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I left high school and entered university already with a pretty negative view of organized religion. But a fortuitous opportunity at the start of my time at University helped cement that mindset.

I was “gifted” through most of my early education, and that selected me for the advanced track in college. There was a 2 year program called “Humanities” that was an accelerated packaging of most of the general education requirements, with some enhancements. Naturally I jumped on in.

In the first semester, there was a course where we took a high level, literature study of the Bible. The emphasis was on comparing it to other world religions, to understand how it influenced virtually all western thought and writing, and ultimately to dissect it as a work of literature.

The part that was fascinating to me was the obviousness that the different “books” were written at different times, in very different voices, and with almost remarkable frequency contradict each other on major foundational concepts. The Bible is literally littered with gross and petite contradictions, errors, and fallacies. And that is just the New Testament.

In this class we also spent time analyzing the tortured theological reasoning to explain away, and justify these inconsistencies. A lot of really smart men (universally men throughout history have been the keepers of theology until very recently) labored for whole lifetimes to explain and justify things that were probably written down wrong, or translated wrong.

Fascinating as this was, it opened my eyes to how blind you had to be to be “faithful“. There was so much to question, that like the belief that Joseph Smith read from the gold plates in a hat with “seer” stones, to be a evangelical christian, to believe that the bible is the literal and strictly true word of god was illogical.

More than one “believer” walked out of that class never to return, their core beliefs having been challenged. I was astounded that there were people who when confronted with evidence, and incontrovertible facts, they would turn their head, and continue to believe wrong things. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but for someone who was a budding scientist, who devoured all the science and mathematics he could in school, this was world shaking.

My guess is that a lot of those people have become the ones who can deny global climate change, evolution, and the standard model of cosmology.

I came away from this experience with knowledge that christianity was at its core flawed and tainted by the inconsistencies in their core gospels. That the foundational texts were clearly written by men, long after the fact, and with that lens applied to the words.

I had read much of the bible before this though. I had a stepfather who leaned on us in my pre-teen years to read the bible, to memorize passages in it. So I read, and even at that age, it seemed like a fairy tale. Not even good fiction.

Next up – I work with a Mormon who threw her life away because of church.

Recapping, I was fortunate in my early, formative years to not have been indoctrinated in religious belief. I also lived in a state that took seriously the separation of religion from education, unlike many of the Southern states.

Good thing too, because Sundays were always dirt bike riding days. Probably 30 weekends a year we spent at Hollister or Metcalf, and even occasionally at Clear Creek OHV parks riding.

I never much thought about church, religion, or faith until much later. I remember becoming conscious of it when I entered the workforce in my late teens. I was working at Marie Callendars, a “homestyle” restaurant chain in San Jose. Many of my coworkers were students at the local private Catholic high school, Archbishop Mitty.

What a difference from my public school experience. These kids were far more rebellious, and virtually all of them were heavy drug users. Not that there wasn’t some rebellious souls at my high school, and perhaps I got a view of a small slice of the Catholic school demographic, but it was eye opening.

I recall wondering what all these angst ridden teens were rebelling against. I had not much clue of the indoctrination, and forced conformity in religious families, so I really had no frame of reference. I was soon to get that frame of reference…

Sundays @ the restaurant

After a couple years, I started working the day shift line cook role on weekends. The main guy had jaw surgery and was out for a few months so I just dove in.

The busiest lunch day of the week, by far, was Sundays. Even the weekday lunch rush paled in comparison to the onslaught of humanity that walked through the door starting at 11:30 on Sunday. The restaurant filled to capacity, and there would be wave after wave of people up until mid afternoon.

However the clientele had some unique attributes. First, they were all well dressed. Men in jackets and ties. Women and girls in long dresses. Ah, it was the after church crowd.

The restaurant had a few large churches nearby (I remember the name of one, Bethel) and post services we would get their custom for lunches.

For the most part they were polite and genial, but they were notoriously poor tippers. I would hear the gossip from the servers. Certain parties who were “regulars” would be shunned. They were the ones who would leave no tip, but a card that said that the server should be ashamed to be working on “The Lord’s Day”.

I would love to say that this was a rare occurrence, but it was an every Sunday phenomenon.

I began to see the “Righteous” as arrogant, condescending, and in many ways as assholes. The servers were good people, working hard to support themselves and their families (most of them were working mothers), and these Church Goers were talking down to them for not worshiping on Sunday. The gall was palpable.

It was this experience that made me more openly question and counter religious people and their practices. Not only did it annoy me, but it was affecting people I knew, worked with, and was friends with. The hypocrisy was monumental.

In part 3, I take a class in college that treats the bible as a piece of literature and analyzes it for its content, not its context.