Specifically, what has causes disappointment in God?
It’s not God I reject. I’m agnostic. Here is why. Cousin Butchie!
I am not ignoring the influence that Christianity contributed to the founding of America. And I have nothing to do with subverting religion.
Many of the Founding Fathers admired the historical Jesus as an enlighten teacher but no more. They subdivided into Deists, Unitarians etc . Jefferson and Adams for sure rejected the Holy Trinity of Christendom.
I was married in a Unitarian Church. I attended the Unitarian Congregation where I grew up. The Unitarians and Quakers were the only churches that officially came out against the war in Vietnam that I could find.
My religious views were formed from as young as I can remember through high school at the peak of casualties on both sides of the Vietnam War.
I was baptized newly born Protestant Christian in a Lutheran Church.
I never attended Catechism which I was reminded by my mother my entire life.
Around the age of ten I was the second oldest in a family of six kids. We lived in a former old wooden office building in a rural area that was converted into a duplex. My paternal grandparents lived in the other half. My Grandmother was extremely religious as typical in a farming community during the 1950’s. She raised Irish and Gordon Setters, hunting and show dogs. I worked for my grandmother feeding and watering dogs and cleaning the pens and kennels. My grandmother never showed any kindness or gentleness toward me.
I do not know why but I would not go as a young child to church. My Grandmother expected that older brothers and sister and they went. I refused and succeeded in convincing my mom and dad that I did not need to go to church with my grandmother or attend Sunday school.
I loved the woods and nature in the thousands of acres of wild game preserve that surrounded my home. I loved wild animals and the dogs I took care of. I explored every inch of it. I had a cousin, Butch. A year younger than me. Butchie visited often and every Sunday dressed in a jacket and tie and went to church with Grandma. He was her pride and joy.
Trouble was Butchie provided me with my first concept of what an asshole was.
In the woods my friends and I spent much time building forts and tree houses. A Tom Sawyer dream. My cousin led a gang that hunted down our forts and knocked them down. One day they showed up while we were there. They brought buckets of rocks from the roadway a mile away. There were no rocks in the woods. They threw rocks at us so we picked them up and threw them back. I watched one stone I threw fly in a perfect arc toward the spot when Butchie popped up and it hit him square on the forehead. Bleeding and screaming he ran back to grandma. I thought I killed him, but from that point on any chance that I would not burn in Godless hell was over in my cold grandmother’s eyes.,
Around that time I rescued a rejected puppy born in the winter and the only puppy in a rare litter of one. He was all black. A mix somehow. I fed him with a bottle dropper and watched Blacky grie into a beautiful strong little puppy. I assumed he would be mine. WRONG. Butchie said he wanted the puppy and I guess the puppy was not going to be raised in an unchristian home.
One day, I went to my cousins house and found Butch and his buddies throwing my dog off a twenty foot high bridge. I got my dog took him home and kept him as my dog.
My parents got divorced years later, moved to the city. My Grandmother died rather young, never asked why, and then sometime after that Butchie was killed around the age of 13 14 thrown from the back of pickup truck that failed to make a curve at high speed. I didn’t mind at all that Grandma’s God took him.
My religious views resurfaced a few years later when the Vietnam War was on TV and I ended up reading about that foreign land and people and it led to an interest in religion.
I studied on my own and read all I could find. I searched for answers to what religion meant to others and myself. My interests led me at one point to religion and war. That led to reading about Buddhism, Gandhi and Tolstoy, MLK and what Jesus said in the Bible.
I worked as dishwasher at 14, then my mom was getting married to a man I could not tolerate. I moved out at fifteen and have worked and paid my way through high school and signed my own grade cards forging my fathers name. I worked after school all through high school
At 17 a 1964 s Pontiac LeMans hit me on my motorcycle head on. It’s fault. I survived all that and at twenty I was married and my first of three daughters were born.
My religious views resurfaced a few years later when the Vietnam War was on TV and I ended up reading about that foreign land and people and it led to an interest in religion
My reading about religion and war was on and off but over time I started a notebook cutting and pasting Quotes from the people I read about. Jesus’ sermon on the mount was in that booklet. A photo of a Buddhist Monk setting himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War,
Then after cutting and pasting from the Bible myself I came across the Jefferson Bible
My natural religion was settled, My appreciation for the works of Jesus was fine. I did not have to believe in anything else about him that my Christian Grandmother wanted.
I’m not anti-Christian at all. I’m just opposed to coercion from anyone or organization telling me what to think about God.
But to come here to make the case that America was not founded as a Christian Nation, nor should it be one, I am regarded as a Jesus hating atheist commie troll.
If no one cares about how one’s life experiences determines one’s views about religion, I am fine with putting it on the record just to show how strong my life’s philosophy and Intuition about religion truly is.
