How I Lost My Religion

When I was a kid, Mom forced me to go to Sunday school most of the time. I hated it, but I didn’t have much choice in the matter, no matter how much I protested.

Later, when I was 11 or 12, I went to Sunday school on my own, at a different church. It was less than a block away, so I could walk. And all my friends went there. It was fun, because we got to play games and sing fun songs.

I can’t say I learned too much about God or religion in general, but I did give it a try. When my Sunday school teacher was praising the wonders of God’s creation I asked her who created God. She couldn’t answer that. Neither could anyone after her.

I was an inquisitive little preteen. I asked all sorts of questions about the bible that troubled me: How did Noah get all those animals on one boat, especially those like penguins and polar bears that come from opposite ends of the earth? Why would God put an apple tree in the Garden of Eden and then tell Adam not to eat any apples under pain of death?

But despite my inquiries, I believed in God and in Jesus Christ, because I figured my preacher and Sunday school teachers were all smarter than I. I may have been wrong.

The preacher at my little neighborhood church warned all us kids that when we got into high school, they would try to teach us that humans evolved from apes. “Don’t believe it,” he warned us.

Then, a couple of weeks later, my Christian grandmother and my mom were having a discussion about what sort of people had populated the Land of Nod, where one of Adam and Eve’s sons moved to find a wife. God had created Adam and Eve, but the bible didn’t say anything about His creating other populated cities. It was always assumed by my family that Adam and Eve sired the whole human race.

Grandma speculated aloud that perhaps the residents of Nod had evolved from monkeys. I corrected her, because of what my preacher had told me earlier.

But as time went on and I grew into a man, I still believed in God, but religion became less important to me. I didn’t attend church anymore, but I still called myself a Christian when asked.

Later, after my father died, I started attending again. For 10 years straight I hardly missed a Sunday. I went to other church functions, too. I was baptized. And I generally enjoyed myself. But as I look back, I can now admit I enjoyed going to church for the wrong reasons. I enjoyed the building, the people, the social hour, the food, even some of the hymns we sang.

But, try as I might, I didn’t really feel all that religious. After I was baptized, all I felt was wet. Something was still missing.

I have come to the realization that what was missing was never there in the first place. I have discovered the bible is chock full of obvious contradictions and errors. And I finally realized that the only reason people know that the bible is the word of God is because the bible says it is. It is the epitome of circular reasoning.

I realize that if God wanted us to have a religion, he would pick one for us and make sure we all knew which one it was. Simply quoting the bible is not sufficient, because if it were, there would not be so many denominations of Christians. The Koran is no different for Muslims. The Torah is no different for Jews.

But that’s not to put down anyone who lives by their religion as long as they don’t use it to harm others. Some do, but the list is far too long to enumerate all the ways religion can harm things in this column. I’ll only mention one way: Pat Robertson.

As for me, I’ll pick reason and logic to live by. If God is the creator of the universal laws of nature, then he is nothing if not reasonable and logical.

A Trip to the Zoo Disappoints

When I was a kid, my folks took me to Cincinnati to see the zoo there. I don’t remember too much about it because I was quite young, maybe 6 or 7. But I do remember they had trash cans shaped like hippos that sucked in the garbage with vacuums in their mouths. I thought it was cool.

I remember monkeys and other animals in cages, as though they were in jail. It was hard to see most of them and many of the animals were not active. It also stank.

When I became a parent, I took my two kids to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago a couple of times. It was a nice experience, except that almost everything cost extra. We had to pay more to see the dolphin show, which we passed up. We had to pay more for the petting zoo. The same was true for the St. Louis Zoo, but it was at least free to get in the gate.

At the time, the zoo in Indianapolis was called the Indianapolis Children’s Zoo and it was located on the east side of town. It made for a good visit, but they were a bit deficient on animals. Again most of them were behind bars, but at least they were smaller bars so you could see the animals better.

When the new Indianapolis Zoo opened in the mid-1980s I was excited. Although I didn’t live in the area then, I visited every summer and the zoo was a great place to take my kids. So was the Children’s Museum.

The Children’s Museum added on a planetarium and a CineDome theater that surrounded the audience with the movie. They were awesome treats for the kids and for their parents. The CineDome is, sadly, no longer there.

Since then, the Indianapolis Zoo has added some new animals and exhibits. When I first attended, neither the dolphin pavilion nor the dessert biome was complete. Now, they have a nice walk-under display at the dolphin pavilion. And most recently, they have remodeled the old Waters building, now calling it the Oceans building.

I recently visited for the first time since the improvements. I took my daughter, who is no longer a kid. But I was eager to see the Oceans display.

The Indianapolis Zoo has much better animal exhibits than the zoos I remember as a child or even as I remember at Chicago. Although the St. Louis Zoo and the Brookfield Zoo may be larger and have more animals, the Indianapolis Zoo is somewhat unique in the way it chooses to display its animals. They are separated into biomes, which are large areas of the planet with similar climate characteristics, such as grasslands, rain forests, desserts, and deciduous forests.

Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed during my last visit. The Oceans building was nice, but it wasn’t much different from the old Waters building. The big difference was that the Amazon Rain Forest exhibit has been replaced with a dogfish shark display that allows visitors to pet the small sharks.

It’s fun for the kids, I guess, but I miss the Amazon display. And I was expecting that, since they were remodeling, they would include one of those walk-through ocean aquariums where the fish are swimming all around you. But they didn’t have that.

At $13.50 a pop, and typically a full parking lot, one might expect continuous additions and improvements. But since the 1980s, not much has changed. The horse-drawn tram is gone; that was a nice ride. They’ve added a carousel and a couple of other kiddy rides that cost extra, but nothing stands out as spectacular.

But it’s not tax supported, like the St. Louis Zoo, and it is much better than it was before it moved to White River State Park. And I believe they are planning to add some larger primates in the near future.

But at this stage, one visit every couple of years is enough. Even then, each visit is pretty much like the last one.

Writing without Technology

In one of my columns last month, about how modern technology has made it so much easier to figure out who that actor is or who sang that familiar song, I ended by lamenting that I didn’t have access to the same technology when I was writing my high school research paper.

It was my senior English class. I think now they refer to English classes as language arts, but they still involve a lot of reading and a lot of writing.

That’s the part I hated most about English class, the reading. I didn’t mind the writing so much, but I hated reading. That’s probably why I flunked freshman English and had to re-take it. I had the grade; I just failed to do a required book report. Looking back, it was a pretty bad trade-off, despite the fact that I got an A on the repeat.

Anyway, back to senior English. My teacher was Mrs. Houston. She was stern and proper. And the last thing she wanted anyone to think of her as was colloquial. Her syntax was impeccable, as was her vocabulary.

I actually liked the lady. She influenced me more than I probably gave her credit for at the time, especially the time she flunked me on a test that I actually got an A on if she had graded it properly. Although I had all the answers correct, I didn’t follow the instructions to the letter, so she counted all the matching questions wrong.

Senior English is the class in which all the students must write a, gulp, major research paper. This was no mere book report. It didn’t involve the reading of one single novel or short story. No, I had to actually do research by reading several sources and writing down all I had learned on note cards before compiling them into a coherent paper of at least 1,200 words.

The good news was that I got to pick my topic. I didn’t have to write about one of those stupid classic novels like Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn. I got to write about what I liked. And back then, as now, what I liked was technology.

In those days technology was a fledgling industry. It was in the days before electronic calculators, and long before desktop computers. It was a time when I was amazed at the electric business machines in the typing lab. One could even do complicated division problems, and it only took a few seconds to divide one number by another.

Anyway, I didn’t take business class; I took typing. I learned on a manual typewriter. I hated it, but I’m glad I took the class. It makes writing these columns go much faster, except for the moments when my brain can’t keep up with my fingers.

And it made writing that research paper much easier, since Mrs. Houston required all final drafts to be typed.

The technology that was in vogue at that time was manned space exploration. It had only been a year or so since the first manned moon landing, and I was still awestruck over the event. So my research paper turned out to be a fun read. I don’t mind reading if the subject is interesting and relevant to me.

So I read lots of magazine articles and books on manned space flight and did my research paper on the history of the Apollo space program to date. It seemed much easier than I though it would be. The note cards piled up and the order they were to go in seemed intuitive. Since I was writing a historical account, chronological order seemed appropriate.

So I got out that old Remington typewriter that I had found in the throw-away bin at the old Edinburgh Daily Courier office and I wrote my 1,200 words, and maybe a few extra just for insurance.

It was a beautiful, marvelous work, at least in my own mind. I read it over and over, making sure there were no stupid errors in syntax or spelling. Obviously, my old Remington didn’t have spell checking.

I got a C from Mrs. Houston. I had expected an A, or at least a B+. But I got a C. When I asked her why, she replied that it was hard for her to read because the letters were blurry and that I should be happy I got a C. She told me next time to clean the keys.

Ouch!