religion for me. (The absurdity of the premise of religion was sealed for different reasons.)

My father, raised Christian, remained so until he went to study geology in college, and has been an atheist ever since.

I later learned that my father had made a conscious effort not to influence my views on religion as I was growing up. What my grandparents did, I cannot really recall. I don’t remember them regularly attending church, perhaps they never got back in the habit after they moved to Arizona. Perhaps I just didn’t notice. Either way, I did not attend church as a child.

There was no doubt that the notion of god as a real thing was conveyed to me as fact by them, but the concept that I took from that would be something considered “deist.” I was told it existed, but my worldview – probably heavily influenced by my father’s education and ability to authoritatively explain weather and geology – was strictly naturalistic. I knew that god had no part in the lightning bolts and the floods, nor did he snap his fingers and lay down billions of years of rocks and fossils.

While I didn’t disbelieve in god, it just never occurred to me to attribute anything tangible to god. God was rather a third nipple on a man. Not only non-functional, but superfluous and non-functional.