I remember March 23, 1997 pretty well. That Sunday, my mother woke me up at 11:30 this morning to send me on an errand. She'd gone to church with my father, but come home after developing a bad headache. Since they'd only taken one vehicle, I needed to go pick him up.
On my way out the door, I half-jokingly said, "Well, I hope I can remember how to get there." It had been over a half-dozen years since I set foot in their church, after all. I hadn't been back since telling the moron who taught my Sunday school class that he should "go live with the fucking Amish." (This was in response to his saying my best friend's mother -- at the time in a mental health hospital for treatment of a chemical imbalance in her brain -- had "freely and willfully let Satan take control of her.") Mom told me she didn't think I'd have any problem finding the church; she was right.
It kinda scared me how effortlessly I managed to drive out through the woods and newly-cleared lands to the church I attended for about a dozen years. That road was one of the first ones I drove after I got my license; I could practically go back to sleep, my brain was on autopilot. Which was, I now realize, the state of mind of many people at that church.
Why did the trip scare me? Well, I've spent a lot of time trying to forget about that church out in the middle of nowhere. The only thing I learned there that was worth hanging on to is the idea that there are such things as right and wrong. But much of what they considered wrong (rock 'n' roll, booze, homosexuality) I see now as neutral or even good, and much of what they hold up as virtue -- intolerance, ignorance, blind faith -- I reject outright.
(My brother has since pointed out that he and I also learned how not to sing there, a point with which I wholeheartedly agree. A potential career down the drain... perhaps I should sue them for lost income. Nah.)
The fact that I could remember how to get from geographical point A (my house) to geographical point B (that church) isn't what scared me. It was the idea that maybe I could just as easily go from the person I was then, the man I am now, back to the person I was growing up there.
When I was a kid, I thought of black people as "niggers," of homosexuals as "queers." Liberals were radicals who wanted gays to be molest our children and women to run everything. All non-Christians, and any Christians who baptized by sprinkling or anything other than immersion, were heathens damned to Hell. And we were all born for one purpose -- to wait around for the Rapture to come; there was no point in trying to have a life, a career, or a family, because it would all be over by the time the year 2000 rolled around. This church taught me all that garbage, all those lies.
Needless to say, I'm not that person anymore. I don't hate people on the basis of color, sexual orientation or religion; I hate them for their own individual reasons, if I must hate them at all. I'm a die-hard evolutionist and a Unitarian Universalist. At that time, I didn't know precisely what I believed, religion-wise -- but I sure knew what I didn't.
As time has passed on, I've remained an evolutionist and a UU, and added the title "Atheist" to my list. At the time I was merely agnostic; though I'm sure some of the people there would have been as likely to stone me for that.
That being said, it was jarring to find myself driving back to that place where I learned such a negative view of the world. That's the place where I learned a few obsessive-compulsive traits to keep me sane; counting the ceiling tiles and the panes of glass in windows, tapping out a shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits pattern with my fingers, going into my head to listen to the songs I actually like rather than whatever is being said or sung around me. I still do that stuff to this day; the place still haunts me that way.
It's not like it was hell on earth there. They didn't handle snakes, at least. And there were a few people I recall fondly, all senior citizens; all of them have since passed on. But that place has nothing to do with who I am now, other than giving me a few nervous tics -- or does it?
It's probably fair to say that who I am now is a reaction to that place, but not the reaction they would have preferred. Rather than become just another face in the pews, just one more sheep dropping money into the collection plate (a plate, I add, that I was passing around before I left), I'm the guy who left before he was completely brainwashed. Rather than preaching God, I preach love; instead of settled answers which cannot be questioned, I toss out question marks.
There are some things that are right and some things that are wrong; they taught me that, sure, although they often had them backward. And they actually taught me one other thing -- that when we know the difference between the two, we should try to help others see it for themselves and make a choice.
So I am. If I ever have kids, they're never setting foot in a church like that. If they are to be religious, they will be brought up in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, a place where they will learn to respect the ideas of others, rather than belittle them. They will be taught to think and to question, and if they get to a stage when they're old enough to avoid being brainwashed, then I will let them go to church, or not, as they wish. (I'd even let 'em go to a fundamentalist church at that point -- not only would it no longer be my place to stop them, I am confident that a kid taught the value of a free mind as a child would see that type of religion for what it is, pure horse manure. Only less useful.)
And in the meantime, I'm going to continue my work with the Unitarian Universalist group at school, to encourage people to think for themselves. That's the best way I can think of to counterbalance a red-bricked church so ironically named Prospect.

God is Dead -- Now What?

Faith Atheism
The Secular Web
The Unitarian Universalist Association