I'm recounting this experience because I'd like to hear if it chimes with anyone else’s experience. I have already met someone who had a very similar experience in the same circumstances at about the same age and I'm wondering therefore if this is fairly common whether there was something about that particular place or situation that induced it to happen.
My parents were regular churchgoers but used to chop and change between churches, I’m not sure why. Eventually, they settled on a church called St. Andrews Presbyterian in my hometown. The minister Rev. Bellhouse was particularly famous for the quality of his sermons something to which I, myself, can attest.
I was aged around about 10 at the time and a feature of this church was that at a certain point during the service the minister would ask the children 5 – 14 year olds) to file out of the main body of the church and go to a separate meeting room where the Sunday school was held. There, a woman with a permanently angry expression and tightly pursed lips as if she were about to release a stream of invective at each and every one of us for our sins and misdeeds, would deliver a kiddie-sermon on some Christian topic, all of which I have completely forgotten. The other thing that was outstanding about her was that she wore a very strange hat; I don't know why I remember her hat, but I do.
One Sunday, whilst in Sunday school listening to her painfully dull interpretation of the love of Jesus and all the rest of it, I had an absolutely overwhelming feeling that I can only now really put into words. I suppose you could call it a reverse “damascene conversion”; like a sudden blinding light, I realised that Christianity was complete bullshit! Since that day, I have never had any reason whatsoever to change that view; quite the reverse, in fact, the passing of over 60 years since that moment have only served to reinforce what I perceived in a flash of blinding light at that very special moment. Since then, I have come to view most other religions and religious beliefs in the same light; I make only exceptions for Buddhism, which it is not strictly a religion as it does not postulate the existence of any sort of God, and Jainism which is the very distilled essence of a belief system based on peaceful coexistence with all other forms of life on earth. Aside from being vegetarian, many Jains refuse to eat root vegetables as harvesting them kills the plant along with many tiny creatures living in the vicinity of its root.
In what I consider to be a truly extraordinary coincidence, I recounted the above on Facebook and I received a reply from someone saying that they too were a member of the Sunday school group in that particular church and that they had had a very similar experience. To me, this begs the questions
“s this a fairly common experience amongst those people exposed to organised religion from an early age?”
“Was this revelation triggered by the miserable, angry old bat who ran the Sunday school?”
“Was there something particular about that church that induced my reaction and indeed a similar reaction in at least one other?”