Writing as Jeremy V
Religion
I am ashamed to say that, at one point, I believed wholeheartedly in God. Furthermore, I don't feel great about the fact that I'm ashamed of it, but I'll try and put it in context.
I was born into a family which, by the time I came along, was Methodist in tradition only. My grandparents on my mother's side were only faintly religious, but I always got the feeling that church was a social thing for them more than anything else. I would be surprised to learn that the tapes they received from the church, recordings of the services delivered to their door when the trip every Sunday became too much for them in their old age, were ever played. But then, I might be wrong - my grandmother always expressed the mildest outrage that I had never been baptised, at which point my grandfather would dutifully tell her to 'mind your own business, dear'.
So, my father was always an atheist, and vehemently so. I figured my mother was the same, although when questioned she would respond with a stock, non-committal response. Not even an interesting response, usually just an 'I don't know'. Whatever she believed she kept to herself, a philosophy she clearly inherited from her father, and one I only learnt the value of when I was about forty and had spend roughly 75% of my life with my foot wedged firmly in my mouth.
As far as church was concerned, it was alien soil to me as a child. I never set foot in one with my family, not even at Christmas, and it took me until I was nine to finally have a reason to go - a kids club, fittingly called The Jeremiah Project. All my friends went, and I badgered my dad to let me go. He was having none of it, so I bothered my mum, and with a frown and a heavy sigh she woke up early every Sunday to drive me to down the road to the church gates, where she would let me off and pick me up without getting out of the car. Bear in mind that she and my father were children of the sixties, the generation when the atheist was invented, to all extents and purposes. The last thing they wanted was a group of 'bloody sun worshippers' (my father's words, not my own) brainwashing their liberal, independent child with poorly disguised preaching.
Of course, I didn't even associate the games and activities with God or Jesus. At that age, who even really understands what God is, or who Jesus is meant to be? They told me that God created the universe, and I just said 'okay' absent-mindedly, more concerned with getting the massive inflatable blue ball before any of the other kids did.
Once, on a trip to the beach with The Jeremiah Project, I got into a conversation with one of the team leaders. I can't remember which of us initiated it, but given the topic I think it's safe to say it was him.
'Jesus was a good man, Jeremy,' he said as we walked along the beach.
'Uh-huh', I said, distractedly.
'Do you know what happens when we die?'
'Not really,' I said, because I didn't.
'Well,' he continued, 'when we die, our souls go to heaven.'
'That's where God is,' I said, feeling I should take some part in the dialogue.
'Yep. And we all live forever.'
'Wouldn't it weird if, when you die, you're still aware of the world around you, and they bury you in a box in the ground, and you can't move or talk so everyone thinks you're dead, and that's what you're like forever?'
The team leader didn't say anything for a while.
'That's what I think happens,' I added.
'No, we definately go to heaven.'
By the time I grew into myself and started asking questions about the world around me, I came to the understanding pretty quickly that God, heaven, Jesus, etc were purely fantasy. Tellingly, I don't even remember coming to that conclusion. Because the religion hadn't been drilled into my psyche from birth, and because I was essentially a tourist in the chapel, my mind didn't put up a fight against the realisation that this world was no more a reality than the C.S Lewis novels my mother read to me at night. I closed the door on my inner church and lost the key, so to speak, honestly believing I would never need nor want to open it again. Not long later, maybe only six or seven years, as a result of an unpredictable series of events I found myself standing on the steps of the metaphorical cathedral once again, the battered wooden door freshly kicked in, barely more than splinters left swinging loose on the hinges.