Losing My Religion

In the pivotal boyhood age between 10 and 12, when we are long longer children but not yet teenagers, a combination of events occurred that led to me losing my religion.  I must have been a skeptic from a young age, perhaps stalled at the age of a toddler, continually asking "Why?" My brothers, sisters, and I were sent to Sunday School as a way to give our parents peace on weekend mornings as they both worked all week. I had heard stories about God and Jesus and his disciples and seen illustrated books, and the church did its best to stress the humble life of Jesus, but I was happy I had not been born on a pile of straw.  God was the stern grandfather who watched over us frail humans and took the form of a thundering authoritarian Moses by Charlton Heston, his grey locks flowing in the wind, brandishing his big stick and forbidding the masses to sin.   When I graduated from Sunday School I joined the choir of twelve pre-adolescent boys like me, whose voices hadn't deepened yet.  I already knew the lessons of the epistles and tried not to doze off, but at signals from the organist, we were called on to sing before kneeling in prayer.  The kneeling was my downfall.  I tended to faint if I was on my knees too long and this caused a commotion that attracted the entire congregation.  I learned to quietly exit the choir stall when I felt this was about to happen and sat in the sacristy with my head between my knees.  Though I wanted to blame these episodes on the rigours of religion, I also fainted while waiting in line to watch "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison," or "Sad Sack" with Jerry Lewis, so the blackouts must have had another cause.  I had to quit the choir but it was easy to walk away from it with a physical excuse rather than admitting I had never been interested in church and thought I had learned all I needed to know.  I could read well by then and there were books to enlighten me if I was curious about details of the Biblical story.

Around the same time, I had the opportunity to go to Vancouver and stay with my mother's sister and her pilot husband.  They lived in Richmond near sea level where there were deep drainage ditches in front of the modest houses so each home had its own bridge.  These were not retractable and were often scenes of tow trucks pulling yet another inattentive driver out of the ditch.  My aunt and uncle had a huge black and white television that I spent hours so close to it must have been a blur.  I'd seen television in fits and starts but only because our neighbours had one, and if we helped their son with his weekend chores and mowing the lawn, he would let us watch Zorro with him, while the Econolite revolving train lamp on top of the cabinet began a new journey every few seconds.  Having the television to myself was a step up to being a spoiled rich kid instead of being one of a tribe.  My aunt even asked what I wanted for lunch, which was a huge responsibility for someone who had always been instructed to eat what was on his plate and be quiet about it. 

The real adventure of the summer was being asked if I would like to go with my uncle on one of his flights up the West Coast.  I had flown to Vancouver from my hometown so the flight wouldn't be my first, but my uncle flew a smaller plane, an amphibious Grumman Goose, that took off from the Lulu Island base and landed at Ocean Falls.  He let me sit in the copilot's seat.  I can't remember where the real copilot went or if there was one, but there were passengers on board so my uncle wouldn't have flown alone.  The wonder of looking down on turquoise mountain lakes, deep inlets, sparkling seas, and tiny ships below, made me realize how well man had mastered the art of flight.  My uncle only had to turn dials, push buttons, pull levers, and we were airborne.  I would never believe again fundamentalist claims that if God had intended man to fly he would have given him wings. With man's ingenuity, which some might say is God-given, he had figured out how to make wings.  Powered by the roar of the engine as we skimmed across the surface of Cousins Inlet, the shackles of a life restricted by every religious prohibition fell away. 

That same summer I visited the Vancouver Zoo.  I was not unfamiliar with animals because apart from pet cats and dogs, our neighbours were ranchers with a townhouse, and they would bring vulnerable calves and lambs home to nurse back to health.  Together we played around the stockyards so even huffing big-horned bulls were only marginally intimidating.  At the zoo I saw sea lions in an enclosure, some of them using a waterslide that spilled onto a wet pool deck, but for years my brain at bedtime toyed with the awful thought of the pool apron being dry and the sea lions scraping the flesh off their bellies.  It was horrifying but I eventually learned to push thoughts like that away, although I knew in the rawness of the animal kingdom, worse things happened.  The most surprising attraction at the zoo was the spider monkeys that hung out in the arched structure above the sea lion pool.  Not only did they make a racket like a kindergarten with the volume turned up high, but effortlessly swung from high perches and sometimes came down to sit on the rocks and peer across the moat at the crowds behind a chain-link fence.  Looking into the eyes of one of the monkeys as they looked back, was like falling into another universe. There was no question that monkeys were our relatives.  With their wide inquisitive eyes, nervous sideways glances, and personal habits like scratching or picking their noses, they could have been my younger siblings.  They were not human but were a frozen stage on the way to being human.  I wasn't sure what they knew or what they felt if anything, but I suspected it was more than we gave them credit for.  I'd already had a hard time going fishing with my grandfather who gave us boys the honour of clubbing the fish he had caught over the head until they had stopped wriggling.  Could I do that to a monkey?  It would be murder. Why would God make a creature like a monkey and stop halfway?  The only answer I could come up with was that God had nothing to do with it.  Life evolved like Darwin proposed, sometimes slowly, sometimes in fits and starts.   The monkey was also me.  We looked into each other's eyes for a moment until he got bored and screeched away, but I would never look at my fingers, toes, and eyes the same way.  Sixty-seven years on, I have not wavered in my belief.  We humans are simply an improvement on monkeys and no higher being is coming to scoop us away to reside in paradise when we die.  We are already in an earthly paradise, on a wondrous planet with as many interconnections as stars in the sky.  If a mortal sin exists, it is in allowing an invented deity to turn us away from the earthly reality of the essential goodness in man when he is of sound mind.  Instead, the self-appointed spokesmen for these deities have tricked us into battling each other.  I couldn't do other than conclude that organized religions were nothing more than gangs of fanatics who were eager to enlarge their flocks to increase their prestige.  My soul did not belong to a God but to a chain of knowledge and understanding that stretched back to my earliest ancestors.  Men have survived millennia using only their wits and capabilities.  When they needed help they asked their neighbours, not a bearded man who lives in the sky.  We are intelligent and capable and will go on creating marvels. Nelson Mandela said, "Everything is impossible until it is done."  We need to leave aside primitive beliefs and live in the real, present, global world. 

When I knew I didn't believe in God anymore, I expected to be struck by a bolt of lightning for my insolence, but the punishing bolt never came.  By then I understood that lightning is not thrown about by some violent vindictive God but is an "electrostatic discharge that occurs through the atmosphere between two electrically charged regions."  Knowing the true source of nature's wonders does not make them less magnificent, but they have nothing to do with an invented God.