The following is post #3 of my true autobiography series. Some names/places/details have been changed or obscured to protect the innocent. To easily navigate through this series, view the table of contents.

The year was 2003.

In the beginning of the year was when the bomb dropped: I’d have to move back in with my parents. Of course, also during that time the drumbeats leading the United States to war against Iraq were climaxing, and as patriotic Americans we were glued to our television news waiting to see what would happen, win or lose.

Personally though, I’d already failed. The Internet-based startup I had been working at since the previous autumn had failed to secure funding, and consequently I was out of a job. When I started the gig, I was recruited as a QA tech with some other various responsibilities, having been referred to their recruiter by my old supervisor at the non-profit Christian ministry I used to work for (another post for another day). I was promised $50k/year plus all kinds of bonuses that never materialized. In the end, I collected maybe 3.5-4 months worth of irregular pay before the checks stopped coming at all, due to their investors backing out. 

In order to take the job to begin with, I’d needed to rent an apartment of my own close to where their offices were located since they were far on the other side of town, and at least a 45-minute commute each way assuming good traffic through downtown, which really should never be assumed. At the time, I’d been staying in a spare room in my friend Chris’ family home, having already been out of my parents’ home for about a few years after my time in college. After a short search, I found a place that looked perfect to me: a nice little one-bedroom in a gated apartment community, very close to shopping and in a posh part of town only 15 minutes away from the new offices.

I had re-created my own little safety bubble without even realizing it.

So it was, that at the beginning of 2003 that bubble is where I found myself pondering where I’d gone wrong. During the last week or two that I lived in that apartment my employer stopped making promises about paying its employees and one by one we all stopped going in to work, abandoning hope of our company’s future success, so I just stayed in the apartment, paced around, and smoked clove cigarettes on my tiny back porch (a habit I’d started a few months before). 

For some reason, I loved that place even though it had almost no personality, paper-thin walls and an annoying, uptight upstairs neighbor who would complain any time I had the TV on at a listenable volume. It was mine, though, and I could spend hours there cooking for myself and pondering what might have been, and considering that I knew that time was coming to an end, I made the best of it.

The peace and tranquility of those last two weeks were completely shattered upon moving back into the family home. Not only was I back in a home with a dozen or so of my siblings (the ones still not old enough to be out on their own yet), but I had my parents around to yell at me as well. 

I know I’ve covered all that in my first post, so I’ll move on, or rather, around that.

Now again, during that time my family was fond of having a TV in the house, most notably for the availability of Fox News. War news and propaganda was on almost 24 hours a day, with President Bush making demands at Saddam Hussein and of course those demands were all ignored until finally, live on television, there we were at war. Again.

When the offensive first started, live on television we could see bombs dropping on Baghdad and the night sky was lit with flash after flash, explosions and death with live reporting on the ground. As a human being, I found the coverage at first fascinating, even titillating, but eventually I was sickened by it. At the time I couldn’t really describe why. 

“Shock and awe” was the phrase of the moment.

In my mind, thoughts whirled. My parents cheered and were practically dripping with vitriol for the Iraqi people, while I questioned the ability for the military to actually know if these supposed “smart bombs” were actually hitting their target. In my mind, I knew that innocent people were dying, but everything I heard on TV and from my parents and the religious authority figures around me, said that these people were not only worthy of the dehumanizing remarks, but also whatever fate might befall them, being that they were obviously acting in support of such a terrible dictator.

The American public had taken on the role of willing judge, jury, executioner and audience to this genocide. For some people, this was a magical time for the cause of justice and democracy, but for the rest of us, well, to say that there were major reservations doesn’t hardly cover it. 

Morally speaking, this was the first time I was able to see first-hand the effects of an entire society hard at work dehumanizing and destroying another society.

That made it a very confusing time for me, of course in large part because of what I was also going through with my parents, because all at once I was finding myself needing to question the authority structures I’d been living under. All at once, not only had my job failed me, but now my parents and government were too. 

The thing was, I still couldn’t quite process why my government had failed me. I knew and could say that the war was unjust, but I still couldn’t pinpoint why it was unjust. I’m not talking about the semantics of would they ever find WMDs in Iraq or not, or would they ever prove to the American people that Iraq was fueling Al Qaeda’s efforts or not, I’m talking about figuring out for myself what my own moral objections were to the propaganda machine I was seeing in action, and why that machine was in action to begin with. 

Essentially, it took me until quite a few years later for me to understand in retrospect what a war machine our country had become, and what it took to sustain that. It took me a few years to understand how to define morality for myself, so that I wouldn’t believe everything the TV told me, or everything a preacher or parent or political figure told me.

Right away, I could spot the lies, but somewhere in the back of my head I still questioned that perhaps my perception of the lies was imagined or invented, that these authorities knew more than I and had my best interests at heart. Gray areas like ‘plausible deniability’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ and ‘best intentions’ haunted me.

Like any good young Christian, years before I had convinced myself dutifully that only my beliefs are worth believing, and my doubts are worth doubting, yet in the process of growing up, it’s common for humans to employ critical thinking to everything else in life as a means of a defense mechanism. We question salesmen, prospective employers, political candidates, we question the messages in movies and music and never, ever question our parents, pastors, or the word of God.

Right?

Well anyway, it was only a short time after the start of the war (relatively speaking, compared to how long the war has lasted) when I was sent packing from my parents’ house, effectively calling that relationship firmly into question.

By then, it was May or June, and after staying with my older brother for only a couple weeks, I moved in with my friend David and his family for the summer. He’d had some bad luck recently too, with his wife leaving him quite suddenly and unexpectedly, and we spent the summer supporting each other through our respective family troubles.

Our days were spent out by the pool of our apartment complex, and our nights were spent at local bars playing darts and drinking Jagermeister. All the in-between times were long prayer sessions and Bible studies, where we looked to God for some kind of explanation for our respective predicaments and how best to resolve them. 

Looking back now, it’s easy to see that the sense of peace that came to us was a direct result of exhaustion. Already I’d felt a sense of despair attached to any thought of faith, knowing that no matter how desperate I was, no matter what the situation, no answer ever came. No one was ever healed, no riches ever were bestowed, and certainly no relationships were ever restored through prayer alone. I had simply overlooked that fact my entire life up until then.

My days of claiming to be a Christian were quickly coming to an end.

Still broke after the summer was over, I ended up moving in with my best friend Chris & his wife, into a spare room they had in their new home. I was able to find a job working in retail, and life settled down a bit over the winter, as I was working and mostly staying away from my parents. 

Stubbornly I clung to the hope that the relationship with my parents could still be repaired, and eventually it was after about 9 months or a year, but really only barely enough to where I could visit the family home and see my siblings. My parents would never really apologize sincerely for their side of things, saying only that it was the right thing to do at the time and even later trying to take partial credit for my successes despite the fact that they had left me irreparably homeless and broke, at the mercy of friends and family. Beyond that, they never really trusted me around the rest of my siblings either, expecting me to try and pervert them or something of that nature.

It was almost a full year after the Iraq war began, in the spring of 2004, that I finally was financially stable enough to rent a room on my own, with roommates I hadn’t known from before; in other words, I wasn’t being supported either fully or partially by my friends or family.

It took one more incident and some hard work to get me there though. It was February ‘04, and my friend Chris was ready for me to move on, so he and his wife kindly let me know I needed to be out by the end of the month. As the weeks went on though, I still had no savings built up, and with bills still coming in I had no money to rent my own place by the end of February, which left only one option. 

Foolishly, hopefully, on the last day I picked up the phone and called my dad. I told him the situation, that I needed a place to stay and had nowhere else to go and no money to spend. He said that in order for me to live in the family home again, I’d need to pay rent, keep my job, and not say anything against them while under their roof. The logistics of this were practically impossible, not that I couldn’t just play along, but the job I held was a commuting nightmare from where they lived even if I had transportation, but I had no car and there was no practical transit system between their place and my workplace (it would have taken 2-3 hours each way, as opposed to a 20-minute drive), and he was unwilling to commit to helping me get to work and back regularly.

For 20 minutes at least, I explained the details of this to him, how I couldn’t promise to keep a job that I had no expectation of being able to commute to, but I still desperately needed a place to live and would do everything I could to stay employed while I lived there. No matter what I said, it wasn’t enough, and it became clear: he just didn’t want me there.

I hung up the phone, in tears. Explaining to Chris and his wife what happened, it wasn’t long before they said they’d let me stay a bit longer as long as I kept looking for other housing. I’ll always be grateful for how gracious and understanding they were through that time, as I’m sure it took plenty of sacrifice on their part.

Not long after my situation progressed, and within a month or two I found the place where I would live for the next 5 or 6 years. Not only that, but already my own religious viewpoints had almost fully evolved from a strictly fundamentalist viewpoint. 

The best example of this is probably from the first time I went to look at the room I’d be renting. I was met by the landlady, who lived in the basement of the house and rented out the upstairs bedrooms as she could to help pay the mortgage. She showed me the small room, built as an addition off the back of the house. When I say it was small, it was barely more than a closet, but I didn’t have hardly any belongings, and just felt like I wanted a place I could call home, where I could hide away for a while. 

After showing me the room, she introduced me to the other roommate, a 30-something woman who occupied the larger bedroom on the main floor. 

After a short talk, they cut to the point: “it’s important to us that you know that we’re not together, but we’re both gay.” 

“That doesn’t bother me at all. I may be a Christian, but I don’t preach about it anymore, and I don’t have a problem with homosexuals,” I replied.

A week or so later, I picked up the keys and started moving in.

It took me a lot of trial and error, and a lot of finding things out the hard way before I was finally rid of the Christian label, not to mention the naïveté, but finally living in a non-judgemental, liberal and yet positive environment was the best thing for me. Looking back, things could have gone much worse at this point, being very impressionable, broke, and looking for any remotely positive influence that I could find.

The war between my parents and I, if you can call it that, was only beginning and like the quagmire in Iraq seems like it may never resolve. Even in recent years their resistance to truth, in fact even going so far as to spread lies about me, still continues. The war going inside me, though, the one to find truth and fight off my ignorant impulses, would take years before I’d finally feel settled enough to discern truth and make decisions without a lot of personal doubt.

The effects of that war may be with me for the rest of my life.

What is a soul? Could a soul even exist, completely apart from our ability to sense and think and move?

Watching the film Cold Souls again, my mind spins into overtime. How could one even define a soul?

Would it have weight? Matter? Memory? Is it a read-only set of instructions for how to process feeling and emotion, or an alterable blueprint for a living being who grows and matures and changes with time?

Perhaps could it be merely a lens for interpreting the senses?

If it were a physical organ, where would it reside if not the brain? Would it be wrapped around and through us like DNA or is it an electrical charge that cannot be measured except as 'on' or 'off?'

Given a superstitious or religious context, does it live despite our bodies' state of life and death or does it expire or transfer when we expire?

If, in a Biblical context, are some pre-selected for certain tasks and/or privileges? If so, what would be the point of evangelizing? What would be the point of morality, and why would we ever need to 'do the right thing?'

If it is a lens, does it dull with time or wear? If a fabric, can it be mended, altered, or even designed? If a mere lobe of the brain, a databank of filters and memories, would information does it process, save, ignore?

If we are to live of free choice, and morality matters, surely there is nothing but to live and do well. If we are pre-selected or predisposed, surely there is nothing but to die as all do. If we are preprogrammed but with a capacity for change, should we not still live and do well, to the best of our capacity? Thus self-loathing is either of infinite or no importance, as is self love. As is masturbation, in both the literal and metaphorical senses.

For mankind, what then comes next?

And who needs a cigarette?

Thought I'd take a quick aside from the autobiography series to mention some additions to the site as a means of blog housekeeping. :)

In the top navigation of the site here, you can find all my social networking links if you'd like to follow me on Twitter, Google+, or Think Atheist. I've also had an About Me page put in there for a while which kinda summarizes my background. I might have to revisit that soon, but anyway, I digress...

The new additions to the site are the Ask Me Anything and FAQs pages.

On the Ask Me Anything page you can find my email address & a Formspring form for asking me questions, as this site grows its readership I want to allow readers to ask follow-up questions on the posts here, and I'll answer them either personally via email or here on the blog publicly, or both. Depends on the situation and my own discretion, really. 

The FAQs page, since I have yet to receive enough questions for a true FAQs section, currently has a page of information about my goals and motivations for this site and my writings, which hopefully will give some additional background for anyone new. I break those down into sections, like Identities/Security, Religion and Atheism, and Hatred and Reason, so that you can get a good idea of my goals for the project.

Also, I'm hoping to have a third autobiography post in this space sometime in the next day or so, depending on my ability to write and edit it in that time. We'll see. When that happens though, I'll add a Table of Contents page so newcomers can find their way through all of the autobiographical posts in chronological order easily. 

Anyhow, check out the new pages above and ask some questions if you'd like, I welcome any and all inquiries. 

Jackson

The following is post #2 of my true autobiography series. Some names/places/details have been changed or obscured to protect the innocent.

In a recent post on Google+, I linked to the news story below and mused on the fact that it’s a wonder something similar hadn’t happened in my family. That wasn’t an exaggeration.

Telling my side of that story is the easy part, though, considering my experience was on the tamer side compared to many of my siblings. Growing up, I was a favorite child for my parents, I figure not only because I was the youngest of their biological children, but likely because I was the one who was least likely to question them as parents and authority figures. Because of that, I was on the receiving end their discipline much less frequently than many of my siblings. 

Now, to back up and tell the whole story, I’m going to give some background, so bear with me. In my last post I referred to my upbringing as an orphanage experience, run by my parents, and that’s how I look at my experience now as an adult, but in reality, we described ourselves as a family, and even though I now have more or less completely dissolved my relationship with my parents, I still love and refer to all of my adopted siblings as my brothers and sisters, because that’s who they are to me.

I describe my upbringing as an orphanage though not because of how I view my siblings, but because of how we were treated by our parents. 

To be fair, I don’t believe they ever set out in the beginning of their marriage to have a large adoptive family. I’ve never had the chance to find out about that era in our family history, but to sum it up, my parents gave birth to my oldest brother a couple years after they were married, then to me a couple years after that. Not long after, from the way I remember being told about it, my dad had a vasectomy. 

I was probably only 4 or 5 when they first started taking in other children. One of the first was an older sister from South America, and the next was another younger one from the other side of the state, an infant girl from a drug-affected family who had undergone some major neglect and abuse in her short time on earth. 

From there, it spread like wildfire.

Looking back, I can see that my parents were not growing a family so much as collecting children in the name of God. Even counting all of the children that are still considered part of the family (about 15 of us), it’s probably not even half of the complete number of kids who have come through my parents’ guardianship over the years. There were children they took in that they planned to adopt who ended up being re-placed back with their original families or extended families, foster children, problem children who ended up being placed in specialized care, foreign exchange students from China & Japan, a Russian refugee family who had about 6 children of their own, and even in recent years they took guardianship of some of their adopted children’s kids for a while. The kids came in twos and threes and even 4 at a time once. 

Why so many? My parents believed that as long as they had a home, it was their God-given responsibility to provide a home for any child they could. They’d receive a phone call saying that a child was in need of placement, and sometimes they’d even go pick them up that night or the next day. In much the manner of the Catholic missionaries of old moving into tribal areas to "save the primitives" my parents loved the praise and adoration that was heaped on them when they'd parade us all one by one into a new church.

At our peak, I think our family had maybe 18 or 20 kids living in our home at once, in about 5 bedrooms. Bunkbeds were commonplace in our home, and we usually had large, open rooms that we used as bedrooms that often fit multiple bunkbed sets in each. Sometimes kids even shared beds, but suffice it to say, no child of theirs ever had their own bedroom, or at least not for long. As one of their favorites, I think I had my own room when I was in my late teens for a short while, but beyond that it was pretty rare.

In the house that we lived in for about 13-15 years, we had a lot of space. There was a large swimming pool and brick barbecue in the back yard, and a small grass field behind that for us to run and play in, all fenced off and with tall hedges surrounding it. The adjoining garage was converted into a dining room/school room, where we ate all our meals and did all of our school work. The attic had also been converted into living space, with a long hall for beds (usually for us boys) and an office space for my dad, who worked from home as a photographer. The basement had also been converted, with a semi-hidden food pantry, a long dormitory hall for the girls, and a darkroom.

In that house lie some of my worst memories. 

Memories like my mom punishing me by making me run up and down a set of stairs over and over while hitting me with a baseball bat every time I came back up to the top of the stairs. Memories like one of my sisters refusing to eat rotten eggs, being forced to eat them anyway, then being made to eat her own sick after she vomited from it. Memories like one of my sisters who was born with Spina Bifida being made to walk endlessly with her walker up and down the sidewalk in front of our house, despite how tired or sore she was from being beaten, as though somehow her condition would improve and miraculously she'd learn to walk without the aid of prosthetics. She was also spanked and hit any time she came down with bladder infections, as though it were her fault they were more common with her condition. She frequently had marks on her hands and legs and back from all the neglect and abuse, and I think all of us were glad when she was moved to another home for special needs children, knowing that she was probably in a better place. 

There’s much more I could talk about, like all the fights my father would start with my younger brother who had very poor anger management to begin with due to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Or I could talk about my adopted siblings of darker skin color who were treated as sub-standard by our racist mother. Or how any time any of us would disagree with our parents we were cut off from the family, with one time in particular my dad flying one of my teenaged siblings down to Mexico and abandoning her there.

The lack of safety didn’t stop with just the threats from my parents though. I remember the fights I used to have with my one brother, we’d fight as hard as we could as often as we could, one time in the heat of a particularly brutal fight I even took a wrench to his head a few times before we were broken up. I’m sure he would have done the same to me if I hadn’t gotten to it first. Another foster kid they took in was older than me by a few years, and thus much stronger, and got his kicks by basically beating me every chance he got, whenever the parents weren’t looking. It took a while, but eventually they had him sent to a different home. Last I heard, he was in juvenile hall. 

Illness and injury was also a major threat. In all of my childhood, I don’t remember ever having health insurance. My parents didn’t believe in it. Some of my siblings were covered, as foster and adopted children are often covered by the state, but despite that some of them never got the care they needed. Broken bones went untreated, left to heal with time. When I once broke a finger playing basketball, rather than take me to a doctor my mom just went to a drugstore and bought me a finger splint. When my teeth were going way out of alignment due to my thumb-sucking as a small child, I had a small set of braces for a little while, but when my orthodontist advised getting headgear to properly correct major misalignments, my parents talked me out of it, saying I wouldn't want to have to deal with the embarrassment of prosthetics. In my adolescence, I remember a period of a couple months when I had recurring sharp pains in my abdomen, almost constantly. No amount of crying or complaining led me to medical attention. Eventually it went away...

Today though, not all of us are that lucky. Even now I know of a couple chronic injuries my siblings have that could have prevented with proper care many years ago. I somehow found out that as an infant I was treated for some kind of foot/ankle injury, but they never would tell me what for. None of us as adults have been given any medical records from our childhood. 

In all honesty, I think those experiences have made us more resilient. Our lives have gone on, and we do what we can to carve out a life and a living with what little education we had. Some of us cling to each other and hang out often, some of us prefer to never speak. 

One semi-fond personal memory of that time that probably sums things up best was from when I was probably about 12 or so, talking with some of the more older siblings about which of our parents was worse in terms of the harshest discipline. 

The consensus was unanimous: our mom was quicker to anger and spanked us much harder than dad. As we were discussing, our dad walked in and announced he was leaving the house for some sort of work errand, and asked what we were talking about. Without hesitating, I said “we love you just the way you are!” and everyone burst into laughter. 

From that day on, I knew that whenever possible I always wanted to make people smile.

Jackson

The following is post #1 of my true autobiography series. Some names/places/details have been changed or obscured to protect the innocent.

I grew up in a super-religious family. A super-religious, large family (10+ kids). A super-religious, large, home-schooling family. Honestly, I could go on like this for a bit, so let me run it all together for you now...

I grew up in a super-religious, evangelical Christian, large, adoptive, home-schooling, school-bus-driving, mixed-race family.

Now that I'm older though, I just tell people I was raised in a cultish, abusive and neglectful Christian orphanage run by a man and his wife, who happened to be my parents. That's the most honest truth about my upbringing as I can give in a nutshell.

Admittedly, my formative years were atypical, even by Christian standards. Growing up, I remember seeing "normal" Christian families at our church, with only a couple or few kids, a Mom, a Dad, riding in a sedan or station wagon, going to school, attending things like soccer practice and so on, and wishing I had their life. For years growing up, I remember going to my parents and crying because I had no friends, no one to talk to. Not only was I home-schooled, but frequently our family would go from church to church so I rarely had regular friends to hang out with. I would play basketball at the hoop in our driveway and talk to myself because I had no one else.

What did my parents do? Eventually they adopted a brother close to my age so we could be friends. He and I fought a lot, almost all through our teenage years.

Anyhow, by the time I was in my later teens, we had kinda settled at one church where I was finally able to have friends, be active in my church's youth group, go on missions trips to Mexico, and more or less feel "normal." I had joined the youth group's leadership, was involved in a church-related drama group that put on Christian productions, and was driving on my own, even if it was the family van. I was high on Jesus, my family, my friends, and my new-found freedoms. My only problem was I didn't know what to do with them.

Educationally speaking, I was home-schooled all the way through high school. The curriculum, as you can imagine, was heavy on the creationism, patriotism, and "Christian Nation"-ism, and low on any of the facts. The only good parts of learning at home was that I learned to do things like multiplication and division in my head, and I learned to love reading.

Reading was my only escape for a long time until I got into music. I read everything I could get my hands on, which wasn't much due to my parents' steady censoring watch. Tintin comics, Hardy Boys mysteries, the Chronicles of Narnia series... I loved being buried in books, just so long as they didn't have any sorcery, witchcraft, or rebellious tones in them because those were forbidden. In fact, the above three series can pretty much sum up my reading list until my teen years when I was given Frank Peretti novels to pore over.

I absolutely loved Christian music. It started with DC Talk, Newsboys, Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant... you probably know the names. Eventually I got into the "good stuff," the independent Christian rock scene, where pop-punk heavyweights like MxPx ruled and Jesus became just an occasional reference.

Now, I'm mentioning the reading and the music for a couple reasons. First, my family for many years did not own a television, so for much of the 80's and 90's I was almost completely out of the loop in regards to actual pop music and culture in general. Michael Jackson was just a name I had heard - I didn't actually get to hear any of his music until my late 20's. I probably could have looked him up before then, just never did. That's just the tip of the iceberg though... there's still lots about those decades I'm still learning as I go through life - things I never got to experience that were a part of everyone else's existence.

Secondly, I'm mentioning my music and reading influences because of my educational background as well. When you're home-schooled, live at home, have no friends, no job, and all of your culture influences have been culled from a very short list of approved subject matters, you quickly find yourself with no frame of reference for how to actually live in modern society when you're released into the wild. That is my life. 

Out of high school, I attended a prominent Bible college in the mid-west for one year, then dropped out. Living in the dorms was quite an eye-opening and life-changing experience. Sure, we had to wear dress shirts and ties every day to class, attend church every week and chapel services twice a week, not to mention the required Bible/Christian Living-type courses, but all of a sudden I found myself living in a hall with guys who would be my friend, and who listened to some amazing secular music and watched fascinating and hilarious films and TV shows. Films like Austin Powers and shows like Seinfeld and even Friends seemed so amazing to me at the time, I watched all of them that I could, even every re-run marathon no matter if I'd seen them before. I'd go to the movie rental place by the Wal-Mart across the street and rent any and every movie I could find, no matter how sick, depraved, or horrifying its cover looked.

Still, I had no idea how to actually live.

When I left Bible college (more on that experience in future posts I'm sure), I was still absolutely clueless on how to behave, how to eat, shop, date, anything of substance, really. I ate fast food all the time. I held down a job, somehow, probably because it was the only thing that gave me purpose. Money makes the world go round. I took out loans and signed up for credit cards that I then maxed out and was left unable to pay on. I'd get home from work and just watch TV or movies, or occasionally go see friends I already knew. Meeting new people was completely out of the picture. I had absolutely no idea how to date, much less treat women. All throughout my teen years I'd get boners in bed and never knew what to do about them. Literally. I didn't even figure out how to masturbate until about 21. 

Somehow, I thought everyone lived this way, and more, that that was the ideal way to live. 

In my first apartment where I lived by myself, I would sit and be lonely and not have any idea how to solve that problem. But it wasn't until my job fell out on me and I got laid off that things really started getting bad. What I didn't know then was that things needed to get bad before they could get good. 

The long and the short of it was that I went completely broke, and with no money coming in I lost my car and my apartment. Not to worry, things never got so bad that I was homeless, as I was still in the good graces of my parents, so I went to live back home for a few months until I could get back on my feet. 

Thus began the 'WikiLeaks' moment that Started It All.

When I first moved back in with my parents, they had moved again. Now, when my family moved, they never did it for a good reason, they did it because they were running from something or someone. More on that later I'm sure as well. Anyhow, the house they lived in now was new to me. My mom loved it because it looked like a doll house with a porch and was painted in what can best be described as fairy tale colors. I swear, I'm not making this up. I've seen Barbie doll house sets that looked much more normal than this place. The downside, though was that this house barely had enough room for the kids who lived with them. At this time, about 10 or 12 of the kids still lived with them, all packed into 4 bedrooms, with the guys, myself included, in a non-bedroom in the basement.

So, I was stuck in a room, in bunk beds, with my brothers, down in a rat-infested basement. Frequently I complained to my parents about the sleepless nights with rodents scampering around us, only to be ignored. On a daily basis, my parents began yelling at me for not having a job, telling me I needed to sue the bastards responsible, that declaring bankruptcy was NOT an option (despite my complete lack of income, inability to find a job in the small town they now lived in, and debts that had long since defaulted). I wasn't the only target for their hate, though. They yelled at my siblings, but mostly the ones they didn't like, while still pampering the ones they did. Those graces, apparently, I had fallen away from. I wasn't even that rebellious. I'd gotten my ears pierced, but otherwise had no strange tendencies or rebellious behaviors. I was still a Bible-believing straight-shooter and tried to do the right thing, so I didn't understand what had gone wrong.

At this point in my family's history, they had also finally come around to owning a TV, and had become hooked on Fox News. Day in and day out, the calls for justice against the Iraqis and Osama bin Laden rang out, and they cheered seeing bombs dropping live on TV in places like Afghanistan and Baghdad. They cried martyr, claiming some kind of oppression against them from gays and liberals and hippies and atheists. The hate that spewed was non-stop, and any time I asked them to tone it down or questioned their motivations, I was treated like a sick animal, with looks wondering what had possibly gone so wrong with my life. 

Finally, after almost 6 months of this, I had seen and heard enough. I was determined to try and turn the situation around. My siblings and parents fought both verbally and physically all the time, often enough with my parents starting the fights, determined to know this information or lay down that new law. Finally, I was going to speak out, only I didn't know how. 

Out of a need to get all of my thoughts out, without being interrupted or misinterpreted, I sat down and typed them up a heartfelt letter one night, and left it on my dad's desk for them to read before I left, going out for the day with friends. Upon my return, my life would turn upside down. 

My letter told them how all I saw from them was hate, how I was raised to believe that God is love, and we should treat people with kindness and respect. I told them how I didn't feel I could talk to them, how I was embarrassed to see them this way, how I was sad to see my siblings treated this way, how I didn't feel safe with rats running around me at night. 

When I returned from my friends' place the next morning (I'd been helping them move and ended up staying over. I wasn't even out partying!), they told me they were heading out to church, and they'd left me a brief letter as well. I went down to the basement and read it quickly while they were preparing to leave. It said, quite succinctly, I needed to leave the house right away, that I was no longer welcome. I walked back upstairs in time to see my mom walking out the door.

She turned and looked at me, began to cry, and just said "have a nice life," then shut the door behind her. While they were gone, I panicked, stressed, and ended up calling my oldest brother, who lived a state away, and he ended up driving all the way over that afternoon to pick me up to live with him for a while. He understood completely.

...And that's what started it all. At the time, I don't think I would have told anyone or even thought to myself that I'd ever not be a Christian later in life, much less claim atheism, but that's the domino that started it all. Looking back, it was probably inevitable that something like that would happen, and there were plenty of doubts that came before and after then, but that was the single life event that launched me probably irrevocably on this trajectory. 

In the coming weeks and months, I hope to tell more of this story, both going back before this event and sharing what came after. To find out why, read my about me page and my why tell the story? post. To put it concisely, I hope only that it gives someone else hope, that good things can come from bad circumstances, and that hate does not always win.

Also, I hope you'll come back to read more.

Jackson

Later this weekend I plan to begin adding my first autobiographical posts to the blog here, but first I wanted to write some more briefly about why I want to tell my story.

Personally, it took a lot of years and a lot of relatability for the message of skepticism to get through. For instance, I remember hearing, for example, people like Bill Maher and other comedians and sociopolitical figures make vast, sweeping statements about religion and Christianity for years before I even stopped to consider the possibility for my own adult self that my beliefs were based on an awful lot of lies. These statements were mostly written and delivered for laughs or quotability - just sound bytes for the cause of atheism, and thus I always just considered them the same as me, a believer, but in their case a believer in a lie. 

However, I mentioned Bill Maher above mostly because his film Religulous was a strong influence on my finally being able to reject my faith for good. Now, by the time that movie came out in theatres I had already been out of the church for some time, but my beliefs had been nagging... Could I take that final step and abandon them for good? What I saw in that film was a lot of what I'd been used to before, but with a twist this time: context. In the film, I got to see Bill cracking jokes, making fun, and in between all of that, he was telling his own story, having honest discussions and backing up his statements with fact. It was those stories and facts that stuck with me. 

That's really a sense of what I hope to provide here: not an encyclopedia of cold, hard facts that prove once and for all that anyone and everyone should leave their beliefs behind (There's plenty of people that do that already, and they're for the most part better equipped than I anyhow.) and not an endless series of one-liners that you can already find here and there all over the Internet already, but a serious, heartfelt-but-still-well-reasoned examination of why and how I ended up a free-thinking skeptic and agnostic atheist. A story with context, relatability and above all, honesty.

The story will seem disjointed at times I'm sure, and my facts may not always be bulletproof - I'm still learning too - but I do intend for this to be an honest and respectful place where people of any belief system might be able to find new ways of thinking about the world, new ways of approaching problems, and new outlooks for making things better. If I'm somehow able to help make any of those things happen for even one person, I'll feel like it was worth it.

In the meantime, please check out my just-posted about page and say hi using one or all of my social media links above. I'm here to talk, but I'm not here to make enemies, so if you're here to spew venom, I'll just ask you to move on.

If you have a thought about something I've written that you think I really ought to know about, do get in touch!

Hope to see you around...

Jackson

In the video below Philip Plait (aka Bad Astronomer) talks about the human aspects of being an advocate for skepticism and science to believers of religion, mysticism and fantasy. It's not really a new video, except that it is new to me, but I wanted to share it because I feel like the point still needs to be made today. He's speaking directly to skeptics here, encouraging them basically, as you can see from the title below, to Don't Be a Dick. 

Personally, this is something I know I've struggled with, and still see others struggling with, but I feel like in essence it all comes down to my (or our) approach to these conversations/situations. More on my own thoughts below the fold... If you're a skeptic/atheist and have yet to see the video below, take a half hour and check it out, then read on below.

Read the rest of this post »

Evangelical Christian Rick Perry graduated college with a 2.2 GPA in Animal Science and he wants to be President?

So far, his biggest qualifications for being a candidate seem to be that he's rich, he's white, he's good-looking and he's Christian. None of those should make him a candidate for President.

Read this article by Dahr Jamail on Al Jazeera for the full story.

I was brought up to think that the word godless was spared only for describing reprobates and the scum of society.

Now that I'm grown up I spare the word godless for describing my ideals and my heroes.

Penn makes a good point in this video... if atheists are to ever be able to make progress in society or even politics, we should be the calmer ones, less petty and desperate. So much of what I see shared online are knee-jerk reactions, which, while atheism is in the minority much of what we do will be reactionary, more often that not the best reaction is one that is proactive - seeking to eliminate the injustice before it happens, and not reacting emotionally or in a hyperactive mindset when new injustices happen.