Blog Spotlight: Losing My Religion
Like a lot of atheist agnostic skeptic humanist freethinkers, I didn't just wake up one day with morning wood and the realization that god was kind of a silly idea. I was raised in a church. We went every Sunday. I sang in the choir, performed in plays, and went to camps during the Summer. (We were Methodist, the plain toast of Protestant denominations). While I don't ever remember being wholly enthralled by visions of an omniscient, miracle-slinging, invisible sky-grandpa, it didn't occur to me to really question the idea until long after I'd ceased to be a regular churchgoer.
Notwithstanding the people who make the most noise on the Internet, the world isn't cleanly divided into true believers and soulless atheists. There are a lot of people who are in the midst of a long fall away from a childhood religion, and there are also nonbelievers who come to (or back to) some religious faith. People on either side of the divide may yell the loudest, but there are plenty of interesting perspectives that fall somewhere in the middle.
My new favorite representative from the middling masses is frequent Skepchick commenter Improbable Bee. Her blog Losing My Religion tracks her trajectory out of her religious upbringing toward a more skeptical, evidence-based worldview.
I'm sure that I'm biased because of the direction in which she's heading, but she's talking about it in a thoughtful, articulate way that's very appealing. She's wrestling with more intense versions of a lot of the things I faced, but she's far more insightful than I was. Regardless of your place on the believer-skeptic continuum, it's worth your time to take a look.
5 comments:
I was going to say "Good God! Thank you!", but that particular comment is a bit too fraught with connotation, wouldn't you say?
Thank you very much for the mention, and I will do my best to keep being articulate, regular, and at least semi-interesting.
Just as a heads-up, though, I bought my first NIN album today, so don't expect anything overly positive out of me for the next week or two. ;)
* IB
To "lose one's religion" doesn't mean to lose one's faith. It means you're at the end of your rope, or you're nonplussed, or your at your wit's end -- you're so stressed and upset that you're about to forget some of your religious training, such as not taking god's name in vain.
If Scarlett O'Hara had lost her religion, she would have said something stronger than "Fiddle-dee-dee."
Jesus christ I don't believe I left an apostrophe error in my comment.
I don't think that the meaning of the phrase is so concrete that it can't be nudged over just a bit to indicate a long term drifting away from a tradition of faith, rather than a momentary lapse.
At any rate, I'm just a reader. I didn't pick the name. If you've got issues with that, you'll have to take it up with the author.
No issues; just trying to edify.
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