1. Where do you live now?
Seattle, WA.
2. Where was the bulk of your childhood spent?
Born in California, moved to Pacific Northwest just before turning 5. So I’m a local.
3. What religion, if any, were you brought up in?
4. Did you have any formal religious instruction as a child? If so, how much and what kind?
5. Did your parents try to influence your degree of religious observance, either in childhood or in adulthood? If so, to what extent?
These three questions have the same answer. My parents are not particularly religious, and never tried to indoctrinate me in any set of beliefs. I can remember just three times, for example, where my mother and/or father took me to a church; one was an Easter service a relative had invited us to and the other two were weddings.
In general, the subject just never came up. I was not trained to be an atheist (which I am now); neither are my current beliefs a reaction against childhood impositions. We just never talked about it. This left me rather naive as a kid, obviously. I recall one neighbor boy my age (we were about 12) who found out I didn’t go to church; he was horrified and tried to tell me about Satan and Hell and all the bad stuff that was going to happen if I didn’t fall to my knees that very moment. I remember saying “um, okay” a lot and wondering if he’d been dropped on his head as a baby. In addition, I remember a school project in third or fourth grade where we had to do some sort of civics poster, drawing up a picture of Life in These United States, with all its various aspects. I made a comic-book-style page, divided into panels, each panel labeled “sports” and “science” and so on. (Science has always been important to me; my grandfather is a geologist.) For the “religion” panel, I drew a house with a cross on the front, a big white-bearded guy in a robe floating above it, and a word bubble coming out the door that said “…And we give our blessings to him,” no capital H. In retrospect, I’m a little surprised people didn’t call me on the obvious fact that I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.
The family’s lack of religiosity continues to this day. For example: My stepsister (my stepfather’s older daughter) got married recently. She’s pretty religious (it comes from her mother, who oddly is a conniving dishonest witch), so she and her husband got married in a Church of Christ facility in Coeur d’Alene. I sat with my wife and several other family members in the back; we were all pretty uncomfortable with the setting, and we glanced at each other and suppressed snickers when the minister’s presentation mentioned the thing about the woman being made from the man’s rib and therefore should submit to his superiority or whatever the hell it was. We really didn’t want to be disrespectful, but it was awfully over-the-top for us. I don’t think anybody noticed, anyway, since we were in the back. And when it was over, my mother (who had been up front as part of the wedding party) commented to me in an aside that the service was “lovely, but pretty God-y.”
6. Did you attend public schools? Religious schools? Neither? If you attended public schools, was there any religious instruction as part of the school curriculum?
Public schooling, up through the mid/late 80’s. (It occurs to me that this question would benefit from some date information, as standards have changed quite a bit over the years.) The curriculum was almost completely devoid of religious content.
7. Do you currently practice any organized religion?
8. How religiously observant do you consider yourself to be now, in terms of following the formal practices and restrictions of a particular organized religion?
As mentioned above, I’m an atheist. However, I’m not an evangelical atheist, i.e. I don’t feel a burning compulsion to rid the world of religion. While I am not religious myself, I am fascinated by it, and I pay very close attention to the role faith plays in human social organizations. I mention this because some atheists feel their “formal practices” should include speaking out about how atheists are oppressed in the U.S. (and we are) and working to gain respect and freedom from persecution. Me, I’m pretty much in the closet.
9. How do you think your degree of religious observance compares to that of others where you live?
As masonite and amarinth indicated above, Seattle is an odd duck when it comes to this stuff. I’m not sure I’d agree that the city is an atheist/agnostic haven, because we’ve got a lot of Lutherans and Episcopalians and Asian converts (y’know those churches with the signs in Korean out front? we’ve got a ton) and other “quiet” religious types. We probably have more atheists and agnostics than the national average, but not by much, I’d say. It’s certainly true, however, that our brand of hands-off politeness pushes overt evangelizing and door-to-door conversion quite a bit to the margins; we think it’s in bad taste, really. Our political leaders don’t make religious issues the centerpiece of their campaigns, for example; the one time a hardcore religious type was nominated for a statewide office, she was crushed in the election by a humiliating margin. But, anyway, as an atheist, I’m all the way to one end of the scale, regardless.
However, by an odd quirk of fate, the department in my workplace is largely populated by Protestant evangelicals. My closest co-worker, for example, has one of those inspirational Scripture calendars hanging on his corkboard, and if I remember correctly actually has a Divinity degree of some kind.
That’s about it.