You didn't ask me about my experiences with religion as a child, but I'll tell you a little anyway. And no doubt it does put my particular attitudes in context.
I was raised in the south. My parents were atheists. They were ethical people, and truthful, and it would never have occurred to them to suggest that my sister and I lie to the Christian children and pretend we believed in things we knew to be stories people made up for various reasons, such as Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, or God.
It would probably have made our lives much easier had they suggested it. When my son was growing up I explained to him that there was no God, of course (and no Santa Claus or Easter bunny, either); but that the Christian children and their parents whom I had known in my childhood hated people who did not partake of their religion and would say extremely cruel things to you (if they were the parents) and, (if they were the children) would hit you and scream at you and spit at you and beat you up and pull your hair and throw your books on the ground and try to get other children not to play with you and perform whatever other vicious cruelties their little religious minds could devise; and God forbid you were Joey, the little Jewish boy in the corner house, because if you were Joey you also got ostracized and called "Christ killer" and "Joey the Jew! Joey the Jew!" whenever you made an attempt to come out and play with the little Christian boys and girls.
What a row it created when my mother told me to inform the children, when they tormented Joey, that Christ was a Jew!
The father in the Christian family that lived closest to us was a wife beater. I mean a serious wife beater. Mrs. Walters, whom we saw often with black eyes, welts and bruises, would seek shelter from the violence in our house. However, my mother, being a yankee who grew up in Brooklyn, had the habit of using the word "goddam" on occasion. (I never heard a single four letter word in our house except "damn" and "hell." My parents were quite prudish, but did say "goddam" and "hell.") And because of this, the Walters children were forbidden to play with my sister and me in our home, as my parents would be a bad influence on them. Those little girls screamed and screamed in terror in their own home, of course. I would hold my hands over my ears!
I have a million stories about life for an atheist child, or a Jewish one, in the Bible belt!
By the time my son went to grade school, things were better for non Christians. And we lived in New York. He disregarded my suggestion that if he didn't want to fight a lot, he might consider not discussion religion with his Christian classmates. And he had no trouble at all, or at least none that bothered him. When the teacher asked the children to raise their hands (this is when our son was in first or second grade) if they were Protestant... Catholic... Jewish... and stopped there, my bold boy raised his hand and said, "You forgot to ask who is an atheist!" So she did, politely, and three atheist children raised their hands! (And when my son got married (to the girl he first fell in love with in the fourth grade!) both of his fellow atheist first grade pals were at his wedding! (That was certainly a diversion, but it's a sweet story, so why not?)
Anyway, you can see that my own atheism came naturally from being raised in an atheist family (my son is a fifth generation atheist on my side and my mother's, and third or fourth generation on my husband's (though I was sometimes sent to Quaker Schools; my parents had a soft spot for Quakers), and nothing I ever observed about the behavior or morals of Christians has ever suggested to me that a belief in God did a damn thing (I am my mother's daughter) to turn a bad person into a decent one. |
