The War On Faith - Personal Deconversion

I was raised in the small town of Katy, Texas, about 25 miles west of Houston, which was
rapidly changing at that time from a rural, agrarian area, to one dominated by suburban
sprawl. I was exceptionally active in the First Baptist Church of Katy as a child and the
folks went to great pains to emulate June and Ward. It was basically the nice little
average rural/suburban White Anglo-Saxon Protestant wet dream, complete with the
standard light touch of racism, and heavy doses of idealism, homophobia, xenophobia,
flag waving patriotism, mysogonism, and absolutely massive servings of ethnocentrism. I
was so involved in the church that I was actually sent to the principal's office in the ninth
grade for calling a teacher who claimed to be Christian a hypocrite and quoting Timothy
2:11, " I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men..." The principal, being in a
small Texas Baptist town, did not exactly scold me harshly. What was he going to do?
Suspend me for quoting the bible? I'd have been on the five o'clock news. The local bible
thumpers would probably have burned a cross on the principal's lawn.

I was also a full blown geek, complete with the bowl cut, and the horn-rimmed glasses.
Only the lack of a pocket protector kept me from fulfilling all of the geek stereotypes in
high school. I was even editor of the high school newspaper, and took physics, chemistry,
biology, algebra, trig, and college English courses. I, as most of the former fundies I've
come across, had my religious fervor lesson gradually over time. I slowly began to go to
church, and church functions, less often. After I returned from my freshman year at
Texas A&M I went back to my local Southern Baptist church for the last time. There was
a long lecture that danced around the subject for half an hour before finally getting to
the point, which was advocating a vote against Texas allowing the lottery. It just struck
me as so condescending. This guy was talking down to me like I was an idiot. I was
offended by the whole spectacle, and never went back to church again. There was just
something about a preacher telling me how to vote that struck me as unamerican, and
wrong.

I next enlisted in the Marine Corps for what turned out to be an intellectually devoid
exercise, but one which was hugely beneficial to my college finances, and personal
discipline, not to mention the possible source of my seemingly endless humility and soft
spoken demeanor which should be overtly obvious to anyone who's read this site's What
The Fuck section. The Corps might not have needed me, but I sure as hell needed the
Corps. A puke at the Houston MEPS station attempted to trick me into taking an
administrative logistics position, but I would have none of it. I am, to this day, baffled as
to why anyone would join the Marines to become a clerk. I was First Squad Leader from
the first day of Boot until graduation and was the Guide Of Weapons Company Delta at
the School Of Infantry at Camp Pendleton. I was a Machinegunner (M.O.S. - 0331), Rifle
and Pistol Expert, and was on the Pistol Team in Pearl Harbor Marine Barracks. I never
attended church services, even while in Boot Camp, when a high number of recruits
found Jesus with a sudden fury, but I still considered myself Baptist.

I had been raised very much an idealist, and still had not grown out of that idealism, or
the flag waving, borderline flag worshiping, patriotism that is so common with southern
fundamentalists, so I absolutely loved the Corps. I had never been so good at anything in
my life, and had never felt so perfectly suited to what I was doing. I had "LIFER" tattooed
on my forehead, figuratively speaking, and wore my Marine Corps ring on the finger
where a wedding ring is supposed to go and considered myself married to the Corps "till
death do us part." That was it. I didn't have to think about anything else for the rest of my
life. I would spend the remainder of my days in the Corps. The Marine Corps, however,
felt differently about the arrangement and filed for divorce on the grounds of
somnambulism (sleepwalking), so I received a fully Honorable Discharge, complete with
the nifty "certificate suitable for framing".

It was like the bottom fell out. What the fuck am I gonna do now? After about six months
of living in bars and honkytonks endlessly repeating the phrase "I was in the Marines. I
can walk, and run, long distances, clean dirt, organize steel wool, and I can put a round
up a flea's ass with a pistol at fifty feat, but what the fuck kind of job does that skill set
help me land out here in the real world?" I was running my head about such things in a
bar out in Katy one night, for about the thousandth time, when someone I didn't know,
quite unexpectedly, actually answered my quite rhetorical question. "Ever thought about
becoming a cop?" This guy made me look small by comparison, and at 6'3", 230, there's
not just a whole lot of people running around who make me look tiny. I became a Texas
Peace Officer here in the Houston area with an agency whose hiring criteria was, luckily,
not predicated on the evils and disparities of somnambulistic prejudices. I still, though,
had a very healthy idealist streak, and considers the "crooks" to be evil.

After a time, was assigned as a Drill Instructor at a boot camp for young, adult, criminal
offenders (17-25 year olds). Suddenly I found myself face to face with harsh realities I
had never encountered before. In each platoon of "adults" I would encounter a
probationer I had to teach how to bathe. There were twenty-year-old fathers of two
sitting beside my desk reading "see Spot run." I was aware for the first time how much of
a toll ignorance could take on a person. These "adults" were adult only in the physical
sense of the term. I realized not only that these kids were not evil, but that nobody was.
These kids lacked the character to be evil, they were simply intellectually bankrupt. They
were raised in a violent shithole, by idiots, around idiots, in the image of idiots, to be
idiots. What a shock it is when they start acting like violent fucking idiots. It was all they
knew, and it had absolutely nothing to do with "evil." The Christians are fond of saying
"He had a choice. He didn't have to rob that store." These "adults" in my charge were not
capable of mature decisions. They simply lacked all the things semi-intelligent citizens
consider common. No form of socially acceptable morality or other socially important
skills had ever been taught to them. Their mind set was so detached from reality that it
was shocking to me. They were quite completely educationally, intellectually, and
psychologically bankrupt. They were completely fucked right out of the gate.

The final straw that broke the proverbial camel's back came when I was about 25, and it
was a book on Greek mythology. I have always enjoyed the subject, and had bought the
book thinking it was a book of stories, but this book was more focused on the origin and
development of the mythology and how it changed over thousands of years. I noticed
shocking similarities between the mythology of the Greeks and the evolving mythology of
the Xians and Jews. So Zeus starts out a raving prick who will wipe out a whole city just
because the king pisses him off. He's an evil, twisted, petulant fuck, just like the Old
Testament god of the Abrahamic Religions. Then over about two to three thousand years
he gradually grows nicer, and less directly involved in their lives, and now he's a nice
guy, like the New Testament god.

Combine that with the Pandora story, where all evil enters the world via one woman, and
the Eve story from the bible. Women were the afterthought after men had already been
made, and were created, supposedly, to be the companion of man. It was like a light bulb
went off in my head, and I suddenly realized "Holy shit! That's just like Christianity". Old
Testament god versus New Testament god, along with Pandora and Eve. The gods of
Pandora and Eve created the women imperfect. Created them so they were capable of
temptation. Then they intentionally, and knowingly, placed temptation right in front of
them, and then feigned shock, surprise and fury when they acted on that temptation. Any
god who does shit like that is a fucking idiot, or a fucking psycho, or fucking both. That's
when all the religious shit came crashing down for me. I went over to a friend of mine's
house that night and said "I think I'm an atheist".

But that was just the beginning, because, suddenly, I had a lot of work I had to do. I then
realized I had been raised on this stuff as the basis of my moral system, so if the bible was
bullshit, what else was I raised on that was bullshit? I then took each and every thing I
believed in and held it up to the light of logic. Piece by piece, very methodically, and
intentionally, I picked away everything ethnocentric, mysogynistic, homophobic, etc,
because they could not stand up on their own two legs without being propped up by
faith, and cast them from me. I felt like a child who had just learned about Santa Claus. I
still have to use the logic filter today, because I still have very idealistic impulses, the most
common of which is my constant tendency to expect way too much out of people.