Why I believe what I believe

This comes via an idea from A Nerds Country Journal, Which I got to from UTI

The original idea was Why I Stopped Believing What I Believed Before. But as you'll soon discover I had good reason to change it slightly.

My story is a rather boring one. I grew up going to church every Sunday, complaining the whole way there, being told to stop fidgeting once I was seated, then being released to torment the Sunday school teacher for an hour or so. As a child I hated every moment of it with the exception of the schooling, that was at least interactive and I was with people my own age. I screwed around a lot and asked questions that made adults mad or confused, those were the high points of my spiritual life. I was in the church chorus for a few years, I was suckered in, they said there would be cookies at the end of each practice, and I continued to go for a while but then they stopped bringing cookies, that was the end of my tenure there (sadly thats a true story). I cannot recall a time even as a youth where I had any sense of there actually being some god creature watching my every move. So my views never really changed drastically. I seemed exactly like the whole Santa Clause thing, it was fun and we all went along with the gag, but I knew that it was just that, a gag, a trick that adults play on children to make them like Christmas even more, which seemed silly as we already were getting presents and thats the part that kids really like anyway. My mother was a religious person but for very tangible reasons.When I asked why we had to go to chruch she never said, so you don't burn in hell, it was because it was a good community of people to interact with. And shes right, I went to a very liberal easy going church that was very interested in how things were for the people of the area and we'll throw a little god and a splash of jesus in from time to time. So looking back I am glad that I went to church even though I think religion is a crock of shit. What is difficult for me is to try to pin down when I stopped believing because I cannot remember a time when I did believe. Although I will admit that there was once when I did pray in earnest, I didn't think it would do anything but I was powerless to do anything else, there was a huge storm and our basement had completely filled with water and was only inches away from filling our first floor, so I went on the back patio in the rain and I prayed that the rain would stop. And it did, even at the time I did not attribute this to divine intervention but to the storm moving on, but I thought it should be included in my story as it my only personal way of understanding why others do believe. When your at the mercy of things you cannot control it is comforting to look to a higher power, but that does not mean its real.

The one point in my life where my views really did change was church related but not religious in nature. I believe it was my junior year of high school and a small group of young people from the church raised money and went to Guatemala to visit a mission. We were not Catholic but that was of no concern to the preist, or Padre as he was generally known. Father Greg (padre) was an inspirational man, and as life changing as the trip already was there was one story he told that further changed my world view. He told of "The Violence," he very matter of factly told us the story of what it was like living in Guatemala during a civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and spanned more than 3 decades. A friend of his who live on the other side of a large lake was murdered and the US government had been urging them to leave and for a short period of time they did evacuate. All of this made me sad and to appreciate what we take for granted, but it was one short piece that changed everything and that was how he said that the war was started y the CIA because the US government did not like the new president, Arbenz. I knew that the US did shady things in other countries but the notion that they could overthrow a foreign government without backlash surprised me, but what shocked me was that I had never heard of it. I was a good student who like history and social studies, and in all my years I had never once heard of this. And its not like it was half way around the world, its the next country south of Mexico. This is when I began studying what else the US has done, this changed everything.

So thats the story of religion in my life. There was no profound wakening, I just slowly realized that some people actually though it was real, like real real, and that idea still puzzles me to this day.

-Tim
(Kilgore Trout is simply my way of saying thank you to Kurt Vonnegut Jr., without him I never would have known the true joy of reading)