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How My Peepee Led Me To Atheism

reverendhornibastard

Depraved Deacon of Degeneracy

I was a nerdy, bookish child. That probably explains why I grew up to be such a nerdy, bookish adult.

When I was about 9 or 10 years old I learned that Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the earth other than the sun, was 4.2 light years away. The problem was, I couldn’t relate to a light year. How far was that?

I asked my grandmother, the only adult in the room at the time, about light years. I’ll never forget her response. Without even taking the cigarette out of her mouth, my saintly grandmother squinted at me and replied with a question of her own, “What the fuck is a light year?”

Our family had recently gone to Disneyland on vacation. My dad drove us all the way from Texas to Disneyland and back in a Ford Falcon station wagon. We didn’t have AC in that car so we sweated profusely all the way to California and back. The trip was a little over 1,000 miles each way. This gave me a pretty good gut sense of how far 1,000 miles was.

Then one evening I resolved to figure out how many miles away Proxima Centauri was. I hadn’t learned about exponential notation yet and pocket calculators hadn’t been invented, so I had to do all the calculations by hand in long form.

I had read that light travels about 186,000 miles per second so I calculated how many seconds there are in 4.2 years and multiplied that number by 186,000.

After filling up half of my Big Chief tablet with mathematical scribbling and littering the kitchen table and floor with eraser crumbs, I determined that Proxima Centauri was about 24,690,000,000,000 (24.69 trillion) miles away.

Soon afterward I was lying on the lawn after sunset looking at the stars. I pondered the incredible distances to the stars I was able to see, all of which were relatively near by. I knew there were billions of additional unseen stars in our galaxy and billions of galaxies beyond our own.

For a young boy brought up in a devoutly religious home, gazing at the stars was a deeply religious experience. What did the incomprehensible enormity of space imply about the power and majesty of the Creator?

Then I remembered - I had been taught that Almighty God was deeply concerned that I might be playing with my peepee.

I burst out laughing.

The ridiculous incongruity between the majesty of creation and the phenomenal pettiness of the Creator’s alleged concern that a young, monkey-like animal was enjoying his peepee on a small planet revolving around an average star in the suburbs of one of hundreds of billions of galaxies was too absurd for even a little boy to take seriously.

Many new questions soon erupted into my mind.

Barely a couple of years later I refused to go to church anymore. I told my startled and deeply disappointed parents that I regarded what I was being taught in church as complete nonsense.

Surprisingly, my parents respected my convictions and did not force me to accompany the rest of the family to church any more.

My career as the first and only altar boy with Tourette’s syndrome at St. John’s Evangelical Church had come to an end.

Since my peepee played such a pivotal role in liberating my mind, I’ve dutifully followed wherever my peepee leads me ever since, boldly going where hopefully not too many men have gone before.