Becoming an Atheist: Turning Points

This story is continued from Friday's post (11/14).

My family shared the celebrations of Jewish and Christian holidays. I had no answer for why Jews did not believe in Christ—they plainly didn’t, that’s all. As a child, the fact seemed sufficient to me without explanation. For me, faith was merely another word for religion. Christians had our faith; Jews had their faith; Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, animists, everyone held their own faith—one more or less as valid as another. I figured that if you wanted to be a good person, you just needed to pick a faith and practice it and everything would be all right.

Now, the church I grew up in was not what I would call Bible-based. We did not bring to or read the Bible in church. Our services came straight out of the Episcopal Prayer Book, which contained a few Bible nuggets (mainly some Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer, as I remember), as well as the Nicene and Apostolic creeds. We sang anthems from our hymnal. Our prayers were printed for us in the prayer book. I thought I loved Jesus. I heard that He died for our sins and that He was our Savior, but I don’t remember being taught that I had to believe that message in order to go to heaven. I wasn’t sure from what exactly Jesus saved us, since Satan rarely—if ever—came up in our polite church. As for the Holy Spirit, I had the vague idea that He was my conscience.

So when I left the church at fourteen because I didn’t like Father Hio, our minister, and didn’t want my feelings for him to color my feelings for Christ, I really didn’t see that I was turning my back on much. (Father Hio, by the way, had done nothing to me that I recall; my aversion was based on hearsay—I heard his cute eighteen-year-old son’s typical teenage muttering and decided the man was unbearable.)

In Hebrews 10:25, Paul says that we should not abandon the habit of meeting for worship, that we should keep on encouraging one another, especially because we know that the day of the Lord is getting closer. I know why he said it. After being out of church for several months, I found that my faith had entirely evaporated without my even noticing.

My mother decided to leave the church after I did, and she and I began attending Jewish services with my dad and brothers. The members of Temple Gates of Heaven were wonderful, welcoming, warm people, especially Rabbi Szenes and the Hebrew teachers, like Mrs. Chutz, a native-born Israeli who had met her husband thirty years earlier after he escaped from Nazi Germany and soon found himself with no choice but to jump off a ship seven miles from the coast of what was then Palestine. He then swam to shore to save his life. (The ship could not dock in Palestine with its load of Jews and turned back to deliver them again to the agonies of Europe.)

I loved going to Temple. My mother and I enrolled in the adult Hebrew class and I learned enough to tutor a second grade student one summer. But somehow I found that even without Father Hio to blame it on, I did not believe in the existence of God any longer.

To be continued...

(The photo above is of my family on my youngest brother's bar mitzvah day in 1979. The text is excerpted from my book, Stepping into the Light: You're a Christian, what now? )