What movie traumatized you as a kid?

I have two.

Mary Fuckin Poppins.

I went to a lot of kids’ b-day parties as a young child, at this place called the 3 Arts in Cape Town, always on a Saturday afternoon, and invariably blasting us with just a spoonful of saccharine chim-chim fuckin chiminy brain sucking glee. It was enough to leave me insane from an early age.

The other one was…

Freaky Fucking Friday

…with a young Jodie Foster, which I hated for similar reasons.

Honestly I found the meaning of the word saccharine because I looked up that horrible feeling those movies gave me in my stomach… it’s the feeling of your brain getting sucked down into your gut and out of your arse.

Those sickeningly sweet movies are the true reason that I fucking love horror. I wrote this to be humorous, but I am dead serious. I hated those movies as a child.

Indoctrination gone wrong. My journey into atheism. Part 3

This is the third part of my four-part series on atheism. This one was originally published on my old blog on 20 January 2014.

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Where part 2 left off, I was eight years old, and had completed my first confession and first communion. I did believe in God (but no longer believed in Santa Claus), and I did believe in Jesus, kind-of. At least, I believed that God had a son, but I could not understand why I was supposed to pray to him, rather than praying to his father.

I kept my doubts to myself, because I was a child, and had been taught that I must have the faith of a child. I found the whole thing very confusing. Also, I didn’t want to get into trouble.

I went to confession twice more in my life, once that same year, and once before my confirmation, which happened when I was 14.

Before I reached the confirmation class, there were a few years that are mostly a blur in my memory. At one stage I had a teacher named Patrick, who was an Irish South African complete with red hair, red beard and a smoking habit that required one of the kids to be sent to the shop and buy him a pack of cigarettes before each lesson. He was a pragmatic type of fellow, and told us tales of his youth and what it was like to attend a Christian Brothers school, and spent the rest of the time teaching us to know the required prayers and Creed off by heart. He also taught us what to say when people criticized us Catholics, accusing us of worshipping Mary and what-not.

Those lessons came in quite useful in the most surprising of places… Years later, while adding features and fixing bugs related to a program that could store freeform data, but did not correctly persist the right number of characters, I unit tested the code by filling the freeform text with the Hail Mary and Glory Be prayers, from memory. I reckon that after my colleagues saw all the prayers in that database, they must have thought I was off my head.

As for the lessons in defending Catholicism, I learned in later years, when it comes to criticism, even if the negative criticism is unfounded, people who criticize are often just not willing to listen to any response, so there is seldom any need to answer what they have to say. [Edit 28 August 2016. I used to be defensive about my former religion. When I wrote this, I still was. The truth is, the rationalizations that Patrick taught us to use when defending the religion didn’t make much sense, when I think about them now. Why should Mary intercede between us and god? Why pray to Mary?… Assuming a need for prayer at all, which I do not. But even if god existed, praying to Mary makes no sense at all.]

Patrick also taught us about the Holy Trinity, and I did not understand that part. By the age of ten, I was already successful when in came to selective belief. I think, as a Christian, you have to be. I mean, is creation a literal tale? Is it a parable? I thought a parable must have a second meaning. What is the second meaning; the lesson that it conveys? The whole story of God creating the Earth in 7 days, “Let there be light” and the fall of man don’t make any sense, no matter which way you look at it. I knew that already at ten years old, but I did what every good little Christian does, and tried not to think about it.

Then we moved on to the next Sunday School teacher. She was a crazy person named Beverly. I was convinced that she was out of her mind, when she taught us about Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, Limbo and original sin. WTF? We all inherit Adam’s sin, and are not forgiven for it… Only baptism in a Catholic church frees us of this. Thus if a baby dies, having not been baptized, it can not enter Heaven, but must spend eternity in Limbo. As for the rest of us, even if we live saintly lives, after we die we must hang around in Purgatory for a while, maybe hundreds of years, before we can go to Heaven.

I’m sorry, but only a lunatic could ever believe that nonsense. So we inherit sin? The sins of the father, literally. What about every sin of all the other billions of ancestors after Adam?

So by 12 years old, my selective belief was starting to get out of control. By the time I reached 14, at around the same time as my confirmation, I’d reached the point where there was more that I disbelieved than I believed, and my doubts in the existence of God, at least the God I had been taught of, was starting to take over.

Again, this is starting to get long… I don’t want to put too much into a single post (and it’s almost time for me to drive home anyway). Thus here ends part 3. Of course there will be a fourth part. Beyond that, I don’t know.

Indoctrination gone wrong. My journey into atheism. Part 2

This is the second part of my series on atheism. This one was first published on my old blog on 17 January 2014.

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Where part 1 left off, I was six years old, and two weeks into my very short stint of attending Mass alone. I still believed in God at that point, but I also believed in Father Christmas (or Santa Claus, as he is called in many other countries).

I was a shy and introverted little boy, and spent most of my time in my own universe of my imagination. I’d also only just started reading, so it would be a good two or three years before I could discover that books brought a wealth of imaginative tales just as interesting as my own. In retrospect, I was quite advanced for a six-year-old in some ways, and quite behind in others. I was terribly clumsy; my verbal skills were probably not on par with my peers because I didn’t talk much and my imaginary people and places were visual; and my perception of the world was somehow a tad different to everybody around me. This makes me sound almost like a (retarded) child prodigy, but that was not the case. I was just a quiet, shy boy, in everybody’s eyes. I did however, already criticize things like the movie I referred to yesterday, and my taste was already quite different to that of my peers. When I tried talking about it to anyone, they didn’t understand, so I stopped talking about it.

I said I’d explain why my family joined me at Mass… My father would drop me off at the Sunday School, which was done at St Anne’s Primary School in Plumstead, Cape Town. This is on the same premises as St Pius X church. After the class was finished, I would attend Mass (or maybe before – my memory of this is unclear).

Afterwards, I had to walk home. It was only a short way but I always had the problem where I only remember the directions one way, and get confused going the other way. Here is the route, from my house in Attlee Rd to the church. (Ignore Edu-Babez preschool… That wasn’t there back then, and even if it had been, retarded spelling wasn’t all the rage as it is now.)

So, the very first time I had to walk alone, I got confused and turned into the wrong road. I think it may have been Rotherfield Rd… So I walked about twenty meters, realized I was going the wrong way, and turned back, crying all the way as six-year-olds do.

A very kindly old man was driving along, with his wife sitting in the passenger seat. Seeing the poor little lost boy, they stopped and asked me what was wrong. They offered to help, but we had a campaign at school about strangers. You know the type… Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t go to strangers. Don’t get into the car with a stranger… And so on. I couldn’t imagine why that might be. I figured the old guy and his wife didn’t look like monsters who might eat me up, but you never can tell with monsters.

I began to cheer up, having relaxed and been put at ease by the kindly elderly people, which had jolted my memory of the way home, so I politely informed them that I couldn’t get into their car because they were strangers, but “It’s this way” and proceeded to run home.

Of course I informed my parents of the whole thing and they were concerned. They were possibly even more concerned after a mother of another child informed them of my antics during Mass. Mass was rather a boring experience, so after I figured out the mystery of the hymns, I decided to show off by playing with the hymn book when boring things like singing and sermons telling the same stories about Jesus that I’d already heard were going on. Apparently this (random paging back and forth through the hymn book) distracted her. My other favourite pastime during boring moments, which nobody knew about, was pretending that I could shoot laser beams out of my eyes which then stole the life essence out of the back of people’s heads. (Hey, that’s what you should expect when sending a six-year-old alone to church!)

So that didn’t last very long. Soon the whole family went to Mass together, and continued to do so until I was about 18.

The rest of my Sunday School years were mostly uneventful. I was a good boy who never disobeyed, and although I never got comfortable with the whole Jesus thing (I prayed to God, but the idea of him having a son – who was also God – and a holy spirit – who was also God – was something that just didn’t feel right), I thought I was a good Christian.

The only other thing that really stood out for me was my First Holy Communion. Not the communion itself, mind you – I always wondered what those little thingies tasted like, although I knew it was not cake, but the confession. By then I was eight years old, and we all did our first communion together. Before that, we all did our first confession. At eight years old, I had already decided that I didn’t believe in confession. My logic then was not much different to that of an adult: There was nothing about confession in any of the bible stories I knew, therefore it made no sense. I also didn’t understand what made the priests so special that they could forgive all my sins, because they were just men, and I had been taught that Jesus died for my sins, so there was no place in my understanding for confession.

So I bunked my first confession by pretending to be sick that week. I did eventually go the next week though, and consequently felt left out. Everybody else had gone and stood in a long line together, for confession with Father Tom Nicholson, who was much loved by all, while I was all alone, and had to face Father Roche, who was a cranky old man much feared by all. I even had to make up some sins because I had not, in my understanding, done anything wrong. This contradiction confused me: Lying is a sin, but I must lie because I need some sins to confess. (Who’s going to forgive me for that one?) It didn’t occur to me that I had committed a sin by bunking my first confession the previous week, because I was always good at convincing myself that I was really sick.

Of course, in religion we always convince ourselves of things that we know can not be true, don’t we? Then we call it faith.

Here ends part 2. There will definitely be a third part. Beyond that, I don’t know.

Indoctrination gone wrong. My journey into atheism. Part 1

A new Facebook friend asked how all her atheist friends came to be atheists… So here it is for me, a series I wrote on atheism and first published on my old blog. Although I’d mentioned my atheism in passing before that, this was my first attempt at writing about it. This was originally published on 16 January 2014.

I’m publishing the original four parts here, separated by 30 minutes between posts…

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A short intro: Sometimes I have entire entries, right down to the paragraph level, maybe one or two puns or wordplays or some other deliberate ambiguity to keep things interesting, as well as the summary with some sort of smart-ass comment, all in my head before I write a single word. That is, the entire structure is predefined and I know exactly what I want to say, which means that the only thing not preset is individual words making up the clauses to link everything together. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I just write. This is one of those times, so I don’t know how long it will be, or whether there will be more parts.

I’m an atheist. You should already know that by now. But I wasn’t always this way. I started out as a good little Catholic boy, and somehow ended up here. How did I get here? I am interested in what makes me tick, and hence what makes other people tick. The psychological journey, of myself and of others, intrigues me. Thus my objective here is to remember “out loud” how I got here, in anecdotal form. (I recently discovered I’m good at writing anecdotes, so hopefully it will be interesting.) I must warn you that it may not be interesting, so if you find yourself getting bored… Sorry! Just go read something else.

Wind back the clock to 1978, when little six-year-old Jerome started Sunday School. Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, I was too quiet and shy, and struggled to fit in. At six years old, I was probably at about the furthest point from fitting in. I had few friends, and preferred to be alone. I lived in my own world most of the time. This was years before virtual reality, but in my universe, something just like it already existed. In the stories that went around my head as I played, everybody owned a game system, similar to a PlayStation or console system, although no such items existed yet. In my universe, you plugged into the game and became somebody else, either a super-hero here on Earth, or a character on some other planet or space-ship. You could work yourself up, and eventually rule planets. I’m making this sound far more sophisticated than it was… None of my characters even had names because it was a visual game in my head. When they spoke to each other and used names, they would be mumbled, so everybody was called Hmmmph or Ergh.

The point is, the little Jerome who arrived late for that very first Sunday School lesson was a boy who struggled to relate to other children. I hated the Disney-style movies that everybody else loved, like Freaky Friday, because I thought they were false and just too sweet. So when I walked into the room and everybody else was singing “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands”, followed by “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so”, which I had never heard before, but decided immediately I disliked, I was completely out of place.

I did grow to love the place though. The old lady who taught the little ones and ran the place was called Aunty Penny, and she made me think of tea and cake, which was my primary objective when not living in my own world. So when we were all encouraged to go to Mass (“It’s a celebration”), I told my parents and ended up going to Mass alone for the first few weeks. (More on that in the next part, including when and why the rest of the family joined me.)

I didn’t know what they meant by celebration. I hoped it would be like a birthday party, with lots of tea and cake. So when I attended that first Mass by myself, I was sorely disappointed to find it was just a normal boring church service, like the ones we (the family) attended at Christmas and Easter. Everybody seemed to know what was going on and had a Sunday Missal, except me, but there were hymn books on the benches. I soon caught onto the pattern of the Mass, and knew when to stand up, or sit down, or kneel, and repeat the mumbo-jumbo like everybody else.

What I did not get was how you were supposed to know what hymn to sing. I was in my first year of school, and so had begun to learn to read. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could make out most of the words and read the hymns without any difficulty, but the mystery of knowing which hymn to sing eluded me for the first two weeks. Then it came to me… Aunty Penny (the sweet old lady who had, in my mind, tricked me into attending because I thought I would get tea and cake) was changing a series of numbers on a wooden board at the front, and those were the numbers of the hymns. I was very happy to have figured it out, but the numbers were often bigger than I could count, and singing didn’t really interest me, so I didn’t actually sing the hymns.

The rest of my team has arrived here at work (the testers), so now I have work to do, and besides, this is about long enough, so here ends part one. There will be a second part, but beyond that, I don’t know.