Month: November 2017

Continued from Part 7

So at the ripe and enlightened age of 17 I was expected to pick the course of the rest of my life.  Settling on computer science, I began applying to school and really wanted to get into the Rochester Institute of Technology.  I applied to a few other schools but this was my dream school.   Anxiously I awaited and eventually received my acceptance letter.  I was thrilled!  My father reviewed the documents and was concerned about the cost.  We took a trip to the school and spoke with the financial aide department.  Essentially there wasn’t anything they would be able to do about the cost and would need to take out loans for it.  When we got back, home my dad essentially told me there was no way I was going to this school and needed to spend two years at community college.  I was heartbroken.

I came to call this thirteenth grade.  There were a lot of people I went to high school with that went here.  I became resentful and didn’t put much effort into school.  Instead I spent that time working on trying to become a leader in the church.  I started a bible study at the college.  I made sure to reserve the room that had the big windows so people could see us in there and might stop and ask about it.  Didn’t get a whole lot of response to that.  It ended up just being a bible study for the people that went to my church and school.  This was also about the same time that I started taking classes at church.  They weren’t formal learning  but more of a getting to know yourself type thing.  I’m realizing now how ineffective it is.  Part of it was taking a Myers-Briggs test.  When I first took it I was an ENFJ.  I took it again a few years ago it had changed drastically to INTJ.  After leaving the church I found how unreliable these tests actually are.

Part of my college curriculum required us to take the philosophy of logic.  It basically teaches logic gates and how to calculate true/false statements.  I found a lot of these portions very interesting and lead me to take a few other philosophy classes, ethics and metaphysics.  Ethics was a pretty great class.  It got me thinking about how we arrive at what we deem right and wrong.  However, I essentially just used it to fill in the gaps of things not directly stated in the bible.  Metaphysics was a bit more eye opening.  Metaphysics deals with the nature of reality.  Things like how do we know we’re not just a brain in a vat being fed memories and sensory inputs.  I liked to entertain these types of thought experiments but didn’t put much actual stock into it.

Continued from Part 6

I coasted through high school doing the least amount of work I could get away with.  I began to resent school and wanted only to do “church stuff.” I was easier to me.  There were few wrong answer do things and nearly no studying needed.  When ever I came across a problem I didn’t know I could just answer “I feel like God is saying…” And that would be the end of it.  I absolutely loved playing on the worship team.  I replaced a lot of time studying school work with practicing playing guitar.

I think the first time I had any thought of doubt would have been freshman year.  That’s the year, in my school, you took earth science.  The age of the earth stuff never really bothered me, I hadn’t done the biblical math yet.  He did say one thing that stuck with me though.  He said “Sorry to break it to you but the water going off your back does so in the exact same pattern as a fish.” I never looked into this but it planted a small seed.  In Sophomore year I had read up some on creationism and decided to debate my biology teacher on whether evolution was a real thing.  I was indeed brought down from my high horse.

Being one that always enjoyed science,I began to shift my views on some of the teachings of the bible to what science had taught me. Instead of being a staunch “God did” christian, I decided that what ever science finds that “how” god did it.  It was easier to maintain my cognitive dissonance that way. Not that I knew what that was before I left religion but I do now 🙂