| Title: | One of those defining moments |
| Posted On: | 2008-02-13 11:42:04 |
It's amazing what you can remember sometimes. Considering I can barely rememeber what I did last week, last month, last year.. remembering something in such vivid detail from when I was around 2 years old is fuckin' amazing. But it's also one of those important moments in life, where something happens that really defines a part of who you are; a part that will stay with you and never change. It's like, you have your life before this one moment, and your life after this one moment.
I'm willing to bet not too many 2 year olds have had many of those.
Despite all the bullshit that I was put through with my parents, there's one thing that I have to give them credit for, and that's never lying to me and teaching me how bad lying was. I was never told about santa claus or the easter bunny or the tooth fairy or any of that shit; I was very much grounded in reality from day 1 when it came to all the bullshit people tell kids to give them some "magic" in their childhood.
when I was 2-3 years old (though probably closer to 2) my mother was back working and my dad worked also, and rather than send me off to strangers to be babysat, my grandmother (father's mother) would babysit me every day. She'd taught me to read by the time I was 2, and not just kids books, I could read the newspaper (though I had to ask what a lot of words were, and didn't always understand the stories, I could read most of the words)
So, she wanted to move me on to something else to read, which she figgured was something better suited to a young child, and that was the bible. I remember her reading to me every day parts from her little leather-bound bible with those ultra-thin gold-edged pages.
Then we got to jesus, and the miracles he performed. I specifically remember the one about how he spit in the dirt to make some mud, rubbed it on the eyes of a blind man, and it made him see again. I remember asking my grandmother how that was possible, and why don't people do that for everyone that was blind, and she answered with the typical "god works in mysterious ways" crap that really means "well, I don't know, but the bible says it so it must be true".
I remember asking a lot of questions about the god, jesus, and the miracles that could be preformed, and asking why, if god loved us so much, doesn't he just make everyone better and just remove dissease and blindness and things like that from existance, and the answeres just didn't make sense.
That's the distinct moment that I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that religion and the concept of an all-knowing, all-loving, caring god was a complete crock of shit, and that god was just santa claus for adults who are too old to believe in imaginary friends.
