The Reality of Pain
Jerry D. Mackey
In a small Baptist church in a small East Texas town, my three brothers, one sister, and our spouses sat with my mother in a pew near the front. My father had died of a massive heart attack a little over a year before, and the family had gathered this year to spend Easter with my mother. She had insisted that we attend church as our gift to her. It was especially uncomfortable for me, as I had years ago preached sermons in this very church among many of these same parishioners—that is, when I had been a Southern Baptist minister.
But life, circumstances, and my love of science had since conspired to remove the death-grip religion had on me. I considered myself a nonbeliever, and my mother was horrified. But my atheism, though not in its infancy, was certainly not rock-solid. I’m sure my mother believed that if she got me into church that somehow I would be struck down like Saul of Tarsus.
As the pastor stepped up to the pulpit, he stated that he had been given a prayer request just prior to the start of services. One of the parishioners had a thirteen-year-old niece who had been in a house fire in Dallas the night before. She lay in an intensive care unit with third-degree burns covering most of her body. The pastor asked that we bow our heads. He entreated God to take the child’s pain away, heal her burned flesh, and make her whole again. He prayed that prayer in Jesus’s name.
And that was my pivot point. As I looked around, I knew that young child was still in pain. I knew her flesh was still scarred and blackened. I knew she was not whole, physically or mentally, and would never again be so in her life.
Enough Already
John G. Manuel
The journey from Protestant Christianity to uncompromising atheism and humanism was a gradual one, including the usual stages of doubt and ultimate rejection of the existence of anything supernatural.
But the actual pivot point, the day when I said, “That’s it—enough already,” the a-ha moment that took me over the final cresting wave of unbelief, took place in a church.
It was Father’s Day. The regular minister was away, and his assistant, a woman I admired in many ways, conducted the service with the help of the chair of the congregational council. Both women were competent in their duties and quite capable of conducting services.
But it was Father’s Day, and the selected material for the service was taken from the biblical story of David and Goliath. The chosen anthem was a song titled, “Bring the Big Man Down.” On Father’s Day!
In the pew in front of me, a man with two small daughters was clearly agitated during the anthem, much as I was. I stood up, marched out of the church, and that was the last time I have ever worshipped in a church. It was an unforgettable rejection of religion—by itself perhaps an inconsequential event but for me the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The minister phoned me after the service and inquired about my sudden departure. I explained my feelings and suggested that next Mother’s Day she might tell the story of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt. She was not amused, but neither was I. I was unapologetic in my assertion that her material was inappropriate to the day.
A single moment in time. But the one unforgettable moment that pivoted me irretrievably into complete unbelief in anything supernatural. I have since discovered humanism, and I will never turn away from it.
People, and only people, can and do choose to make a difference.
John G. Manuel is a retired accountant, raised Anglican, now a humanist and until recently a Humanist Wedding Officiant, having conducted hundreds of weddings and numerous funerals and child welcomings. He is now assisting in the preparation of CFI’s Study of Religion in Canada and contributing to other humanist activities.
Overcoming an Assumption
Robert J. McManus
Truth be told, I didn’t pivot completely all at once—as you will see. But there was one seminal moment I recall vividly. It was on Sunday, November 5, 1950.
I was ten years old, living in New York City. I was Catholic—but not, I think, what they call “devout” or “strict.” My Protestant mother had died when I was three, and my nominally Catholic father, who had by then married two divorced Protestants, was ineligible as a result to receive communion in the Church. Besides, in catechism classes preceding my First Holy Communion, Sister Ellen had indicated it was unlikely that a non-Catholic—my mommy, let’s say—could get into heaven. That didn’t sound very nice. Maybe a degree of doubt was baked in early.
On that seminal day, I had walked alone, as I often did, from our apartment to an early mass at St. Vincent Ferrer at Lexington and 66th. (Back in the day, you had to fast—no food, not even water—after midnight before receiving communion, and so I preferred to get it over with as soon as possible.)
In his sermon that morning, the priest said something like this:
This is a time of great joy to Catholics all over the world. And that is because, on this past Wednesday, November 1, the Holy Father in Rome decreed that the body, the actual flesh and blood, of the Blessed Virgin Mary never knew the corruption of death. Instead, we now know that she arose in glory from the tomb and ascended, physically, to Heaven. To be clear, my friends: what Pope Pius said this week did not make this so; it has always been so. But now, at last, we Catholics can be assured that it is so.
I remember what the little-boy-me thought about this, but I never discussed it with anyone for years, and it was years before I acknowledged what that little-boy-me knew at some level on November 5, 1950. In fact, over seven years passed before that February morning when I overslept and awoke in my freshman dorm room with a crushing hangover. I realized I had to decide whether, in the ensuing twenty minutes, I would: get out of bed; rush to put on a suit, shirt, tie, cordovan shoes, and my London Fog raincoat; dash through a New Haven sleet storm to the campus Catholic chapel; and, once there, confess to an apparently senile old man in an oaken closet that I had masturbated, lest I be consigned to hell if I should die before receiving absolution.
Nah. I rolled over and went back to sleep.
After graduating from college and serving in the navy, Robert J. McManus returned to New Haven for law school. He is now a retired international and environmental lawyer residing in the Washington, D.C., area. He has been very happily married for forty-two years to another lapsed Catholic.
It Was Laughable
Brian Myres
When I was about ten years old, my mother sent us to a Baptist meeting where the kids in attendance were asked to “come down and be saved.” My sister dragged me along with her (I really didn’t want to go; I was already having doubts), and damned if she didn’t go down and into a back room. Sitting alone by myself, I decided to go down also. When I arrived in the back room, I saw quite a few children bawling and praying, and I started to laugh. An adult came up to me and angrily asked, “Why are you laughing?” I told him I thought all this was stupid and funny, and I walked out of the room. That was it for me … an atheist from that day forward! The year before, I was awarded a Bible for perfect attendance at a more sane church, and the inscribed date was 2/12/1949 … rather prophetic as that was Darwin’s 140th birthday, and I became a biology professor later in California!
The Preposterousness of It All
K. W.
My pivot point occurred at the age of fifteen or sixteen inside a First Baptist church. A church elder told me that dinosaurs never existed. He claimed Satan populated the earth with fossilized bones to mislead humankind about their existence. Carbon dating was also not to be believed, as Satan manipulated test results to suggest the earth was older than what the Bible revealed it to be. I realized these claims were preposterous and, over a period of time, came to the conclusion that most everything about any religion was, and continues to be, equally preposterous.