Belief - repost

[andrewducker]

Question three was borked. Rewritten to actually cover all the bases, and not be internally contradictory. Apologies to the 7 people who already filled it in!

[Poll #1427776]

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Good poll.

When I was a child (in the south of England, in the 1970s), Christian belief was considered not only to be the default but the only option. My parents considered themselves CofE (in the ultra-weak sense of attending church only for births, deaths and marriages, and not even for major church festivals) and never questioned the possibility of lacking religion. My education was within a Christian context (state primary school, public secondary school); it was assumed that you celebrated Christmas, Easter and the Harvest Festival. I attended Cubs and Scouts, went to far too many St. George's Day parades and church parades, and listened some pretty lousy sermons (the Methodists were generally worse than the United Reformed).

When I was about thirteen, I had something of an anti-Damascene conversion. I realised that I didn't actually believe any part of Christian dogma; I could believe that there might have been a Jesus of Nazareth, but the origins of the Bible meant that it was exceeding unlikely that there was any truth in its accounts of him. In short, the Bible could only be taken as allegory at best. The existence of any sort of supernatural being was so deeply implausible (and the prayers that invoked him so close to the sort of crawling parodied by the Pythons) that I couldn't see how any rational person could believe in one. Wish fulfillment at best.

Or, to put it more succinctly:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

[andrewducker]

I was also born in the South of England, in 1972, and I never believed. A fair number of my compatriots of the time seem to have felt likewise.

There were celebrations, but they seemed to be entirely rite, with no actual belief involved.