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Childhood: (about age 5 to 9) attended Sunday school at Methodist church with mother. Remember not enjoying it all that much, would have rather been playing freely. Around age 9 I told my mother I didn't like going, and she said it was ok with her that I didn't, if that was my choice. So I stopped going. At age 15 I was a rebellious teenager, but not crazily so. I got into some of the usual bad-boy stuff, smoking tobacco and pot, doing LSD, trying to get into every girl's pants that I could (zippo luck there, btw). One evening I accepted an invitation to a "religious rap session" at the home of a couple of kids I knew, which turned out to be a sort of a prayer meeting. I was still flying pretty high from being on acid earlier that day, and although my memory of the specifics is unclear, the combo of tripping out and being in that particular place at that particular time resulted in what I can only describe as a profound religious experience. I remember being in a prayer circle sitting on the floor in the living room, and being overwhelmed with such strong feelings of emotion (the LSD was definitely working), and sincerely believed that I had discovered God. Anyhow, the other kids helped me pray the "salvation prayer" and that was it. I was "born-again". I spent the next two years of high school, until graduation, attending the local Baptist church and learning my new religion. A few weeks after graduating high school I moved away from my home town and went to live in a christian commune that I had heard about some months previous. I lived there for a little over a year, and became a full-blown Jesus-freak. But circumstances led me to split from them; there were just too many things about this whole Jesus thing that just were not making sense any more, as I found myself and my intellectual capacities maturing. The fundamentalism of Christianity left me thinking that it was basing itself on unabated emotionality, and blindly, stupidly, refused to ask itself to honestly resolve even common sense questions. This became unbearable for me; call it intuition or whatever, but I just began to feel that fundamentalist Christianity was missing the true message of Jesus. Either that, or Jesus was truly a whacko. So I split that place, and returned to "mainstream" Christianity, but after a few years of that pasty oatmeal variety of spirituality, I had had my fill. As I said, my intellectual capacities were maturing, and I began to apply reason and critical thinking to my ways of viewing the world. Eventually I became convinced that if there was any sort of god at all, it could not be any of the forms anyone had tried to formalize and define up to that time; all those forms were deficient in one way or another, to my way of seeing it. So I just let the matter coast for a while. Then, around 1980 or so, I began to write some of my thoughts down regarding religion, god, etc. I realized that what I specifically had was "no belief in god", which is of course, atheism. Later on, during a college philosophy course, I further realized that it was only proper to apply the term atheist to myself when it came to the question of whether I believed in the existence of god, as it is the most accurate term. In 1992 I became a member of the American Humanist Association, and have spent those years between then and today educating myself in the philosophy of Humanism. Today I consider Humanism my advocation, and am active in promoting the practicality and workableness of the Humanist philosophy. So, in a nutshell, Christian overnight, but free-thinker by evolution. Forrest R. Prince (aka Longbeard) |