The Silencing of Religion
Part Five of a Multi-Part Series “Towards Religion and Meaning”
Note: This is a multi-part series, if you haven’t read the previous posts, I highly recommend checking them out to catch-up before proceeding, here.
- Part One: Why I Turned Away From G-d
- Part Two: Declaring My Atheism
- Part Three: The Repugnancy of Religion
- Part Four: The Superficiality And Thoughtlessness of Religion
Mirabeau B. Lamar High School was a far cry from my elementary, middle, and junior high schools. Whereas I had previously been located in The Woodlands ~30 miles away from downtown, Lamar was a mere five miles from the Houston cityscape. And with this change in environment came a melting pot of a student population that I was frankly unequipped to properly engage with.
When I say ‘unequipped’, what I mean is that I grew up amongst a completely uniform Caucasian population and wasn’t familiar with how to properly engage with most other people in a respectful manner. To add to this, my school had a monolithic variance of intelligence amongst students — something I was also not familiar with. As a result of my social ineptitude, I received a few ‘educational beatdowns’ during the first few months at Lamar, causing me to learn some ‘street smarts’.
Luckily, I was able to seek refuge from these situations inside the bubble of the “International Baccalaureate Programme”. This was my school’s version of the AP (Advanced Placement) program. It comprised of about 15% of my grade’s total student population and entailed a special curriculum that allowed students to get ahead in college via placing out of various courses.
Despite my poor social skills, I was able to make some friends in this new school. We would spend most of our time talking about what you’d expect teenage boys to be talking about — messing with our classmates, chasing girls, hanging out, etc… But every so often, we would go deeper and discuss matters of philosophy, morality, and purpose.
We weren’t the only ones having these deep conversations. As individuals from junior high began to add me on Facebook, I noticed a quiet rebellion against their religious upbringing occurring via their status updates. While seeing these statuses deeply frustrated me (as I was bullied for my Atheism), I was also happy to see these people finally thinking for themselves.
Throughout high school, religion would continue to fade into irrelevance as Atheism began to take more and more of a hold on the minds of myself and my peers. It was nice to know that my classmates were focused on rooting their thoughts in rationalism instead of some unquestionable religious dogma.
It was no longer taboo to be Atheist. In fact, if there was an overtly devout group of religious individuals at my new high school, I was completely unaware of it. Which was fine by me.
