In the beginning . . .

I thought I would start with a little background information for those of you who don’t know me (and those of you who think you do). For the sake of brevity, I will be painting this history in pretty broad strokes with more detail to follow in future posts.

I was born the first child to middle class parents. My grandparents were immigrants from Sweden (paternal) and Denmark (maternal). Only recently did I discover that my paternal grandfather was from the Sami people of Swedish Lapland. These are the indigenous people–along with the Saman of Siberia and Mongolia–from which we get the word “Shaman.” This will prove to be an interesting coincidence in my latter life.

The town I grew up in was rural with an economic base of dairy farming and the timber industry. It sits atop a plateau just to the West of the Cascade Mountain foothills and Mount Rainier. In recent years it has become primarily a suburb or the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area–particularly for urbanites who want to play the life of a country squire–but still retains much of its rural character.

Throughout my childhood exposure to any formal religious training was mostly non-existent. I suppose we were Lutherans (in name only), as much of the town’s population, including me, was of Scandinavian heritage. I rarely, if ever, recall us going to church as a family except for occasions such as weddings. Once, my parents made a feeble attempt to send me to Sunday school with some of our neighbor’s kids, but that was very short lived. The only thing I remember about it was playing with some Jesus and friends cardboard cut-outs on a felt-covered board.

Since my parents didn’t have a strong religious conviction, they must have–at some level–seen the hypocrisy in trying to give me any kind of religious upbringing. I consider this a great advantage in my future spiritual life, as I did not have any early religious indoctrination to overcome. However, with my naturally free-thinking and rebellious nature, this would probably not have been too much of a barrier.

When I was finally old enough to intellectually grasp the concept of god–sometime in my preteens–I made the conscious choice to be atheist. At the time, I probably didn’t know the word “atheist” and if I did, I probably didn’t know what it meant. Nevertheless, having discovered Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, et al. to be “make believe,” it seemed that god–or at least the Judeao-Christian god–was make-believe as well.

A footnote: This is one reason why I have the Adult Content warning on my blog. I don’t want to be the one to shatter any child’s beliefs in Santa, etc.

The further I went in school, the more convinced I was that belief in a supernatural being was a vestigial artifact of a primitive and superstitious past. By the time I entered high school, I not only knew what atheist meant, it was a label I wore with pride. I even took the atheist position in a debate in one of my classes (back then you could talk openly about such things).

So, by the time I was in high school, I was a budding young atheist. Then something unexpected happened.