Some of my earliest childhood memories, age 4 maybe, are of Sunday School, enjoying the stories and the socializing, but being secretly astonished that the sweet little old ladies that ran the Sunday School made such a show of believing in their stories, of pretending they could actually communicate telepathically with a character in a story.
On reflection, I’m not so much surprised that I didn’t accept the BS, but surprised that I knew instinctively not to question them about it and rock their boat.
But then, more recently I’ve started worrying that one of these days the mothership is going to come back and pick me up and debrief me. “What have you learned from over fifty years of living on this planet, among these people, as one of them?” And I’ll have to admit I don’t understand this species at all.
Well, I am utterly shocked that at such a young age you didn’t even consider the possibility that God was real and that you could pray to him. Seriously, what gives? Where did this sense of distinction between fiction and reality come from? How did you distinguish the Bible from, say, History?
How did you distinguish the Bible from, say, History?
By age 4 I think I had figured out that stories about magical or super-powerful beings always turned out to be made up. I did believe it when adults told me that people had souls though, until I got a book that showed the location of organs in the human body and I noticed it wasn’t in there.
Argh, how I envy you guys. Me, I used to believe All Myths Are True at first, and then I selectively and methodically disbelieved those that I (very gradually) discovered to be inconsistent. I guess I’ve always had the tendency to completely immerse myself in stories. Even now, I still take stories and fiction way more seriously than I should...
I had basically the same origin, just born/raised rationalist I guess and mostly agnostically christian enough to have done sunday schools and nightly prayers. Things like magic and such never really made sense, as much as I liked to imagine them, and used to hallucinate a different world frequently in which I had such abilities. Obviously I was just crazy but rational enough to at least accept that others didn’t see the things I did and thus it just made more sense that they weren’t real, that imagination and reasoning were clearly two different things (not mutually exclusive, you can combine them as this place seems fond of trying to do in some way or another). If anything I’ve felt too restricted by leaning to far toward rationality for most of my life and feel as if I’m only just beginning to understand that Maybe All Myths Are Actually True Somewhere. Regardless, that’s more philosophy than science and until we find such a somewhere or such a true myth (which we frequently do in smaller scale concepts) doesn’t seem too worth worrying about, but that’s my natural rationalist bias that I’m struggling to “overcome.”
Well, what are your boundaries on “consider”? I remember entertaining the possibility of God’s existence at a pretty early age—somewhere between two and four, but infantile amnesia’s eaten the specifics—but always as a hypothetical, a playing-pretend game. It took me quite a while to realize that my peers weren’t consciously participating in a pleasant fantasy; as late as age eight or so I remember making decisions that could only have been predicated on the opposite assumption.
For context, I was raised in a pretty obviously Christian cultural milieu—picture books of Bible stories, a sense that it was normal to go to church on Sundays even if you and your parents didn’t—but most of my very early authority figures didn’t make a conspicuous show of belief. “Secular” might be the word, but only implicitly so.
I also never took the idea of a real interventionist god seriously, and while I’ve only lived one childhood and so can’t compare the effect of this influence to its absence, it might have had to do with the fact that I learned about dead religions at a very early age. By the time my fundamentalist grandmother started proselytizing to me at the age of three, I already had significant exposure to Greek mythology, and I mentally filed “Grandma’s beliefs about God” into the same class as “Ancient Greeks’ beliefs about gods.” It didn’t even occur to me until I was about eleven that these were beliefs I was expected to take seriously and have an emotional investment in.
I did experiment with the idea of a non denominational god as a kid, but I never felt the need to make excuses for the hypotheses if they turned up null results. I concluded that if there was a god, it wasn’t giving me any reason to worship or believe in it, so I might as well assume it didn’t exist.
Some of my earliest childhood memories, age 4 maybe, are of Sunday School, enjoying the stories and the socializing, but being secretly astonished that the sweet little old ladies that ran the Sunday School made such a show of believing in their stories, of pretending they could actually communicate telepathically with a character in a story.
On reflection, I’m not so much surprised that I didn’t accept the BS, but surprised that I knew instinctively not to question them about it and rock their boat.
But then, more recently I’ve started worrying that one of these days the mothership is going to come back and pick me up and debrief me. “What have you learned from over fifty years of living on this planet, among these people, as one of them?” And I’ll have to admit I don’t understand this species at all.
Well, I am utterly shocked that at such a young age you didn’t even consider the possibility that God was real and that you could pray to him. Seriously, what gives? Where did this sense of distinction between fiction and reality come from? How did you distinguish the Bible from, say, History?
By age 4 I think I had figured out that stories about magical or super-powerful beings always turned out to be made up. I did believe it when adults told me that people had souls though, until I got a book that showed the location of organs in the human body and I noticed it wasn’t in there.
Argh, how I envy you guys. Me, I used to believe All Myths Are True at first, and then I selectively and methodically disbelieved those that I (very gradually) discovered to be inconsistent. I guess I’ve always had the tendency to completely immerse myself in stories. Even now, I still take stories and fiction way more seriously than I should...
I had basically the same origin, just born/raised rationalist I guess and mostly agnostically christian enough to have done sunday schools and nightly prayers. Things like magic and such never really made sense, as much as I liked to imagine them, and used to hallucinate a different world frequently in which I had such abilities. Obviously I was just crazy but rational enough to at least accept that others didn’t see the things I did and thus it just made more sense that they weren’t real, that imagination and reasoning were clearly two different things (not mutually exclusive, you can combine them as this place seems fond of trying to do in some way or another). If anything I’ve felt too restricted by leaning to far toward rationality for most of my life and feel as if I’m only just beginning to understand that Maybe All Myths Are Actually True Somewhere. Regardless, that’s more philosophy than science and until we find such a somewhere or such a true myth (which we frequently do in smaller scale concepts) doesn’t seem too worth worrying about, but that’s my natural rationalist bias that I’m struggling to “overcome.”
Well, what are your boundaries on “consider”? I remember entertaining the possibility of God’s existence at a pretty early age—somewhere between two and four, but infantile amnesia’s eaten the specifics—but always as a hypothetical, a playing-pretend game. It took me quite a while to realize that my peers weren’t consciously participating in a pleasant fantasy; as late as age eight or so I remember making decisions that could only have been predicated on the opposite assumption.
For context, I was raised in a pretty obviously Christian cultural milieu—picture books of Bible stories, a sense that it was normal to go to church on Sundays even if you and your parents didn’t—but most of my very early authority figures didn’t make a conspicuous show of belief. “Secular” might be the word, but only implicitly so.
I also never took the idea of a real interventionist god seriously, and while I’ve only lived one childhood and so can’t compare the effect of this influence to its absence, it might have had to do with the fact that I learned about dead religions at a very early age. By the time my fundamentalist grandmother started proselytizing to me at the age of three, I already had significant exposure to Greek mythology, and I mentally filed “Grandma’s beliefs about God” into the same class as “Ancient Greeks’ beliefs about gods.” It didn’t even occur to me until I was about eleven that these were beliefs I was expected to take seriously and have an emotional investment in.
I did experiment with the idea of a non denominational god as a kid, but I never felt the need to make excuses for the hypotheses if they turned up null results. I concluded that if there was a god, it wasn’t giving me any reason to worship or believe in it, so I might as well assume it didn’t exist.