Ralph Edington
My Conversion Story
My story is not exciting. It’s not revolutionary. It’s not even long.
I was a conventional child of a convention family in Southern California in the 60’s. My mother, who was Catholic, insisted on bringing us up “proper” by sending us to the local Catholic school.
I’d always looked askance at the wildly unsupportable claims of religion, even as a small child. My first thoughts were always, “Oh yeah? Can you prove that? Do you have anything at all to back that up?” However, one day, at the tender age of 10, while in the fourth grade, the nun/instruction made a serious, irreparable error — she introduced the class to our first science book.
After reading the book from cover to cover (though it wasn’t required), it became clear to me, even at 10 years old, that there were two opposing camps in the world — one that offered facts, evidence, proof, reason, logic, and common sense, that could back up their claims, and another camp that asked you to accept wild, improbable stories “on faith” — and the more faith, the better — in fact, the fact that you could believe something that contradicted all evidence and common sense was taken to be a sign of great… well, great something. But it didn’t sound good to me at all.
I knew from that day which camp I stood in. Which camp I would fight for. Which camp I could truly believe in — no faith required.
[ratings]
