Here's a gambit sure to draw in lots of comments: The Rude Pundit asks people to submit Christian horror stories. When religion goes bad, it gets disgustingly rancid, so I'm sure he's getting a flood of juicy tales, with the usual insanity of bigotry and going-to-hell stories and lunatics babbling in tongues and dishonest proselytizing. So, inspired, I thought I'd share with you my horrible childhood experiences with the vicious Christians who drove me into atheism.

Only I haven't got any.

I actually have rather pleasant memories of church. I was brought up a Lutheran, and attended a small white plaster church in Kent, Washington, that was also attended by my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my mother (Dad was a bit of a heathen), and many other people of Scandinavian descent in the area. It was a calm and unpretentious place. We'd go to the service on Sunday morning, listen to an unmemorable sermon on some bible verse, sing a few hymns, and then I'd sometimes go to Sunday school, which was mostly more bible verses with a bit of arts&crafts. My parents were relaxed about it; if I didn't want to go some Sunday, it was no big deal. If you listen to Prairie Home Companion, you know what I'm talking about—most of the people attending were Minnesota transplants, and I grew up hearing that Minnesota sing-song accent and the vestiges of Scandihoovia, with "uff-da" and "nehmen" the usual bland cusswords.

I also sang in the church choir and was a regular altar boy. I went through confirmation classes, but gave up on them before finishing. My abandonment of religion was not a traumatic event; I'd never been a serious believer, and all that happened was that I started thinking about what the church was telling me, realized it was largely uninteresting, mostly untrue, and that pretending otherwise wasn't particularly honest of me, and I stopped going. My family was unperturbed, I had no regrets, and there weren't any hysterics from the church leadership (the pastor was a nice guy, and the choir director…she was a saint, an amazingly sincere and dedicated person.)

So now here I am, years later, apparently with a reputation as someone who hates Christians and Christianity. It's not true. I've got Christian family and friends, and while I think there is no rational reason to believe in religion, I am also well aware that we don't live our lives entirely in the realm of reason—I don't think less of a person for enjoying a morning spent singing and talking about moral values, any more than I damn myself for spending an evening now and then curled up with some SF novel. I think they'd be better off without the religious crap clogging up their brains, but I'm not going to lecture the average guy about it—I remember one teacher who moralized at me about the bad influence of comic books, and I think it would come off just like that.

But here's what I do despise: self-righteous religious dogmatists who use their bibles as clubs to oppress. Religion based on fear of hell and threats of damnation, with congregations full of schadenfreude. People so overwhelmed with the nonsense of their faith that they've lost all perspective, and have let it dictate politics and science and other aspects of reality. The godly who think their religion is a justification for dictating what other people should do, rather than what they themselves should do. People who think virtue is solely the provenance of faith, and assume that believing in Jesus is enough to make them good. Any religion that is used to argue in favor of killing people is simply evil. I can't abide the pathological religion that is dominating the politics and media of our country right now.

It is more than a threat to my preferred secular way of life. I think it is a betrayal of the worthy, balanced kind of religion in which I was brought up, and I am constantly dismayed at how rare it is for Christians to express their horror at the hijacking of their faith by the Falwells and Robertsons and other pious poseurs and intolerant haters of the far right wing. There has to be a recognition that religious extremism is despicable, and not something that we protect and rationalize because it's got the word "religion" in it.

Of course, one other worry I have now is that just as I was disillusioned and disappointed by the last election, maybe I've had it all wrong. Maybe those good people in the little white church of my childhood were all hateful bigots, quietly biding their time until the opportunity was ripe to rise up and slaughter the infidel. If that's so, don't tell me. I think I'd rather live in my little bubble of good-hearted, irrational unreality. Consider it a vestigial religious impulse.