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Issue
1 * January 15, 2006 |
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Growing
up a Skepchick (Continued) Although my world was surrounded by religion, I was raised to have a very scientific and skeptical outlook. Before I was ten, my father taught me how to convert numbers into binary, hex, and octal; how to find the constellations in the night sky; how to use a microscope to find tiny amoebas swimming in our tap water; and how to watch a caterpillar form a cocoon and emerge, weeks later, as a butterfly. Perhaps he wished I'd been born a boy, or perhaps he just had no other way to communicate, but he filled my mind with math and science as soon as I could understand. From these lessons, I learned about observation and evidence, and about the scientific method. My father may have gone to midnight mass on Christmas Eve, but religion didn't play a starring role in his life. My mother, on the other hand, was a spiritual gypsy. I had been raised Catholic (my mother converted from Judaism to marry my father) and then Baptist (my mother became born again when she divorced my father). As a child, I had only flirted with religion, never taking it to heart. When I was fourteen, everything changed. My mother, dissatisfied with the tepid Baptist church, started taking me to, first, a Pentecostal church and, then, to a frighteningly cult-like non-denominational Bible-study group. Every night we gathered in the basement of a home, sitting on metal folding chairs, couch cushions, or the floor, and listened to three hour sermons. Every night we heard the same message. Over and over again, it was drilled into our minds. We sang songs, prayed in tongues, and gave money to prove our devotion to God. I was allowed to miss school if I was tired - but not church. Even that was not enough to satisfy my mother's spiritual hunger, so she invited the preacher and his family, who hailed from Texas, to stay with us when they were in town. I was inundated with quoted scripture and Christian music every waking hour that I was not in school, for months on end. I started out being very rebellious and angry about having to spend time with these strangers instead of my friends, and having to study the Bible instead of trigonometry. But over time the message seeped into my brain and I started accepting our new life as right and normal. I stopped associating with my friends from school, and made new friends at church. I stopped watching TV and listening to secular music, and bought a bunch of albums by contemporary Christian artists. I stopped studying, and carried my Bible around at school. Looking back, I can see that brainwashing tactics were used to convert me. But at the time I was too young and naive to realize what was going on. At first it was fun, and I was very happy. But after a few years, I moved to the South and I started to see the dark side of the force. Christians in New York, no matter how fanatical and zealous, always seemed to maintain liberal values. But in the South, I discovered that bigotry, sexism, and reactionary politics were tied closely to the gospel of Jesus. Unfortunately, over the past decades, this oppression has spread out of the South and across the United States.
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