Growing up without god, but not without a rich fantasy world. [View all]

[Warren Stupidity]

When I was four my best friend in the whole world (BFF but that didn't exist yet) was another four year old down the street, Sally. We were inseparable. I would get up in the morning and walk down the hill to her house and we would spend the rest of the day in our make believe world of four year old play.

On reflection, what a different world the early 50's were. At the age of four I could walk out the house and down the road to a neighbor's house. Unattended. On my own.

It was around this time that my mom made me a cat costume for Halloween, and for the next few months I pretty much wore that costume every day. On with the costume, and I was a black cat.

I was raised an atheist. There was no god in my family. No church. No temple. No indoctrination. I was aware that other families had this thing we didn't have. They went to church, they believed in "jesus". I remember being taken to church one Sunday by another neighbor, I guess as an experience my parents thought I should have. I recall thinking it was quite boring, as I'm sure every other child in attendance also felt. We celebrated a secular Christmas and Easter. My dad was raised Catholic, my mom was raised Jewish, but they had both lost their religion in the crucible of the Great Depression and WWII. They had set out to raise their children without god and so they did, but they always made it clear to all of us that religion was a choice one could make.

One evening I was over at Sally's house and we were playing up in her room. It was getting near bed time, and she was determined to show me what she did before bed every night: she prayed to god. And so she got on her knees, her elbows on her bed, and started having a fervent conversation with nobody. Until then I didn't really get what religion was. Then I did. It was make believe, it was like what happened when I put on my cat costume, or when Sally and I invented fantasy worlds in the tree house in her yard. The only thing was, for Sally this wasn't make believe. I grasped that she thought she was talking to somebody real.

That moment has stayed with me for almost 60 years.