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invention
.: posted 4/23/2004 ::: by webmdave
::: 
[Note] this was put in internet infidels but got no response
I noticed several contributors here using names from water ship down and this interested me as this book, and the film had a part in my becoming an atheist. At school we were made to pray everyday, my earliest memories were of everyone around me kneeling with their hand together and me with my hands in a paw like configuration praying instead to Frith, the sun deity worshiped by all rabbits that was invented by Richard Adams. I did this because in the film a brilliantly animated creation myth is portrayed in aboriginal art style, and to my very young mind was more powerful and moving, and seeming made more sense than the one in the bible. I understood this was fiction, but I looked at the people who believed the Christian teachings and felt that if they could have their god why couldn’t I?
This my seem odd but I didn't feel right praying to a god I didn't like or understand, it took me years to realize what was going on, I was rejecting the dogma as instinctively wrong somehow, and it wasn’t till I began studying Christianity that I started to realize that I had good reason to. But the highly developed doubt that is the cornerstone of my life was not what made me regard the bible as a work of fiction. I felt the need perhaps to worship but felt there were better alternatives. Maybe because I was exposed to many other faiths in my pluralist town, I also liked some of the colorful Hindu gods, but always saw them as inventions.
I would not have prayed had not the teachers insisted, at first it was obedient mimicry but I soon rebelled in any subtle and un-noticeable way I could, and I think this goes against the idea that we are naturally religious. Has anyone else had any similar experiences of inventing their own religions or re-directing their compulsory religious duties into something else they could more easily relate to, or was my childhood unique?
The point is that to me the story and the emotion was what made me for a brief period semi-religious, I think that the morals that adult theists use to justify their faith is just rationalization, those who were brought up in the bible did not first come across it as a series of enlightened rules, but as nice little stories about Noah and Jacob, that is how the young are introduced to faith, the commandments are drilled into them later so the pulpit posers can claim they are better than everybody else. But holy law has proven inapplicable, contradictory, and in some cased immoral, does then faith have any moral right at all, it not religion in fact against the best interests of mankind?
City: Grimsby
State: Lincolnshire
Country: England
Became a Christian: 8ish
Ceased being a Christian: 14ish
Labels before: Church of England
Labels now: Epicurean, skeptic, stoic, atheist, noncognitivist, freethinker
Why I joined: peer pressure
Why I left: still working that out
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