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April 17, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:18
716 My History with Religion
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Good afternoon, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. 1710 on the 17th of April 2000.
And set! And I wanted to talk...
I had an interesting IM conversation today.
Sorry, I had to cut it short. I was at work.
But somebody was asking me about whether I'd ever been religious.
Of course, it's an interesting question.
I guess I've never rambled on about it before, but I thought it might be an interesting topic.
To talk about my history with religion.
Because I did not pop from my mother's hellish womb fully primed to be a materialist.
There was a hop, skip, and a jump from where I started to where I ended up.
So I thought that maybe I would talk a little bit about the journey.
I think it's not an uncommon journey.
I think that I was probably exposed to a fair number of different idea sets when I was younger.
And the first real religious thought or sentiment that I can have, sort of odd, it's associated with a Cliff Richard song, which dates me, oh God, almost back to the Neolithic age, which was Power to All Our Friends, almost back to the Neolithic age, which was Power to All Our Friends, or I think it's Power to the People, Power to All Power, to all our friends, to the music I really liked the song, though I haven't heard it in donkey's years.
I should try and find it. And I was in an attic, and I was playing, I can't even remember what, it's very shady, a very hazy memory.
I was very, very young, maybe three, three and a half years old, maybe four.
And I was playing in an attic, and I was humming that song to myself.
And suddenly I felt this very bizarre kind of coldness.
Kind of chill in the air.
And I had been taken to church and I had learned about God.
And my aunts are very religious, though my father was not at the time.
We'll get into that a little more later if it's of interest to you.
And I had a belief in God, or a belief in a higher power, just because when you're a kid everything looks big and the adults are close to God themselves, so it's not that big of a leap.
But I was humming this to this song to myself.
And playing away.
And I suddenly felt a very strange kind of chill just settle around me.
And I felt that there was this enormous cold, cold, cold, cold eye that was watching me.
And I felt that the eye was...
It wasn't glaring, because I wasn't significant enough for that eye to glare.
I was just a little kid, but it was sort of staring idly and coldly at me.
And I felt very strongly this feeling that it was God or the song.
It was God or the song.
I couldn't have both.
Then if I liked the song, God didn't like that I liked the song, because there was nothing of God in it.
I mean, I knew hymns and so on.
If I liked the song, then God would not like that I liked the song.
So I had to choose between the song that I was humming And this big, vaguely distant, chilly eye that I felt in...
I mean, it's not like I didn't feel it in the room like I turned around and looked, but I just sort of felt.
It was more like a... I mean, I never would have used these words as a kid, but it was more like a mental space that I was experiencing.
And for me, it then became very clear, though I made no decision, but it became very clear that to love the things of this world, a pop song that gives you pleasure to hum, to love the things of this world was to be unloved by God.
Now, I didn't get hated.
I didn't get a sense of sin.
I didn't get a sense of badness.
I just got a sense of vague, dreary, infinite contempt.
But not active contempt, just yawning, yeah, yeah, yeah, kind of contempt from this cold eye.
And if I were to try and identify the first break that I had with the religion, it would definitely have been in that attic when I was about three years old, playing away.
Now, my very first memory in life was of, oh gosh, I must have been very young, two to two and a half, perhaps.
I was sitting on...
So this was before the cold eye in the attic.
I was sitting... On a carpet.
And I was so young that I couldn't even...
I don't know. I mean, it's so hard to place, right?
You have no idea when you're young how distant and dreamy this stuff gets when you get up in years.
I mean, I'm 40, whatever, right?
And... I was so young and felt helpless.
I may have been younger than two years because I distinctly remember not being able to get up and walk.
I should have been walking by two, two and a half.
I'm pretty sure I was.
I don't think I had anything that was particularly backwards.
And I was sitting on the ground.
I had some blocks or something like that.
And my brother was just sort of dancing around me in this mad, taunting manner.
And he was chanting over and over and over.
It literally felt like a broken record.
He was chanting over and over and over again.
Stephen is a baby!
Stephen is a baby!
You know, in that horrible...
Just teeth-gritting, nail-scratching, whiny, sing-song, irritating, taunting voice that children have.
I very strongly remember that as my very first memory.
Just thinking about it now, the cold and contemptuous I that disliked me humming a song It could very well have been a memory of this early indication with my brother.
And it was significant in this dream, or sorry, in this memory, in this early memory, that I had no, there was no parent around, there was no adult figure around, and this sort of taunting, and I was unable to get away, and it was taunting that was just going on forever and ever.
And I think that that was sort of my first exposure to power, right?
To power. I was helpless to get away.
I was a toddler, if that.
Barely out of infancy, my brother was a couple of years older, dancing around, focused heavily on taunting me into sort of a state of mad frustration.
You know, it's incredibly frustrating to have this kind of repetitive repetition going on in your ear.
And, I mean, imagine if I just did Stephanie as a baby, like over and over for like 40 minutes and you couldn't turn the podcast off.
Hey, maybe podcast 1000 is beginning to make shape in my head.
But that was certainly my experience with power and helplessness.
And I think, for me, conceptually, I was not able to reach power.
Beyond that experience, that experience with my brother, sort of the teasing and the taunting and the frustration.
There was this hot sense of frustration running all the way through my body.
Helplessness and frustration and anger.
And I think that it's sort of hard when your first experience with authority or power or whatever you want to call it is of being completely helpless.
And having this sort of crazy child taunting you when you're helpless, it's sort of hard for me, like sort of thinking back in now, it would have been pretty hard for me to reach beyond that experience to find a benevolent God in the heavens that I could seriously respect and think was the best thing since sliced bread and so on and so on and so on.
So, for me, it was that that was the pinnacle of authority.
I have very few memories of my mother when I was very young, and she certainly hit a catastrophic depression, postpartum depression, after I was born, and was in hospital for months and just couldn't get out of bed.
This was a real salvation for me, of course, because...
I was handed over to a nanny who was very affectionate and she ended up naming her child after me, as I've mentioned before, so I had a real bonding experience with a nanny that did not occur.
My brother fell prey to my mother and I was, you know, my mother had a certain Almost kind of self-destructive salvation habit with me in that when I hit puberty, she self-destructed, which was probably the best thing for me.
And she also self-destructed after I was born, which got me into the hands of a loving nanny and this and that and the other.
So there was a real benefit to that.
Because those first couple of months are very, very essential when it comes to bonding, eye contact, physical affection, being treated with all the gentleness that an infant requires, that has an enormous impact on life overall, on your emotional cognitive development.
So that's a big difference.
I also have a theory that I was the result of an affair, which of course is lost to history, lost to time, and I'm never going to bother getting a DNA test, because it doesn't really matter.
But I certainly don't look anything like old daddy.
And my father certainly had an affair.
And it's not uncommon when one person is having an affair for another person having an affair.
And when I was born, I was...
Well, my parents broke up very shortly thereafter, which is also not uncommon if the child is a result of an affair.
My mother was an absolutely gorgeous woman, and so she would have had no shortage of suitors, I think.
And the depression which hit my mother after I was born may have had something to do with this thing.
I mean, there's nothing but the most vaguest intimations and second guesses and so on.
There's really no point pursuing it at all, because I'll never know the truth, and it doesn't really matter one bit.
But I think that it was hard for me to read because I had no sort of parental authority that I respected and admired.
And I think that's sort of a basis for coming...
That's really the basis for coming up with the loving God scenario, the loving authorities.
And then you project yourself...
You project your ideas up beyond those loving and attentive parents or whoever.
You project our foot up to get the loving God idea.
But because my first exposure to authority was sort of a cold and sadistic and contemptuous older brother...
My father was long gone by this point, and I could not...
Like, conceptually, when I exaggerated or inflated my first experience with authority to the idea of a god, I got basically a cold and distant sadist, right?
Which was not incongruous with my early experiences with my brother.
Actually, my lifelong experiences with my brother.
So, there was no...
A way that I could project my early experiences with authority to have a living, loving, benevolent God.
And certainly it has been the case with me that what you take pleasure in, authority disapproves of.
I mean, that is a pretty common thing throughout life.
That what you naturally will take pleasure in, people on authority will just disapprove of.
I mean, that's so, for me, humming a song and, you know, that being something.
And music, of course. I'm a total music geek and music slut.
And that's been the cause of ridicule from my brother.
For, you know, for quite some time.
It was many years while we were together.
And so on. So the bands that I loved, he thought were goofy or bad or silly or, you know, Pink Floyd's too depressing and Queen is too flamboyant and, you know, all this kind of stuff.
The bands that I really got off on.
My brother was more into, like, the white bread stuff, like, Hall of Notes, dance on your knees.
It's not bad. I really like the song Rich Girl.
I love that line, don't you know, it's so easy to hurt others when you can't feel pain.
Now, I continued to go to church, to be taken to church for many years, after this very odd and chilling experience in the attic when I was alone.
Also, you know, thinking back on it, What the hell was I doing in an attic on my own when I was like three years old?
And what was I doing being completely left alone with my brother?
Anyway, this is just the chaotic, weird, bad parenting that went on in my household.
But... I was taken to church, and there were two major ways in which I was taken to church, or major areas I was taken to church.
And I hope this is of interest to you.
I mean, if it's not, feel free to, you know, I'll get back to the Fed soon.
But this was sort of my experience with religion.
I definitely put things on hold after my experience in the Attic.
I did not believe. I did not reject.
I basically entered into a state of nihilism, With regards to religion, or I guess you could say fearful or cautious agnosticism would probably be a little bit more appropriate.
I just avoided the topic within my own mind.
Is there a God? Isn't there a God?
And it basically was Pascal's wager gone sour, right?
So for me, it's like, well, if there isn't a God, that's great in a way.
It means that my life makes a bit more sense.
Because if there is a God, and my first experience was God...
Taking my mom away and my parents splitting up and my brother being a sort of cruel jerk kid, then it would be kind of hard for me to say, ah, I guess the loving creator is preparing me to become strong so I can do great things.
Gee, what a fabulous sky god.
Can I worship you some more?
Perhaps if I cut a finger off and eat it, you will be satisfied with that as well.
So all of that was just not...
I just wasn't able to formulate a loving God.
I also wasn't able to get rid of the idea of God because of the coldness that I felt in that attic and the contempt and the bored, superior indifference with any pleasures of the things of this world.
I just could not...
I did not want to invoke that displeasure even though I felt that...
It was wrong.
There was nothing wrong with having a pop song.
Now, I don't recall anyone had talked to me about hell at this point or anything like that.
But, oh boy, I don't even know if I want to get into a big description.
I'm not going to get into a big description of authority in England because, what do you care, right?
Authority in England 30 years ago.
Ooh, now there's a fascinating and global topic.
And I'll await for the massive canvassing of emails saying, Steph, no, do tell us about authority in England 30 years ago.
Because, boy, oh boy, that's pretty gripping shit.
But, um... I was taken to school by my aunts.
Now, I spent some time, and again, you know, when you're young, when I was young, when I left boarding school, I have a picture of like 500 kids.
They were all sort of stuffed in there, like sardines in a hell's half acre.
And when I left boarding school, I could look, I remember this distinctly, trying this out when I was boarding school from 6 to 8, 6 years old to 8 years old.
And I remember looking at that picture.
I still have the picture. 500, I'm sort of sitting down there in the front.
And I remember being able to look at all the kids in that picture and naming them all.
Naming them all.
And now, of course, I remember my name, my brother's name, and like one or two other guys, and that's about it.
So, you know, it's not L-timers.
It's just, you know, your brain likes to remember more useful things at times, you know, like the name of the cartoon collector on The Simpsons.
You know, it's important to get these things in your mind.
But I was taken to my aunts, and I distinctly remember doing kindergarten in my aunts and finally figuring out that if you draw a plane with the wings going up and down like the fins of a shark, that perspective is not correct.
I think I've mentioned this before.
I also remember being entirely confused about the word are.
A-R-E? It's like, okay, what?
So we've got a language here.
The word is R. There's an R in it, but it's not the letter R. And it sounds like R, which also has an R in it.
Anyway, it was all just, I remember trying to puzzle all that stuff out and drawing lots of pictures of bombers and planes shooting with those little dashboards and things blowing up.
And so I don't remember doing a whole lot of work.
And I remember thinking, hey, I can handle this.
This is fun. And I don't know, for the life of me, why I was sent to my aunt's, which was in Cheltenham, which is, I don't know, 100 miles away, 80 miles away from London.
I have no idea why I was sent to my aunt's.
Just part of the chaos. Of a childhood with somebody destined to chew their own brain out with mental illness.
I had no idea why I was sent to my aunts in Cheltenham for that.
It was a long time, too.
It was a long time. It was long enough that I needed to be enrolled in school.
So it's got to be, I'm guessing, about a year.
Six months to a year.
It certainly was enough for me to get into kindergarten and all that kind of stuff.
And it wasn't just because my dad was on my...
My aunts on my dad's side.
There's no real relatives on my mother's side because of the old war.
But... And this is the family that the...
My uncle was part of the bombing raid that leveled Dresden with the firestorm that killed my grandmother on my mother's side, my uncle on my father's side.
It's all this pan-European bloodshed nightmare, confluted, who talks about anything at dinner?
Not us! But...
I was there and I was taken to church and I very distinctly remember that I was given five pence to put in the collection tray.
Five pence would be about, I don't know, a million dollars now.
You know, relative to the expectations of, like, I don't know, a five-year-old.
And I very clearly remember that we were going to church and I had five pence and I should put it in the collection tray.
Now, I'd already learned this lesson in so far as I remember being at a fair when I was very young, probably about four to four and a half.
And I think it was one of my mom's boyfriends bought me a balloon.
And he said, well, son, you can hang on to this balloon or you can enter it into the great balloon race.
I actually used this for a scene in Almost.
The Great Balloon Race.
And in the Great Balloon Race, I could let my balloon go, and they would attach my name to it or whatever.
And then it would go, and I would win something.
I can't even remember what now. I guess it was something that I considered good.
And I thought, ooh, a race, a winning, this sounds great, right?
So I let my balloon go.
It just sort of sailed off into the sky.
And as it sailed away, I was like, don't!
That was not very smart, now was it?
Because now I don't have a balloon, and I frankly don't really think that I am going to win anything.
The wind, who knows?
The only balloon sitting up there in the sky, it looked pretty damn lonely.
And again, I sort of felt a little bit of that cold sort of eye of like, well, that wasn't too bright, now was it?
And so I guess I've always been a bit of a balloon in the hand is worth two in the race, so to speak, kind of guy.
So that's sort of been a sort of constant habit of mine, to be a little bit more cautious with things.
Probably since that, I don't know if it was just that, but it certainly had something to do with it.
So I was given five pence, and I was supposed to put it in the collection tray.
It made no connection to me whatsoever.
They didn't say, well, this is going to go to hungry kids.
It's just like, here's your five pence, now go put it in the collection tray.
There was no conceptual understanding or explanation of where the money was going or what it was.
It was just like saying, well, here's your allowance, now go throw it down a well.
Here's some money. Throw it in the river.
It's like, why are you giving me money if I'm just supposed to throw it away?
Because for me, putting it in the collection plate was pretty much identical to throwing it away.
And I very much remember that, I mean, we had one of these ridiculous priests, well, just priests, and ridiculous is redundant, in these sort of gold brocade and well-sequined, a big teacup cozy hat, and the church was huge, and the organ was massive, and the stained glass was...
Bloody. And I remember thinking, really?
Five pence? Really?
Like, this guy's wearing gold and he's got a house as big as, like, a stadium?
And I'm supposed to give him my allowance when I'm some broke kid whose mom isn't even here?
Like, I'm basically a semi-orphan being handed...
I'm supposed to give this guy my money?
Like, what kind of sense does this make?
Now, of course, if they had said it was for the poor, I'm pretty sure I would have said at that point, well, that's me, isn't it?
No, you're living in a big house.
It's like, yeah, but it's not my house, not my parents' house.
So I hit the money. For me, it was just like, well, people wanted to take something, or they were giving me something, which I felt was not...
I mean, I don't remember getting any allowance.
You were pretty much at the whim of the elders.
Maybe here's a bonbon or something.
Every adult in England has a jar of really...
Freaking bad candy.
Like really bad, stinky, awful, like the kind of candy that unless you're just dying for sugar, they put it in your restaurant bill, right?
And that little black folder with your restaurant bill is those swirly green hard mints from hell or whatever.
Like everyone in England has like really bad candy.
It's hugely bad candy.
Not like nice toffees or anything and chocolate.
And so everyone in England says, hey, would you like a candy?
And you're like, yeah, no, wait, oh God, oh no, now you're going to give me this crap, and I've got to put it in my mouth, and then I'm going to have to spit it out, the taste is going to be there all day.
So I didn't have any allowance to buy my own candy, so the only money that I got was this five pence.
I guess, you know, now, honestly, it'd probably be around a U.S. dollar, dollar fifty, something like that, right?
So for me, it's like, okay, you give me a buck, and then you want me to hand it away, and I got nothing.
I got nothing here. I got nothing.
And I was living out of a box, for God's sake.
So for me, it's like I hid the money in my sock.
And anyway, so I figured that, you know, I'd figure I'd just do that...
You know, you reach in and you just make a noise, like you're dropping something in.
I figured then, you know, I can accumulate this money and buy an aircraft, which is sort of what I wanted at the time.
Well, you know, I knew enough about investing for interest at that point.
And, of course, we all congregated out front of the house, and everybody's like, okay, now show me your five-penny piece.
Show me your five-cent piece, five-pence piece.
Oh, man.
And I don't think it was because they necessarily thought we were stealing it.
They just wanted to make sure we had it.
So it's like, oh, damn it.
But I was in my sock, right?
So, anyway, of course, I go through this big pantomime of looking for it, and then I wriggle my toes and say, you know, I think it fell into my sock.
You know, with all of the wide-eyed cherubic innocence of a guilty child who'll stop at nothing to get away with theft.
And it was...
everybody just said, oh, well, that's strange.
Or I can't remember, maybe I said I put it in my sock for safekeeping and forgot about it.
It was some lie that was vaguely plausible enough that people would just go, well, okay, let's get to church, right?
And I think I was not given five pence for a little while or something like that.
But it's interesting because for me, I felt...
No guilt about that.
I'm not particularly prone to guilt as a whole.
I can be prone to self-recrimination, like, oh, that was the wrong thing to do, or that was a silly thing to do, or I've made a mistake and the blood drains from my cheeks and that kind of thing.
But I did not even remotely feel that I was trying to do something that was wrong.
And I think that had a lot to do with the fact that nobody was talking to me about my circumstances.
Like, why was I being shuffled from relative to relative?
And where were my parents? And why was my life so different?
And where was my brother? And so on.
I actually can't remember if my brother was there.
Honestly, genuinely can't remember if my brother was there at this point.
And... I didn't feel that I was doing anything wrong.
I just sort of felt like, well, it's just kind of like a...
I shouldn't say it's a game.
It's just that they want me to take this money and give it away to people I don't even know, who doubtless are doing a whole lot better than I am.
And it just didn't seem right, but it also didn't feel like there was anything I could discuss.
I didn't feel like I had any knowledge about anybody's ethics.
It was just obey orders, right?
It was just obey orders. Here, take this money now, put it in the collection box.
Like a robot, right? And I wasn't allowed to ask why or anything.
Nobody explained anything about anything.
So it was just obey orders.
And I think, I mean, pretty much I've always had a pretty amoral approach to obeying orders.
When somebody says, well, go do X, it's like, okay, I'll go do X because you're telling me to go do X.
But that's about it.
You're telling me and you have power, so that's why I'll do it.
But the moment that I don't do it or can find some other way or this or that or the other, then I won't do it.
That's simple enough, right?
I mean, you push the side of the balloon in, and while your finger is in, the balloon goes in.
And then when your finger comes out, the balloon pops out again.
I mean, that's sort of how I felt.
You put pressure on me, and I'll obey.
And then when you stop putting pressure on me, or if there's any way that I can evade this...
Because it very much felt like a state of nature.
My whole childhood, pretty much...
I felt, you know, up until my sort of teens, late teens, it sort of felt like it's like, well, there are all these people who are telling me what to do, but it doesn't mean anything.
I mean, they may tell me that it's about good or bad or whatever, but now I did have a good deal of personal integrity insofar as I do remember when I had lost a pen in boarding school and they said, oh, we found a pen, and I went to look at his nice gold pen.
I said, oh, no, that's not mine. And I just genuinely didn't want it because it wasn't mine.
The headmaster seemed kind of impressed by it.
And that was sort of like, I didn't want to steal, but if someone gave me something, like here's the five pence, then I'm going to try and keep it.
Everything just seemed sort of amoral at this point.
Because nobody was explaining anything to me.
So if you're going to treat me like livestock, then I'm going to have the loyalty of livestock.
Which is like, hey, greener pastures, let's go!
So, I remember listening a lot to religious instructions and this and that and the other and thinking that some of the stories were interesting and I could sing so I was in a choir when I was younger.
When I was in boarding school, we had a really, really boring priest and then we had a very young priest with a beard who was much more...
Engaging and really kind of made us laugh.
And I just remember he would make little jokes like he said with the fall of Lucifer.
And God threw down Satan into a big pond and stuck up a big sign saying, No fishing!
I thought that was pretty funny.
I still remember that to this day.
And he was engaging, but I never believed any of it.
I thought it was entertaining or boring and I liked the singing, but I just never felt...
That it was true.
And I never felt that anybody else believed that it was true.
At all. Like, you had to put on a show.
And there was a lot of putting on a show.
Goddamn garters. Oh my god.
The garters. So we had these...
There's a phrase that, oh, I'll have your guts for garters.
Which means you're going to rip out somebody's larynx and use it to tie up your socks.
Really quite lovely. Often phrased towards children.
So I had these little stupid elastics that kept my socks up.
And... You'd lose them.
I mean, I just... I wouldn't even know where they went.
Basically, I have a twin who steals things from me.
That's been the story of my life.
It doesn't bother me so much anymore.
Just, you know, tide comes in, tide goes out, stuff appears, stuff disappears.
It's all quite scintillating.
It's like a little kaleidoscope of belongings.
But... There was a rule.
You have to wear your... Socks have to be up, right?
And if your socks are bagging down around your feet, then this was considered to be a woeful crime against humanity.
And this was, of course, considered the worst thing.
And so for me, it was like, well, I just have to find some way to get my socks to stay up.
I have to walk so they don't come down, so I don't jar my feet.
Like, all that kind of stuff. It had nothing to do with, I want...
My socks to stay up.
I mean, that was very clear to me when I was a kid and probably goes all the way back to the attic thing.
That, yeah, I'll obey you wanting me to keep my socks up with elastics, but not because I think that my socks should be kept up with elastics.
And this has always been my approach to authority, at least as long as I can remember.
Sure, I'll do it because you've got power over me.
And you tell me that it's important to do this, and it's like, yeah, it's important to you that I do it.
It's not important to me that I do it other than that it's important to you and you have power over me.
And, of course, this helped me be relatively...
It helped keep me relatively unplowed, so to speak, for the fertile soil and seeds of philosophy later on in life.
But I don't remember a single rule that I was given as a child that made any sense, was ever explained to me or made any sense to me.
It was all just like, well, you have to make your bed so that they can bounce a penny off it.
Because it's about discipline, and it's about this, and it's about excellence, or whatever, whatever.
It doesn't really matter. Because none of it meant anything to me.
So I'm stuck in this hellish boarding school in the middle of nowhere, and I always remember those train rides in the dock for an hour or two to go to the school, and it was all just so dismal.
And of course, I was six years old and stuck on a train on my own.
It's amazing. It just is amazing.
Things you'd never conceive of now.
Things you wouldn't be allowed to do now.
I don't think you can do that anymore.
But I don't remember a single rule that wasn't just, crap, so you've got to make your bed so that it's perfectly flat.
Why? Why? Well, no one...
I don't think...
Honestly, I like to sort of say that I was some mouthy rebel.
I really wasn't. I mean, I just...
People would say, well, you have to do this.
Your bed is not made straight.
And, of course, if you were...
I got this very quickly, and I can't remember if I got this instinctively or because I saw some hapless kid get chewed up about this.
But I very clearly remember knowing that if I asked why, I would get some significant punishment.
That somebody says, you have to make your bed perfectly flat.
And I would say, why?
It's always the perfectly sensible question about making your bed.
Why? Why?
Why? Are people going to pop by from Architectural Digest to take a photo of this ratty little dorm?
I don't think so. I'm just going to mess it up again tonight and whatever, right?
But it was a paramilitary organization, right?
I mean, the boarding school is a training ground for the military, right?
It's designed to make you obey orders for no reason and destroy your capacity for empathy by encouraging you to torture children and all this.
It's a training ground for the military.
That's why the upper class go there, right?
Traditional blood-soaked warriors, right?
And I knew that if I asked why, why would I have to make my bed so that a penny bounces off on it?
How does this make the world a better place?
Is this really, really important?
Is this the kind of thing that we should be spending time on rather than learning wisdom and love?
But you can't ask that, right?
If you ask that, then...
Well, bad things happen.
Without a doubt, really bad things are going to happen if you ask that question.
And then, when I... I was out of boarding school, and I went to church there for two years, and we went twice a week or three times a week, and there was choir practice.
And I liked the church. I thought the church was nice.
It was quiet. You could read.
It was placed for singing, which I love.
So that was all nice.
It was very pleasant.
Nothing against the church, nothing against the priest.
I just didn't believe any of it, right?
I mean, pray to God was exactly the same for me as make your bed.
But why?
Why would you go through that?
Why would you bother with this kind of stuff?
And after that, I didn't really go to church anymore.
My father wasn't religious. My aunts were, but I didn't spend as much time with them.
I would spend time with them in the summers in Ireland.
I used to go for the summers for a month or so to Ireland, and my dad would be there.
And they had a cottage, a lake, and it was great stuff.
It was great, great fun. Lots of hiking, other kids, lots of swimming.
It was a lot of fun. But, and I think, I'm sure we went to church there from time to time, but I never went to church again regularly at all.
And I didn't miss it.
I mean, it was just, well, there's just this weird corner where people say, pray to God, the same way there's other weird corners where people say, wear your garters and make your bed so that you can bounce a penny off it.
I mean, none of it sort of made any sense to me.
It was just, you put up with people's prejudices, the way that, you know, in your foreign country, you learn how to, I don't know, let's say that there's a different handshake.
Or, you know, in some countries, men will kiss on the cheek, which we don't do here, right?
So you learn, say, okay, well, I'm in Morocco, so I'll kiss people on the cheek.
I'll kiss other guys on the cheek. I mean, it's interesting, but it's not moral, right?
It's not like better or worse.
It's just the local customs.
And I was very aware that everybody used moral terms to talk about all of this kind of stuff.
But to me, that was just another kind of convention.
The convention is that you kiss a guy on the cheeks when you part from him, and also that you call that moral.
To me, morality was just another convention.
Yes, you must make your bed perfectly flat so you can bounce a penny off it, And you must say that that's about discipline, and that's about excellence or whatever, or the bed.
I mean, who knows, right? But that was just another convention.
It wasn't like it was really about right and wrong and good and bad, and it wasn't so much cynicism that I was experiencing as just, well...
I just kind of got that it was just empty words that people were using.
And it's like, okay, so I will obey you about the bed, because you have power, you can sort of cane me if you want.
I will obey you about the bed.
And I will also obey you in saying that obeying you about the bed is moral.
But it's not. I mean, I was very nihilistic or agnostic as far as morals went.
I'm not sure that I even believed in them, other than as a convention that people talked about.
But let me know if you find this stuff interesting.
I'm certainly happy to talk further about it.
I don't want to bore people to death with stories of my childhood.
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