The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [19]
I was not born into a born-again family. None of my four parents (bio and step) were religious in the least; yet neither were they nonreligious. I think that they just didn’t think about God and religion all that much. Like most children of the Great Depression who came of age during and fought in the Second World War, my parents just wanted to get on with life. None attended college, and all worked hard to support their children. My parents divorced when I was four and both remarried: my mother to a man with three kids who became my stepsiblings, my father to a woman with whom he had two daughters—my half sisters. Mine were the quintessential American blended families. Although I was periodically dropped off for the obligatory Sunday school classes (I still have my Bible from the Church of the Lighted Window in La Canada, California), religious services, prayer, Bible reading, and the usual style of God talk that one might find in religious families were absent in both of my homes. To this day, as far as I know, none of my siblings are very religious and neither are my two remaining stepparents. My father died of a heart attack in 1986, and my mother died of brain cancer in 2000; neither one of them ever embraced religion, not even my mom during her decadelong struggle through half a dozen brain surgeries and radiation treatments.
Imagine their surprise, then, when in 1971—at the start of my senior year in high school—I announced that I had become “born again,” accepting Jesus as my savior. At the behest of my best friend George, reinforced the next day in church with him and his deeply religious parents, I repeated those words from John 3:16 as if they were gospel, which they are. I became profoundly religious, fully embracing the belief that Jesus suffered wretchedly and died, not just for humanity, but for me personally. Just for me! It felt good. It seemed real. And for the next seven years I walked the talk. Literally. I went door-to-door and person-to-person, witnessing for God and evangelizing for Christianity. I became a “Bible thumper,” as one of my friends called me, a “Jesus freak” in the words of a sibling. A little religion is one thing, but when it is all one talks about it can become awkward and uncomfortable for family and friends who don’t share your faith passion.
One solution to the problem of social appropriateness is to narrow the scope of one’s peer group to like-minded believers, which I did. I hung around other Christians at my high school, attended Bible-study classes, and participated in singing and socializing at a Christian house of worship called The Barn (literally a red house with barnlike features). I matriculated at Pepperdine University, a Church of Christ institution that mandated chapel attendance twice a week, along with a curriculum that included courses in the Old and New Testaments, the life of Jesus, and the writings of C. S. Lewis. Although all this theological training would come in handy years later in my public debates on God, religion, and science, at the time I studied it because I believed it, and I believed it because I unquestioningly accepted God’s existence as real, along with the resurrection of Jesus and all the other tenets of the faith. My years at Pepperdine—living in Malibu, sharing a dorm room with a professional tennis player (Paul Newman called once to arrange lessons, causing my mom to nearly faint when I told her that I actually spoke to her minor deity), playing Ping-Pong and Monopoly with a bunch of jocks in Dorm 10 (women were not allowed in the men’s dorms, and vice versa), hearing speeches by President Gerald Ford and H-bomb father Edward Teller, and