Fight The Darkness

This continues my gripping (ahem) auto-biographical musings. For Part I, see here.

As I mentioned, my father says he made a conscious effort to avoid influencing my opinion on the existing or non-existence of god. He was shocked to learn that he had influenced me significantly.

He influenced me in many ways. Not the least was understanding of geology. We frequently went camping around the western United States, and that gave us ample opportunity for rock hounding. Because I was not versed in the bible, I didn’t understand how “at odds” geology was with the bible. Similarly, I was equally unfamiliar with how the other sciences contradicted it.

One day, we were visiting my grandfather’s brother and his wife, who also lived not far from us. We were there in the evening and the TV was on. There was a nature documentary on Chimpanzees in the background. The chimps were doing something terribly funny and my great-aunt said, “Isn’t it just amazing how much theirs faces look like ours?”

To which I, in my youthful, pre-teen innocence said, “Not really, we evolved from apes. There’s bound to be a great similarity.” (Cut me some slack, I was a kid. I know that we didn’t evolve from apes, we and apes evolved from an earlier proto-ape creature, but at the time that subtle distinction was probably lost on me.)

Well, the looks I got are burned forever into my memory. My great-aunt and uncle had a look on their face like I’d just dropped my pants and shit on their carpet. I think my great-aunt may have said, “Well I never…” before stopping in a flabbergasted silence. There was also some embarrassed laughing that said, “Don’t kids say the darnedest things?”

My grandparents looked like I’d just let out a big, loud fart and they were looking for a dog to blame it on. My dad was looking quietly bemused.

Afterwards, he explained to me that they (and my grandparents) were very traditional Christians (read: fundamentalists) and that they had been raised to believe everything in the bible to be the absolute truth. The seven-day creation, Adam and Eve, the flood were all absolutely the truth to them. He went on to say that he’d been raised to believe that, too, and that he had believed it with certainty until he’d gone to college to study geology and then he learned, “…that it was all bullshit.”

That was my first brush with fundamentalism and it was exactly the moment I realized with certainty that the belief in god was based on ignorance rather than any aspect of fact.

I honestly had difficulty believing that anyone could be so unfamiliar with… well… reality. To be ignorant of the facts of the world was just inexplicable to me. Inexplicable, but I now knew that not everything people told me was true. I knew people lied, but I realized then that not all falsehoods were strictly lies. Falsehoods could be honest, but ignorant, world views.

That was also the moment I knew I was an atheist.

I really liked my great-aunt and uncle, but after that, I kept our conversations to cookies and dowsing. (We’ll come back to the dowsing later.)