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Your bible "school" experience.

Ok,who had to go? What did you think of it?
here is my experience of the one week of torment at the hands of the brain washers.
I never really believed all the religious stuff once I reached the age of reason and started thinking for myself. I basically found going to church about as interesting as watching paint dry. Church was,for me a waste of a perfectly nice day. I hated listening to the preacher stand up there week after week and scream at us about heaven and hell...I was always puzzled why people actually would PAY him to do this and sit there and listen to the same tired old bible stories week after week,year after year...*yawn*

One year, Mother got a wild hair to send me and my brother to bible "school" . She knew we'd hate it,so she sweetened the pot by saying:"You go this time and you never have to go again if you don't like it."

Why she thought we'd like it in the first place boggled my mind. Frown

We both hated it. It was relatively interesting craft classes interspersed with massive doses of religious lectures,where we had to listen to old bitties rant on about various verses of this boring book and who begot whom and so on and so on and so forth.(Most of us did not give a hoot and wanted to be outside playing.) .How and why they found this subject so interesting was beyond me. Why they felt it was so important we believe as them, well,I'm sure they had their reasons. I did NOT look forward to any of it.

We all ways got a snack served up at the end of the wasted morning for enduring the auditory torment. The snack was the cheapest crap they could find;Kool Aid and the dreaded,sickly sweet sugar cookies. Two things I will not consume. . I also grit my teeth any time a small child feels the need to sing that sappy,stupid jesus loves me song, But that's another story for another time.

One boy,named Eddie hated it even more than us. One day,i recall two of the brain-washers were standing in the hall discussing him and what he'd done to avoid the deathly boring experience altogether.

He had gone in the boy's restroom,locked himself in a stall and stood atop a tolit seat.

they eventually found him of course and as I listened to the story about Eddie. I thought:"I wish I'd thought of that!"

needless to say,at the end of the week,we both announced we'd had enough of the noxious expeience and Mother kept her word...No more bubble skool fer us...

At the age of 13,I'd had all I could take or religion being rammed down my throat and told my mother flat out i was not going to church anymore and she could not make me.

She said nothing. My brother quit soon after as well.

I've always wondered why some people believe all the religious stuff,while others see it for the fiction that it is.

Funny about that,eh?

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Permalink Reply by MissElainie on October 26, 2008 at 7:25pm

Bubble skool, huh?

I was supposed to be Catholic, so I was sent to "religious instruction" after school, so that I could get my First Communion and then my Confirmation. I never got to the Confirmation thing because I was sent home with the information that I'd be burning in Hell forever because I'd been chewing gum in class. At that point my mother decided that enough was enough.

The only thing I remember from all this is that during confession I could never remember EXACTLY what I'd done wrong, so I would just report things that I'd PROBABLY done. Then, when I was sent off to recite whatever prayers I was instructed to recite, I couldn't remember those either. I'd get a couple of lines into it, and then I'd finish off with something like, "Sorry, God, I can't remember the rest but I really am sorry for whatever I did, so please forgive me, Amen."

Meanwhile, they were telling me all kinds of fairy stories, which I was used to from the whole Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Founding Fathers and American Heroes crap - so I just cruised along not thinking much about any of it. Until they told me that blind faith is good and questioning is bad. That's where they lost me. As dumb as I was, I knew that anybody who needed me to stop thinking and just have faith had to be hiding something. In this case, everything.

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Permalink Reply by Kevin on October 26, 2008 at 9:57pm

I owe a lot to Sunday School. It made me a staunch atheist.

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Permalink Reply by Goz on October 27, 2008 at 12:29pm

Oh,I agree...Sunday school was also as boring as watching grass grow..And then there was the dreaded 11 o clock service.
The pot luck dinners were good though. That's the only part of church I looked forward to.

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Permalink Reply by Anath on October 29, 2008 at 10:36pm

I went to Vacation Bible School, Church camp, and several years of CCD.

Vacation Bible School was when I was really young, and it was a lot of fun. We dressed up in little costumes that looked like robes, and had a small bag of wooden coins tied to our belts for the crafts area. They had twelve groups all named after the twelve tribes of Israel, and we learned about Jewish tradition during group time. In the morning we would make dough for bread, which got sent off to the kitchens and came back at snack time warm. It was served with other "healthy" types of foods that "Jesus and his followers might have eaten (bullshit)" like grapes and crackers and cantaloupe, with honey to put on the bread. They would spread hay out on the ground for a path and sometimes there would be live donkeys or other interesting things out in the "marketplace", where we would "pay" one of the wooden coins to make a craft. There were other stations the groups would rotate through in the course of the day, music time (my least favorite), where adult and college/high school volunteers would teach us silly Jesus songs that we'd sing in the full gathering at the end of the day and for the parents, Story time, where someone dressed up as an apostle or person from the Old Testament would tell us stories from the bible or saints or something. I liked story time because the stories were presented as TALES, rather than shoved down our throats as literal truth. There were also different worship times, and other times we'd go back to the tents and have some sort of discussion on the daily topics. There were other things too but I don't remember them anymore. Essentially, I enjoyed it like anyone would enjoy a unique summer camp, and I was at an age where the Jesus and God stuff just went in one ear and out the other, and the Old Testament stories were still interesting as stories. It was also a non-denominational Church camp so no one flavor of Christianity was favored.

Church camps were less fun, I did those in middle school. I went to Lutheran camps with my friend, even though I was technically Catholic. The first year was not so much fun, as she and I were the youngest girls in our cabin, and the older girls all thought we were "strange" and didn't like us much. Other than that, I don't remember all that much about the camp except singing around a camp fire and playing a massive game of tag. The second year was actually quite fun because we had a good group of campers, and it was also fun in the same way any other summer camp would be fun; bonfires, hiking, etc. It was actually an "X-Ttreme" camp, so we did rock wall climbing, high ropes, rappelling, and so on. I'm fairly sure there was some degree of "trust God, he helps you do these things" involved but I don't remember... I got a bit swept up in the camaraderie even in the religious bits even if they were a bit boring...

I also tagged along to a Baptist retreat before my Freshman year of high school... horrible experience. We had a guest preacher who liked to talk about non-baptists being wrong and going to hell, and all sorts of fire-and-brimstone types of things. At that age, it really began not to sit well with me, because I was not a baptist and my boyfriend at the time, who also tagged along, was Unitarian/Agnostic.

CCD (catholic sunday school) was not very much fun, and I don't actually remember much of it, except for a few things. I made a good friend there, and she convinced me to become a teacher's assistant when we graduated the program, and I was through my senior year of high school, even though by then I was only religious to keep up appearances. I think it might have been lying to 2nd graders' faces that did it in for me actually...