If I were to kick the bucket tonight, what would I want my last message to be? I would like my life to bear testimony to the freedom of casting off the worldview that was instilled in me from childhood.
I found it terrifying to cast it off. But having done so, I shudder to think of how my life might have been had I continued believing the nonsense I was taught as a child.
Children are taught lies
The truth of things now seems self-evident to me. And yet children, even today, are taught lies as truth. They are ‘inculcated’ into ‘the faith’; today’s language for indoctrinated to believe a Big Lie before they reach the age of reason.
I feel angry about it. I feel angry that people are appalled by the sexual abuse of children but they are quite happy or not bothered about teaching children a Big Lie as if it were the truth.
I cannot believe that in this day and age children and families are manipulated into allegiance to a myth. Baptism, holy communion, confirmation. Tinkering with children’s identities and minds and emotions. Including people, excluding them. Lying to them.
Of course, it isn’t just religions that lie to people. States do too. Putin’s lies to the Russian people and starting a war based on a Big Lie. Or the Big Lie of Brexit to the people of the UK. Or Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him.
I believed a Big Lie
It is humiliating to recognize that I believed a Big Lie. Enough to give nine years of my life to studying to perpetuate the Big Lie. And when my son was born, although I didn’t want to baptize him, I went along with the societal pressure to perpetuate the Big Lie.
Make no mistake. It is bloody hard to escape any Big Lie, even when you no longer believe in it. We think of access to schools. We feel the pressure from relatives – good, well-meaning people who don’t see it as a Big Lie. Or who feel that it’s not fair to a child to exclude them from the Big Lie of the society they will grow up in.
‘It’s not fair to do that to a child,’ some will say. So baptize them, let them have their first holy communion and make their confirmation. Cross your fingers behind your back. You don’t have to believe it. But it would be unfair to opt out of the Big Lie for the sake of the child.
Would it?
Would it not be better to teach our children to choose honesty and truth, integrity and authenticity? I’m dumbfounded that a Big Lie I grew out of decades ago is still being taught to children. A Big Lie that divides children from one another. A Big Lie that gives them a false identity. A Big Lie based on sheer lies, absolute fabrications and utter nonsense.
Joe Armstrong’s first memoir is In My Gut, I Don’t Believe. For reviews, see here. He is currently writing his second memoir, Saved by a Woman.