King sns
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- Nov 4, 2008
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Most of us started off believing in Santa and ghosts. And then there was that moment that said... maybe not. Not necessarily comparing the two, but I think there are parallels for non-believers.
For me, it was considering the idea that maybe the afterlife is wrong (this started in roughly 5th grade). It terrified me (I stayed up for hours on end tormenting over it, before realizing how much of a non-concern non-existence really is months or years later), but I couldn't find any evidence that afterlife existed or was plausible.
But the reasons doubt starts are legion (no religious implication intended). Perhaps you saw that there are many religions, and no one could be right. Maybe you felt the moral ideals of the whatever text were dubious. Maybe the concept of God was suspect. Maybe you felt that the answers in your religion were wrong scientifically or didn't add up. Maybe you saw people using religion for oppositional reasons. Maybe some religious story was just silly to you. Maybe you saw darkness in the world God shouldn't allow. Or someone told you AIDS was God's punishment and that didn't sit right. Hell, maybe your parents didn't believe to begin with.
So non-believers. What was that first little nougat of questioning that blossomed into your current ideology?
It wasn't a thought, more of a feeling. I was about 18 and the change from Catholicism to Agnosticism was about as dramatic as someone who has been heterosexual for years and then all of a sudden comes out of the closet. I just couldn't physically live a lie anymore. I have always been that way, though. I just have trouble with strong conviction. I remember being 3 and 4 years old and looking at the wrapping papers on my gifts and thinking, "This paper is the same stuff that my mom uses. He writes "love santa" in the same way that my mom would write "love Santa"... I remember inspecting the gifts every time and just trying to fathom a guy fitting in a chimney. Yeah, we had a chimney in the main part of the house, but it was so small. It would make more sense to just come through the front door.... My mother kept insisting that he comes through the chimney, but I just kept saying that he would have to come through the front door. I also pictured all the reindeer walking down the street. It wouldn't make sense for him to fly from roof to roof, given how close every neighbor was, the take off and the landing, and most people didn't have a chimney, so he would have to actually climb off the roof and go in the door anyways. In neighborhoods it would just make more sense to walk around- only flying when you hit a more rural area where houses are farther apart or if you needed to head out over long stretches. (All thoughts that I had over 4, 5, 6 years old-) and then when I was 7 at Easter I just said, "Mom, there is no Easter Bunny, tooth fairy, or Santa, is there???"
And so my thought process was for every unproven, magical and mystical thing that I came across through my whole life. So at 18, one day I just said, "yeah I'm actually an agnostic, it's just who I am." A whole bunch of thoughts and feelings and aversion to strong belief carrying me to the sudden grand conclusion.