if you are curious....

....and i think i've said this before....

my parents were not religious. my father was technically a catholic, but i never saw him go to church, once. my stepmother found religion late in life; he and i usually went for brunch on sunday mornings when she was at church. he wasn't a bad person, but all he really cared about was sports.

my stepmother was the perfect example of the statement: "only immoral people need to go to church". that woman is/was wicked to the core - the worst human being i've ever met, by a good margin.

my mother would have been raised anglican. she's an addict, so she's been through the 12 steps, and i guess it's left her as some kind of unread deist. i mean, she's not going to go spouting deist philosophy or anything. if anything, i'd be more likely to label her a laveyan satanist.

with the exception of a few outings with a stepfather around the age of ten, i did not go to sunday school as a child. i was not raised with religious values. i don't have catholic guilt, or much of any internalized rejection or rebellion - the only meaningful religious instruction i ever received was at school, and i was kind of taught not to take it seriously. i always took it as an anthropology course, really.

i don't have latent christian values or traditions. i don't celebrate easter or christmas, and never really did. i don't have memories of christian family rituals. i don't have obscure memories of protestant work ethics or values.

i was very honestly raised an atheist. at eight, nine years old i was staying up all night on saturday reading stephen king or isaac asimov novels, falling asleep when the sun came up and just sleeping in on sunday. a little older, and i was in the basement studio all night.

i consequently understand religion exclusively through a leftist historical filter - i have a purely marxist conception of religion, as it came to me largely through secular literature. religion was always a retarding force in society. it was religion that acted as a stop on scientific inquiry, and kept us ignorant and backwards. i've pointed out before that it's more asimov than dawkins, but i would have sounded very much like a little dawkins at as young as eight years old.

so, when i attack christians, i'm not attacking myself. i never was one. it's not some proof i'm not a racist, although i'm not a racist; christianity is as much the other as any other religion is, to me. nor is christianity very white, really - the indigenous religions of europe are mostly lost, but would have been rather tribal and animalistic. christianity was invented in the middle east and brought to europe by brown people, in the world's first example of colonialism.

the point is that i'm not exaggerating when i tell you i'm as harsh on christianity, if not harsher on christianity, as i am on other religions. people don't seem to expect that, for some reason. i don't really know why.

i just try to be as factual as possible in assigning effects to causes. we elected a government with strong fundamentalist christian voices in it, but it is due mostly to the increasing presence of islam - church attendance rates continue to dwindle, while muslims are taking over entire neighbourhoods.

my goal is simply to be as accurate as possible.

but, yes: you should expect a lot of attacks on christianity, so long as we have christians in office, and their policies sound fundamentalist in nature or scope.