My youth in church part 1

 I don’t write about going to church as a child, because although I remember some specific moments from church services and Sunday school, I don’t think about it very often, and I remember very little on the whole. I could describe a Mormon service to people, maybe in dreary detail, and I could describe the sometimes annoying way Mormons talk at church, but I don’t recall many specific or meaningful instances from particular service or meeting because to be honest these memories blend together in their blandness and uniformity and the painful sense of wasted time, but I do remember that there were many non-remembered times sitting on the benches with my family or with the other deacons or the teachers and not paying any attention whatsoever to whatever the speakers at the pulpit said but daydreaming relentlessly about the girls my age in the congregation or maybe a science fiction book I’d read the previous day. 

Later I’d moved from science fiction to Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov and by the time I’d turned 16 and become a priest (a Mormon priest, ages 16-18) I had not learned to drive and did not wish to go on a Mormon mission but I kept going to church in order to see my friends and some of the girls. 

Truthfully, I enjoyed church a little more after I stopped believing, because I knew I could completely ignore the sermons or talks and I wouldn’t go to hell. I could think whatever I wanted and didn’t have to worry about the creator of the universe reading my mind and getting pissed off at all my sex dreams. 

But eventually I got tired of it. 

Now I never go unless it’s a funeral.  But although I don’t believe in a human-like creator, and I don’t believe in any of the miracles of the Bible or anything at all in the Book of Mormon, my youthful church experiences did imprint my mind with most of the Mormon values. I believe that even when religious people talk about believing in a religion, they actually mean the values of that religion, and not the miracle stories. And values means the value of people. When someone lists the “values” that are important to them, they really mean “people-judging-criteria.”  A person says; “We value chastity,” but they really mean “We assess people based on their chasteness.”  Or “we believe the creator of the universe assesses people based upon their chasteness, and we believe this because we read about it in the Bible which is the ultimate authority on how god evaluates humans.”  If you think of yourself as chaste, this is a very comforting thought. 

I still have a Mormon youth inside me, instinctively judging myself and other based on the nonsense I learned in Sunday school. But I have to admit that without the validation of the miracle stories, those judgements no longer carry much weight