Michelle Rogers
I was born and raised Roman Catholic. Even when I was a child, I was always pretty religious. I even refused to play with Ouija boards or do séances during slumber parties with my friends. I also enjoyed reading Lives of the Saints books. During my teenage years, after we moved to Alaska when I was 15, I became pretty shy and withdrawn. During this time, I also began to realize that the lesbian feelings I had been having for the past few years were not going to go away any time soon. The people who helped draw me out of this shyness were a group of charismatic Catholics who came to our church to do a retreat. Looking back, what they did was “love bomb” me and pretend to be a friend to me. One of the women that I had developed on crush on from this group encouraged me to go to Franciscan University, which is an ultra-conservative Catholic school, where a large majority of the people are also charismatic.
So, off to Franciscan University I went when I was 18 to major in Theology. They use reverse peer pressure. All of the popular people prayed and went to Mass every day and fasted 3 times a week in order to convert the world. People saw me as “holy” because I, too, prayed and tried to believe as hard as I could. I did pray every day that God would make me stop feeling attracted to other women. I sought counseling in private, as well, where the counselor tried very hard to get me to tell him that I had been sexually abused as a child or had a bad relationship with my parents. As hard as tried to dig something up like that, I couldn’t. (Lucky me!) I had always been something of a tomboy and never liked wearing dresses. He encouraged me to dress more feminine in order to feel more feminine. I also considered being a nun. I visited convents and talked to them about joining. Lucky for me again, I had student loans that needed to be paid off before I joined.
Towards the end of my years there, I ended up becoming involved with another woman and drifting away from the ultra conservative standpoint. I began seeing the people there as being judgmental and “holier than thou” and literally, quite filled with hate. Protestants were labeled “Prods” and seen as going to hell, as well as other Catholics who were not as conservative. Most especially evil were the “Cafeteria Catholics” who pick and choose which teachings to obey.
After I graduated, I felt myself questioning many of the teachings. Once I was away from that environment and back at home, I was able to more fully accept my homosexuality. At the time, I saw it as “the way God made me” and I continued to attend church. However, I felt myself excluded from the congregation because of my homosexuality.
I drifted away from Catholicism after a few years and began exploring other beliefs. I taught a course in Comparative World Religions and found myself very interested in Buddhism. I eventually joined a sangha and took my vows. However, after a few years I found that even in Buddhism there was a lot of “holier than thou” and relying on the supernatural to make things better. Buddhism does not necessarily center on a deity and can be non-theistic, but it still fed reliance on the supernatural.
So, although Buddhism has a lot of good teachings and practices, I still found myself getting frustrated and drifting away. I read Sam Harris and other atheist writers. I stumbled on them by accident through P.Z. Meyers’ blog Pharyngula. At first I was hesitant to read them because they were atheists and I was uncomfortable with it. However, it started making sense and the pieces fell together. The more I read, the freer I felt. I am now responsible for my actions right now. I don’t have an afterlife or reincarnation in which to make everything up or to be punished. This life is all that I have. This life is all anybody else has, too, which makes others even more precious to me than they were before. It feels good to finally be free.
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