GhostInTheRuins

I was raised in a totally secular/godless household. My parents didn't have any agenda. Religion/faith/god/atheism/spirituality just never came up except for maybe a passing reference. My mother made me go to Sunday school a few times, but we had just moved so it was probably a social thing, and it was a Methodist church so it was fairly low-impact.

Quick story: I was prolly 7 or so and a bus came around the neighborhood and took some us kids off to some Baptist church or something, maybe they promised us cookies at the end, I don't know. Anyway we all had to go to the front of the church and pray about something. I just mimicked what everybody else did which was kneel down and, well, pray. So the preacher is going on and on and I'm tired of it and look up and all the other kids had stopped praying. I'm thinking WTF? Seems I didn't know the keyword 'Amen' signals the end. They prolly thought I was really devout.

All these years later it seems like our house was a control sample in some alien religion experiment. Like, all around us there were petri dishes in which various belief systems were injected into families and allowed to incubate. Something like that.

So, to answer your question, it's quite natural for me to ask the reverse,"how is it that you believe in any sort of higher power?"