re: #172 AK-47%

My mom was fairly un-dogmatic about it, but she sent me to Sunday school and the whole nine yards.

I still remember one day when the Monsignior came to visit us and our Sister got down on her knees to kiss his ring. This was the time of Martin Luther King and civil rights and equality, and I decided that a scene like that had nothing to do with being an American and pretty much just ignored it all from then on.

My upbringing was very non-dogmatic. Sunday school - but at the UU church my mother attended. My father was non-practicing Catholic and was probably pretty much an atheist at that point I think. It’s just not something we discussed as a family.

And it didn’t come up much among my friends and social set. Mostly RC, but no one was overtly forward about it. Ran into a few evangelicals in high school, but they came across as odd.

So I had a pretty simple “live and let live” attitude up until college. That was were I got exposed to nut-job “our way or burn” types. And the lack of pushback towards them from their fellows was what started me down the road towards default suspicion about religions and their agendas. Helped along by reading further history at an adult level and getting knowledge in greater detail on the abuses and such carried out in $diety’s name. (With the later decision was that this in essence was actually just the cover story for abuse and murder for the sake of control and keeping power.)