When I grew up, I was raised by people who became atheists as teenagers, as a product of their own thought processes. The religious people they associated with were circumspect and candid, always a fine balance to strike in matters of personal opinion, with respect to their religions. Most of the elders of my tribe stated their beliefs without thinking they were going to get disassembled and reassembled as a wall trophy, and without any visible conviction or expectation that any of the rest of us would hear them out on the subject of the transubstantiation. As an example. There are many kinds of crazy my father warned me about explicitly.
I didn’t grow up in a world of crazy. I grew up in a world of endlessly cool stuff. Our family friends like Ron and Leo also brought mountains of cool into our lives with shared wilderness and canoeing, and ceilingward fountains of fascinating books on every conceivable scientific and botanical and cosmological subject. My parents were the unGoth Addams Family, two madly in love kids, kids of their own in tow, growing scary plants and having eerie pets and allowing the discharge of air pistols in the house on special occasions. SF, Horror and Fantasy, and Military History were part of the visual, verbal and written environment. We watched 16mm sound films in the basement. Charlie Chaplin was silent and WC Fields was not… just hearing an old style projector fire up is a sound that immediately puts me in a happy place.
And there was always the latest tech pOp could get on his budget. That’s what I meant by growing up in the future.
