I have something in common with jamakin.
No, it's not antisocial personality disorder. And for the record I rather enjoy jamakin, and want to know when he's going to play more WW.
I was also raised in a fundamentalist Christian home.
Have you ever seen the documentary Jesus Camp? If you haven't, and you for whatever reason want a glimpse into the fundamentalist Christian world without being required to become a social pariah, you should watch this movie (last I knew, you could stream it on Netflix). My childhood was only slightly less intense than that. I went to church three times a week (Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night) on average until I graduated high school (we did less Wednesday night prayer services when I got older, but I went to Youth Group, so I was still averaging three times a week at church). I went to a Christian summer camp and even worked there in high school (Camp BaYouCa, which stood for Baptist Youth Camp. I cannot make this **** up).
I think the highlight of this was the fact that I was actually home schooled for 7th and 8th grade. Ditto my sister, who is one year younger, and my kid brother (4.5 years younger) was home schooled for kindergarten through 2nd grade IIRC. Why my parents would suddenly switch us from public school to home schooling might seem fairly arbitrary - after all, I had already been in public school for seven years at that point, surely any sinful stuff they were going to teach me had already been taught, right?
Nope. It was because middle school was when they started teaching evolution.
I'm not entirely sure why they decided to put us back in public school. I certainly learned the theory of evolution in HS biology. I think on some level they didn't want to impede our ability to succeed in the real world, which not having a HS diploma would surely do.
It's hard to fully detail what the effects of growing up in that type of environment are, and I'll probably tell some stories in the course of this blog that touch on this subject. But I think the effects of my upbringing were most obvious in two somewhat related facts - I was incredibly socially awkward in HS and college (I was never the most popular kid in grade school, although I wasn't the least popular either, but missing those two grade where everyone basically entered puberty was a real social killer for me), and I really and truly believed that having sex before marriage was an extremely dire sin and was consequently a virgin until age 23.
Yeah, reconcile that with the infamous (and now deleted) 4L thread.
The logical (and correct) inference would be that I no longer consider myself a fundamentalist Christian (I'm not even sure I believe there is a God, although note that I still capitalized "God"), but it's funny how it still creeps up in little ways. Like sometimes I'll remember a Bible verse that gets triggered by something someone says or does; I'm sure I must have memorized hundreds as a kid. For example, contemplating the existence of a God, I have an automatic reflex buried somewhere deep in my brain - "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God."
It was a long period of gradual questioning of basic tenets I was raised to believe that led to my deconversion, if you can call it that. And on some level, I have to admit, I'm still afraid that they are right and we're all going to Hell. But that's a fear born of years of having those ideas hammered into my brain as a child, and to a certain degree, they will probably be there until I die.