Why I Am An Angry Atheist
(I never was a JW, but the basics were not so different).
I was brought up (raised, for my US friends) in an off-shoot of the Plymouth Brethren Gospel Hall culture. Not as extreme as the Exclusive Brethren but not far removed. No clergy – every brother was expected to be a Bible Scholar – (not sisters, of course) and it’s not surprising that within a couple of years of their foundation in the 1860s they’d split into factions which would never speak to each other again, each convinced that they –and only they – had the ‘Truth’.
I knew none of this at the time, of course, nor that the time of their foundation (1860s-ish) coincided with the foundation of so many other sects/cults.
My earliest recollections, from the age of 3 or 4, are of Sunday morning ‘meeting’, Sunday afternoon ‘Sunday School’ and Sunday evening ‘Gospel Meetings’ in the Gospel Hall.
At the front of the hall, painted as a scroll on the wall in gold and green, were the words ‘God Is Love’. And we sat under that as we listened (mornings) to the thunder of the OT and (evenings) to the NT hoping that some poor soul would come forward to ‘be saved’. That generally didn’t happen apart from the poor disturbed bloke who got ‘saved’ regularly every week or two.
That was back in the 1960s. In the 1970s we moved geographically to a Welsh (English language) Baptist church. The theology was similar, but now there were ‘educationally qualified’ preachers, ‘the Rev Dr xxxxxx’ etc. doing the preaching. These were people who had been to university, studied biblical history and so on.
In the pre-internet days I started to study (as best I could) the history of the Bible, etc. It didn’t take long, even in those days, before there were more questions than answers.
I remember a conversation with an aged Church of England priest. He didn’t believe a word of it but was comfortable in the overall pattern.
Now, I am angry because I know that those people (almost exclusively men) who had studied KNEW (or at least had grave doubts about) that they weren’t preaching the ‘truth’. From the ‘nativity’ stories back to OT stories, and ultimately back to the ‘6,000 year old world’ as taught in Genesis they knew it wasn’t true and yet they insisted on teaching it to us.
Recently, I was putting my grand-daughter (5) to bed and we were having our bed-time story. Someone had given her a book of bible stories. We opened it – she discarded it as ‘crap’. Instead, we read a Princess Barbie (or something) story which she can, thankfully, recognise as pure fantasy.
I am angry because it took me so long to recognise the twaddle being fed to me. I am more angry because those who fed it to me knew better but chose not to. No excuse, I think.