It feels as if it's time to do a posting or two about the "atheist's perspective."  Some background: in my small Iowa hometown there were four churches, three Lutheran and one Methodist.  There were so few Catholics that the only nearby Catholic church was in the country and served people from several small towns.  Most of the town was Norwegian Lutheran, and the Methodist church was something of a catch-all for those who weren't Lutheran (and often thought the Lutherans were suspiciously close to being Catholics--such was the time).  My parents were nominally Methodist, though they weren't very active.  They were believers, but I never remember them going to church at the same time.  For a few months, my father would go; for a few months, it was my mother; and then for a while neither would go.  For a kid in a small town, though, the church provided a lot of entertainment.  One night there was choir practice, another there was youth fellowship (I have no memory of what we actually did at YF meetings, but I went for years).  Sunday morning there was Sunday school and then, like all my non-Lutheran friends, I sang in the choir during church.  One night a week there was Cub/Boy/Explorer scouts; one or two nights there were football or basketball games.  It kept us busy and made for a fun childhood.

Still, it was all social for me and most of my friends.  When we were thirteen, we all went to catechism classes, at the end of which we were "catechized"--like confirmation, but without the Lutheran or Catholic connotations.  We had a workbook, and at the end there was a statement that we had "accepted Jesus Christ as our personal lord and savior," which we were supposed to sign.  I must have been rebellious even at thirteen because I told the minister that I hadn't accepted Him (I'll keep the capitalization just to avoid ambiguity) and couldn't sign.  The minister began reasonably enough, trying to convince me that of course I believed, but I couldn't be budged.  He got angrier and angrier and finally said the equivalent of "I don't care whether you believe or not.  Just sign the book so we can get on with it."  I had another run-in with the minister when three of us, all Scouts, decided that we'd get the God and Country Award.  All of us had gone through years of scouting because it was another way of socializing and every spring we got to travel someplace for a week-long camping trip.  None of us took the Scouts seriously--we didn't try for merit badges and mocked anyone who actually got enough badges to become an Eagle Scout.  So I don't know why the idea struck us to work for the God and Country award.  One of the requirements was that we put in a certain number of "service" hours.  The minister interpreted service to mean that we'd clean the parsonage, so for several weeks, every Saturday morning we would spend three or four hours scrubbing the floors in the parsonage, vacuuming, etc.--whatever the minister's wife didn't want to do herself (and, of course, all this work was beneath the minister).  And every week, as soon as we got home, the minister would call and say that he had run his hand over the tops of doorframes and found dust and that we needed to come back to do the work correctly.  I think he called one too many times, as our parents finally put an end to our "service."

When I was a senior in high school, I decided to become a Catholic, and somehow I made an appointment with the priest to discuss conversion.  Someone ratted me out, and at about four o'clock on the afternoon of the appointment, the Methodist minister appeared at my house and wanted me to come out to the car.  He tried to show me the error of my ways and then asked me to get down on my knees and accept (a Protestant) Jesus Christ.  What this would have looked like--a teenager on his knees with the minister seated behind the wheel--is bizarre to say the least.  I refused on all counts, but when I explained to my parents what the visit had been about, they were horrified and said that I absolutely could not meet the priest.  But a few months later I went off to college, and once there, I went through conversion classes, was baptised a second time, and became one of those more-Catholic-than-the-Pope converts.  I think the attraction was partly just to the lavish rituals, but probably more important, I was struggling with my sexuality, and there were no psychologists in rural Iowa.  The idea of confessing and then being forgiven must have sounded therapeutic.

I had a couple of years of being devoutly Catholic, and then one night after some sort of campus Catholic get-together, an older man (probably 35 or 40, but in those days that seemed much older) asked me whether I wanted to go for a ride.  As we drove out in the country, I knew exactly what was going on.  On the one hand, I was excited that I was finally going to have my first experience (except for teen-age boys' playing around); on the other, I was already feeling terribly guilty.  We parked, we explored, I panicked.  The evening abruptly ended.  The next day I called the priest, Father Gregory, and said I needed to go to confession.  He said he had a cold and asked whether we could put it off.  I said that I really would like to talk and confess; he said he had a bad cold.  I persisted.  (I must've been a real pain to clergymen.)   So I went to the campus center and met with him, though he didn't seem to see the gravity of what for me was very confusing.  I finally said that I would like to confess, so we went through the ritual:  "Father, forgive me, for I have sinned."  He assigned some sort of penance, and I headed back to the dorm.  Somehow, though, I didn't feel as relieved as I expected.  The Church hadn't really taken the guilt away.  And then I realized that it was the Church that had given me the guilt in the first place.  Why not just do away with the middle man?  No church, no guilt.  No guilt, no need for the church.  That was the epiphany of a 20-year-old and the end of my days as a Catholic.

Next, I decide I'm Jewish, but this post is getting long, so I'll save that till next time.  I can see that becoming a happy atheist is going to take more than two entries.  I'll get there, though.