WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR dot COM

I was raised attending a very judgmental, intolerant, authoritarian parochial school. I spent the first few years of elementary school being absolutely terrified that the God they taught about was pissed at me for one thing or another, and that I was going to screw up and go to Hell for any number of things.

Then my dog died around 3rd grade, and my teacher told me – well, scolded me, actually – that she wasn’t going to Heaven, because animals couldn’t make the affirmative choice to accept Christ. This really bothered me, because I’d been taught that basically the whole point of life on Earth was living it according to all these strict rules, so we could go to Heaven.

Shortly after that, I asked one of the authority figures at the school if my uncle, who was the coolest and kindest and most thoughtful person I knew, was going to Hell because he was a Buddhist. They furiously denounced him as evil and bad, and that, yes, he was going to Hell.

This didn’t make any sense at all to me, because my uncle was a good and honest and awesome person who was an inspirational figure to me in my life, and I couldn’t understand why his religious choice meant he was going to suffer for eternity. I mean, I get why the people teaching us this version of their religion believed that, but it didn’t make sense to me.

And that’s when it all started to unravel for me, because it just didn’t make sense. Also, around this time, my mom went religion shopping. Every weekend we were at a different church, and they all basically said, “We are right, everyone else is wrong, give us your money.” I was still really young – probably 10 or 11– and it just felt like a giant scam to me. I wasn’t getting anything positive out of having religion in my life, and I resented having to spend time sitting through sermons and things like that. I started to feel like religion was a very complex story that they were telling us to keep us afraid and controlled.

I think it was in 5th or 6th grade that I read Edith Hamilton’s MYTHOLOGY for the first time, and I remember thinking that these gods in various myths were also stories people told each other to explain things that they didn’t understand or needed to put into a certain context. I did some kind of math, and realized that it was all fiction. All of it. It was all stuff that they made up, and I didn’t need that stuff in my life.

I’ve gone through various phases of not having religion in my life, from being the smug, condescending r/atheist type when I was a teenager to a much more tolerant “your beliefs belong to you, just keep them out of my face” type that I mostly am, now. 

I get that some people want and need religion in their lives, and I know plenty of people who get a geat deal of comfort and joy and positive benefit from their faith. I also get that the vast majority of religious people are kind and awesome and take the teachings of the Biblical Jesus to heart in wonderful ways that inspire them to be kind and generous and patient. I also absolutely despise the American Taliban types who try to use religion to deny rights and equality to people they don’t like.

I would prefer that religious institutions and public institutions be firewalled off from each other. I’d prefer that religious organizations were taxed, and that the scamming televangelists that John Oliver exposed this year would go to jail for fraud.

But I am a realist, and I know that won’t happen in my lifetime.

Thanks for your question.