My brothers and I were forced to attend church related things at least 4 times a week. Sunday school and Sunday service from 9AM to 12:30 PM, Sunday evening service from 7 to 9PM, Boys Brigade (kind of a fundy boyscouts) for 3 hrs on Tuesday, Prayer Meeting for a couple of hours on Wednesday, and Youth Group and Choir practice on Fridays for a couple of hours. I was able to fully get past the indoctrination by age 20 or so once I got some distance from it.
That sounds like my family. We had to go to Sunday school, church service, youth choir, youth service, then had snack supper before the Sunday evening service. We didn't have to attend Wed. night prayer meeting because it was on a school night but we did have to go to Pioneer girls on Fridays, the female equivalent of Boys Brigade. I almost forgot about Vacation Bible School in the summer. We also had to go to Camp of the Woods for a week, when we were about to start high school. It was a Christian camp on an island in New York State. I did everything I could to break every rule during camp week. Good to know I'm not the only one who escaped such severe indoctrination.
Btw, I begged my mom to let us go to a different Baptist church when I was about 18 and had become agnostic. She allowed it and I enjoyed arguing with the Sunday school class there. After several months, I convinced my sister to go into the church, pick up a church bulletin with me, then leave, buy some cup cakes, and sit in the car and chat until it was time to go home. We never told our parents that we had skipped church. We simply put the church bulletin where she would see it. We did go to church, we just didn't stay for the service.
It (religion, belief in deities,) never made sense to me. It just never ever made sense. I remember thinking that as young as 8 years old when I was being made to go to church and sunday school every week. And when I asked questions to fill in the parts that made no sense, the answers were utterly unsatisfactory and it continued to make no sense. To this day, it just does not compute.
The first time I questioned my faith seriously was when the church rejected the "fun interim assistant pastor" for the "boring as fuck conservative pastor".
It made me realize that the edifice of the church's authority was not guided by anything like "god", and because everything I learned about "god" came from that place, it was all "suspect".
Like that, social authority structures went "poof", and I started looking for answers elsewhere. I had to find the real reasons, if any, behind every piece of "wisdom" of the church.
Quite a lot sounds quite similar to things which I went through too. Most of my life I was in churches, Hill UCC was my choice but after asking about dinosaurs and got a sketchy answer, it was one of the first times I ever questioned it. Should have got it when I asked dad about Japan having a different god system, as at the end it was an excuse to still claim Christianity. One day I just began using a thing called Google, and it is not hard to find things. I was checking to see about other religions which ended up with more searches, finding the truth about a timeline too. And once you just begin putting things together, it is not hard to figure things out pretty well. Thing is youngest on the timeline is religion, (All Of Them.) Followed by us, the human race, then our evolution. I don't know what is just before that, but only a fool would think a god made all things when all things were here billions of years before any god(s). So how exactly does a god make something which is here like nearly the entire 13.7 billion years before it was here?
Yeah and there's plenty other things which make no sense in that.
Thanks For Reading.
Edit; It actually begun trying to strengthen faith, and dropped all faith and ended up atheist.
Well, I don't think gods are impossible, just that there's no reason to believe in any such thing anymore than I think it's appropriate for, IE, a "dwarf" in the game "Dwarf Fortress" to believe there is a god named "Jarhyn" who exists and controls all the universe...
There's just no solid evidence of it from inside of such a system.
The evidence I do have (ironically enough, gleaned from the fact that I've sat in that chair) indicates that any such possible entity more likely prefers atheists. In fact my perspective yields all sorts of ways Christianity is grossly and subtly wrong about the "probable" qualities entities in such positions have.
I would start by asking any such religious person "imagine someone comes up to you tomorrow with something kind of like an ant farm, but instead of ants in a frame of sand, it is a machine that contains and hosts intelligences just as capable as us living in a world much like ours, just simulated. They have problems that could be addressed, prayers that could be answered, and a world that can be stopped and examined at leisure, even saved and rewound to a previous version; however doing so does cost you "time" and "energy" and does not actually benefit you in any way at all (other than feeling good for helping someone in a way that physically benefits nobody else outside that environment).
You also have various options of places or alternative environments you can put these people in your "ant farm" into, everything from creative mode simulation to a "sandbox mode" environment. You even happen to have a supply of small drones whose sensory measurements of the world can be translated into signals the denizens of the simulation can understand: they are capable of meaningfully experiencing consciousness of "base reality".
So, considering this, you would be effectively the momentary god of that population, from the Christian PoV, though from the Gnostic PoV, you would be the "TzimTzum".
What responsibilities to you have to the denizens of the ant farm? What responsibilities do you have to all the rest of us with respect to what you put in those drones? What responsibilities do the denizens of the "ant farm" have? What desert do they have to either access "creative mode" or the "containment sandbox" (they don't really, especially if they don't or can't maintain or contribute to the ongoing expenses or existence of the system)? What would earn an entity a trip into the bit bucket? Would you love the denizens of your world? Would you prevent every bad thing from happening to them even knowing this essentially forces you to be a NEET living in your basement playing with your thinking
dolls and doing
nothing else? Would you get involved in their lives even knowing this might make them
explicitly aware of your existence, and thus dependent on you rather than continuing to work to solve their own problems?
Of course, there's nothing stopping the denizens from assuming you exist and assuming things about you and basing their happiness on random things they believe a out you even if they have no access to the truth about you...
Or they might infer rather accurately some things about you from the games they themselves play and their relationship to those games. Some may have a name for you, and assign you fanciful properties, perhaps even describe you more or less accurately just by pure accident.
The simulation, for argument sake, even featured their evolution, and a time frame from simulation initialization that can be mostly be derived from the current state: inside your "ant farm", the whole thing looks far older than the denizen's civilization, because the denizen's simulation DID happen "after" all that long but easy to calculate, history.
What I find a little funny here is that these are all actually questions about god and godhood and the philosophy of ethics as pertains to creators from a perspective that shows that creators have no physical requirement to be "good",
or to even know what they are doing.
There are certainly some identifiable best practices for "creators", but all of those lead to the idea that one's ultimate aim ought always be to build the world they exist in today, for the sake of the people there.
If some unshitty version of Christian, (or Muslim, or Jew, or Hindi, Shintoi(?), or ___) wants to call that "living for the kingdom of heaven" or whatever their version of the phrase is spoken as, I guess I'm "living for the kingdom of heaven". My call out to the universe amounts to "I'll receive all help, make no promises; I shall suffer no gods, masters, nor kings; I shall do what is right because it is right, and hope that if I am wrong about that, it will be made clear as to why that is wrong before damage is done."
These are useful things, theorems of the strange math that is rational philosophy "proven by the pudding" as it were. I can argue substantive reasons for my decisions as pertains to simulations, and in favor of their
general wisdom even in other scenarios by people who are not me.
