Early Beginnings - My first encounter with God.
When I was a child I didn't really follow any particular form of religion. I grew up in basically a non-religious family. The closest thing to religion for us were the Chinese traditional rituals that my father would practice every year or from time to time. Most notable were the visits to the cemetary to see the grave of a dead relative. I remember standing in front of the gravestone chanting and bowing. The fun part was eating all the food that we brought and shooting off the fireworks. As I got older I dismissed these rituals as superstitions. My mother on the other hand didn't seem to follow anything in particular. She thought my father's rituals were silly. She did take us children to a Buddhist temple once at the invitation of a friend.
My first encounter with God, sort of speak, came when I was in the 5th or perhaps the 4th grade of my elementary school days. I attended Public School 191 back in Brooklyn, NY at the time. My younger brother Ray became good friends with a black or African-American kid named Anthony Platt. They were in the same class together at school. On the weekends they would hang out and play together. Sometimes I'd accompany them. Anthony would invite us up to his house and meet his family. We got to know each other pretty well.
Eventually we found out that Anthony attended church and believed in God. He told as all about God and how God controlled everything. Most notably he mentioned that God would punish people for doing bad things. From that point on everytime I hurt myself in some way like stub my toe or cut myself Anthony said that I was being punished by God for something I did that was wrong or bad. Both my brother and I did not believe him and we told him so but he was adamant in his belief. We thought his belief in God was no different than believing in Santa Claus which we didn't believe in either. My brother and I were probably two of the few kids in school that didn't believe in Santa Claus mainly because we didn't celebrate Christmas. According to my father this was mainly because we were Chinese and most Chinese people didn't celebrate Christmas (actually I suspect it was a ruse so he could avoid having to buy us presents.) That was one thing we had in common with the Jewish kids but there weren't many at the school we attended.
I eventually capitulated and said there might be a God but my brother did not give in. I did it mainly to stay on good terms with Anthony not because I believed it. I still hung out with Anthony because even though I didn't agree with him I thought he was a nice guy. My brother on the other hand stopped hanging out with him. After elementary school we lost contact with him because we'd gone on to different junior high schools. We never saw Anthony again.
After that I didn't think much about it until high school, for the most part I was primarily an atheist. As far as I was concerned religion was something other people did. I thought most religion whether it was Christianity or Judaism or whatever was nothing more than superstition; however, in high school I encountered two very powerful and influential forms of Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism. My life was about to change in a dramatic way, but that's a long and very drawn-out story for another time.
..ktlam..
April, 15, 2009
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