Discussion question related to my religious upbringing.

Both my mother and father were very religious in studying the Bible and praying, but they never attended a formal church during my lifetime. As a young boy, I attended the local Methodist Sunday school, but stopped before I was ten. One of my classmates in elementary school was struck and killed while waiting for the bus by a young man who fell asleep while he was driving returning home after working the night shift. I didn’t understand why God would have allowed that to happen and my mother’s explanation didn’t help.

But growing up on the farm I had already had many doubts about passages in the Bible that didn’t reconcile with what I observed. I watched cows, cats, and dogs labor and give birth to calves, kittens, and puppies, so I knew early on that there was no way that any woman named Eve could have been born without a uterus and therefore bearing children was a normal mammalian process and not due to any sin.

We also had a variety of fruit trees and I ate the fruit and knew it didn’t carry any special knowledge of anything, and I couldn't conceive of why a tree with the supposed characteristic of possessing fruit with the knowledge of good and evil would have been planted in the garden anyway. Who would be eating it and what happened when the fruit ripened, did it fall to the ground and deteriorate like all the fruit from our trees and what if an animal ate it, like the deer did with some of the fruit from our trees, would they acquire knowledge of good and evil? As far as I was concerned, the fruit was just juicy and tasty.

As a little boy playing with one of our male Beagles, I was rubbing his tummy and noticed that he had nipples and I asked my mom why, since he was a boy dog. I remember her asking me why I had them. That question remains with me today, because there is no reason for man to have non-functioning nipples unless woman was created first and they then became non-functional in a man just as they are on a male Beagle.

At night, I would gaze up into the stars, there was no light pollution, and when I learned how far some of those stars, like our sun were from Earth, I realized that if I were on them, I wouldn’t even be able to see Earth so I began to think that in the great universe we were a pretty insignificant part.

About this time, I began to question all the time and effort throughout history spent on trying to determine how we got here and all the people killed because they believed or didn’t believe a certain way. I wondered how much better the world would have been if all that time had been channeled into trying to make life as good as we could for ourselves and others, but as I got older, I also realized that other people have different views and reasons for believing as they do and I doubt that that will change much in the next ten thousand years. In a billion years more or less the Earth may cease to exist and what remains of any of us will long be gone with our only consolation that the elements which comprise us will probably still exist in some part of the vast universe.