While considering what to write now that I have made a very-in-my-head commitment to write, I figured that a discussion of religion would make sense to elucidate my life and also, perhaps, make an interesting and hopefully didactic (there’s that old man coming through again) essay on gaining morals without religion. I grew up in a fairly atypical christian household. My mother is a diehard fundamentalist pentecostal. Her belief and trust in god is unwavering and she is a sinner by Romans 3:23. My dad is a fairly progressive catholic. His belief in god is second to his belief in moral absolutes and he is also a sinner, albeit solely through self awareness. I went to denominational christian schools my whole life and progressively jumped from lutherans, to independent baptists, to the assemblies of god(s). Throughout most of my childhood, my father read the bible to me every day. One chapter from the old testament, one chapter from the new testament, one chapter from the gospels and one 15 minute long prayer was my family’s pain quotidien. I memorized a few bible verses and went to sunday school every week. Compared to most of my more recent friends, minus a few notable exceptions, I am a biblical bible.

If you have ever seen the show 30 days, you might have seen the episode where an atheist mother had to live with a super christian, god-sanctified, and nuclear family of four with another baby on the way. The biggest concern that the christian father had with the heathen atheist mother was that he found no tangible way to teach children how to be good, moral people without the use of the bible as a parabolic tool and could only conclude that her children were unprincipled and shameless kids with no guidance in life. At the time, I only thought that the guy was stupid for not believing that children could be raised by example and not only through reading the good book of the lord god our father. Now, I think that there is a much more complicated response to his issues, especially in terms of my life. Despite the plethora of bible stories read in my household, my morality was actually defined by stories uninspired by god and his will.

In addition to the daily bible readings, my father told me stories nightly, to put me to bed as his father did with him. These stories were mostly folk stories of his region in south India mixed with redesigned-in-the-moment stories he read when he was a kid. This included the story of the bishop and the candlesticks in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables to small excerpts from the Sultana Scheherezade’s tales. Without my real conscious understanding, these stories were in direct competition with the morning biblical fables for the prize of capturing my mind and shaping my morality.