The Thread #8, My Religious Training

I do not know how much influence the world outside a person's brain can have on the religious beliefs of the person. I do know how people learn to incorporate religion into their lives in ways that seem very non-religious. I have spent a lot of my life wondering how people could turn words and ideas to fit their purposes with no problem with the seemingly intrinsic contradictions that they were ignoring.

My father was a pragmatist first. His religion was mostly for show and blending into the larger family and community. He always attended church and he taught Sunday School now and then, but he never let religion inhibit his natural tendencies to get the job done, whatever that job was. My first paragraph about ignoring the contradictions can be first applied to my father. He seemed to have no problem with them.

My mother lived her religion, very much never allowing statements of religiosity to enter her vocabulary of useful phrases. Unlike my father, she made few statements of belief and absolutely no show of her beliefs that could be construed as phony or contradictory of her statements on life. You might never know that my mother had a religious side, except that she was there in her pew on Sunday morning.

So, while we children were ushered off to church with our parents every Sunday, growing up, we were not bombarded with religion during the week. The large Bible was there on the coffee table, and we all looked at it often and read from it, but there were no family devotion or prayer times, except the blessing before a meal.

I listened to all that they had to say. I learned the bible verses and participated in the discussions. But, a child does not really know his or her own mind. To immerse the child in any philosophical belief and reinforce that with all the symbolism, even to integrate it into the totality of the learning process, is no guarantee that it will stick.

Religious belief is an adult thing because only adults really understand the concept of faith. I was a literal child and I think that all the other children were as literal as I was. Literally, church, for all its teaching and preaching, was about getting together with other children and having a good time. It seems to me that if man wants anything to endure that is so encompassing as religious belief, then we best be content with the children looking forward to it as a good time set of events.

I make very little connection between the choices that I have made as an adult relative to church and religion and what I experienced as a child, save this one. I knew that I wanted my children to have the same opportunities that I had, growing up inside a nurturing church community, and so we provided that to them.

But, my religious choices as an adult have to do with what I have learned, and continue to learn as an adult. I really did adhere to the Paul's advise, when I became an adult, I "put away childish things." I quit thinking and speaking as a child on religious matters. The results have been what the results have been.

I never had someone to "push religion down my throat." It is probably a good thing that I did not, for I would have rebelled completely against any such effort. I never really had people warn me that if I did not do this or that, then I would burn in the fires of Hell. Again, had they done so, I would have rebelled completely. I got to be an adult without a strong sense of needing to be "saved" or "born again."

Religion was not presented to me in a way that it gave me reason not to learn all that I could learn. I felt no need to reconcile knowledge that I was learning about the age of Earth or the concept of man being here on Earth for tens of millions of years. I was free to approach science as the great tool of man that it is, and to feel pretty good about the conclusions of science that passed muster.

I really can not speak for all children, maybe not any except myself as a child, but I know that the lack of pressure on me as a child to accept religious beliefs and to change my world view based on those beliefs was a great asset to me later in life. It allowed me to reconcile that wide gulf between the tenets of religion and the practice of religion. I really did not grow up with any great expectations of religious people being any better people than non-religious people. My wonderful and honorable Grandfather Anderson Howington probably had a lot to do with that for he did not join a church until near his death.

Today, I write and speak without the language of church and religiosity. I can quote the Bible very well and use its lessons often. But, I refuse to either blame religion for my shortcomings or give it too much credit for my good moments. This probably can all be attributed to the qualities of my mom and my dad and the freedom that they gave me to be the person that I would become.