Picking up where I had left off, when I first really started to outwardly reject the superstitions I once held true was in high school. It was a direct result of the church youth group my mom had made me participate in for a short time.
It was sincerely a moment of clarity. To be fair, it would be disingenuous of me to say that I immediately dismissed any irrational thoughts and rejected any uncritically examined claims. That was not the case. There were still some (although very small in number) superstitious and paranormal ideas that I held on to after this point. Basically, I still hopelessly clung to prayer and faith. Rather, this event was the spring board that launched me head long into skepticism and what made me examine most claims a little closer than I had previously. So what happened?
For starters a little about the church my mom attended and the youth group. The church was a non-denominational congregation made up primarily of wealthy, or relatively wealthy, families and the church itself was a burgeoning area megachurch. The pastor was a former candidate for U.S. Congress and, in addition, my uncle was one of the church deacons. At the time funds were still being gathered to erect their building and mass/sermons were held at an area high school in the auditorium and after mass Bible studies and youth groups were held in individual classrooms. These are mostly trivial matters for the story, but give you a little background on the church.
When I was 15 or so my mom started making me, my brother, and my sister and I attend church with her. I never wanted to attend the church or the youth group and resisted as much as I could, but lost that battle on most Sundays for about a year, maybe 18 months. My dad never went, which I quickly began to resent him for. Not because I looked down on his lack of commitment to God or some such nonsense. Not at all. I was envious. I was pissed that he got to stay home and relax—that’s what I wanted to do! Further, at the time, I was convinced that I got all the religion I needed from reading select passages of the Bible and watching Mysteries of The Bible on A&E, which was much more true than it was not.
Anyway, by the second or third Sunday my mom and aunt conspired to get me into the church’s teen youth group. I was pretty vocal about not wanting to attend, but eventually had little choice when I was introduced to the youth minister and had to face the prospect of telling him, to his face, that I was not interested. Sadly, I buckled to the pressure. I agreed to go.
Although I did agree to go and sit through these sessions, mostly quietly and keeping to myself (personality traits that friends will attest are not common for me), I snuck out or avoided going whenever I possibly could.
Several weeks into attending youth group, there was one Sunday that I decided to not attend one “class.” My mom was in Bible study, my sister was in the younger youth group, and my mom had the keys to the car. I was stuck. I certainly wasn’t going to go to youth group, but I had nowhere to go. So I decided to just wander around the otherwise empty high school, dodging the occupied classrooms and keeping an eye on the clock so I would know when to meet my mom and make it appear as though I had actually attended the youth session.
So there I am, wondering around, and I decide to take a break at a water fountain to get a drink. As I lifted my head up from the fountain a wave of slight terror swept over me. I was caught. My uncle, the church deacon, happened to be out in the halls as well and spotted me. Crap. He walked over to me and asked why I wasn’t where I was “supposed” to be. Trying to think quickly, I told him that they were watching a movie (which was true), I showed up late (not true) and that I didn’t want to interrupt the movie (also total B.S.). He said okay, clearly not believing me, and let it go from there. He could have made a big deal about it, but he didn’t, which I respected and still do. The downside was that I knew I had better be at that next meeting—getting caught again did not seem to be an option for me at that point.
Funnily enough, it was at that follow up meeting that I had my revelation. It was October and a week, maybe two, before Halloween. Perfect time for the hip youth pastor to rap with the kids about Satan, right? Never mind the fact that All Hallows’ Eve is a holiday steeped in religious tradition as it was intended to honor the Saints.
There I am in this classroom—I think it was a choir room—and there are somewhere around 30 other teenagers in this class, give or take, and we’re having Halloween dos and don’ts laid out for us, then it happened. He brought up Ouija Boards. Seriously. He brought up Ouija Boards and talked about the dangers of messing with spirits and conjuring the Devil. It took me a moment to realize that he was serious. What he obviously didn’t know is that I owned an Ouija Board and that I knew it was a trick and nothing more than a cheap piece of cardboard with an even cheaper piece of mass-produced plastic.
After giving a brief overview of what Ouija Boards are to the uninitiated, he first asked how many of us had ever seen one before. Of course, I raised my hand with many others. Then he asked how many people thought Ouija Boards were dangerous and not something to be trifled with. My hand shot down. He closed his initial round of questioning by asking if there was anyone who thought Ouija Boards were okay to use or play with. My hand shot back up. It was the only one.
Shocked that I had disagreed with the idea he was presenting us with, that Ouija Boards were dangerous and spiritually harmful, he pointed me out and said something to the effect of, “Zack, you’re not worried about Ouija Boards? Why is that?” It was as gentle a question as he could possibly offer.
My response was simple, slightly sarcastic, and true. I confidently said, “Because I don’t believe that Parker Brothers is in league with the Devil.”
The youth pastor sat in stunned silence for a moment and then acted as though I had said nothing at all. In that same moment I noticed several of my classmates (?) looking at me aghast at what I had dared to say, but part of them had to know was true. Quickly the youth minister moved on and went back to his discussion on the dangers of the witching board and conjuring devils and spirits, completely ignoring my response.
I sat quietly and listened to him babble on about what I knew was nonsense, then a couple of other kids related second and third hand stories that they claimed to have heard about Ouija Boards doing mysterious things, like floating, spelling out words on their own, not allowing themselves to be destroyed and so on. Not one of their allegations even remotely credible. Yet, there we were, wasting a perfectly good Sunday morning while the youth pastor encouraged this circus. I suppose it’s possible that he didn’t believe any of their stories, or even the words that were coming out of his mouth, so long as he got the kids excited about Jesus. On the other hand, maybe he really did believe it all. Maybe he really thought that any Tom, Dick, or Harry could waltz into a Toys R’ Us buy what amounts to a devil conjuring tool and in less than an hour open a portal to hell. I have no idea. All I know is what I saw and the conversations I heard and it was in that moment that the light bulb went off.
I was appalled by the out right nonsense that was being shoveled to me and when I looked around the room at the concerned faces and nodding heads, it bothered me on a deep level. I was angry at the lone adult in the room for encouraging it all and I felt bad for my peers who were getting wrapped up in this nonsense. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right reward patently false stories about flying Ouija Boards. It wasn’t right to tell kids that if they played with a popular party toy that devil may come and claim their souls. It wasn’t right to make clearly impressionable kids believe that they would possibly faced hell for pretending to call on ghosts and scare each other in a manner not far removed from campfire stories.
It was the first time I can truthfully say that I saw the negative effects of superstition. Where I saw the emotional and cognitive harm that they can do. I felt no guilt about having owned an Ouija Board that day, but what about the kid who did? Peer pressure at that age is a hell of a thing. Imagine, you’re a 14-15 year old kid and some adult that you look up to, for whatever reason, and several of your friends start saying that a particular toy is evil and that if you play with it, there’s a good chance Satan’s going to come for your soul, and maybe you’ll even go to Hell. What does that kind of guilt do to a person? How does it affect how you at that age? How would that effect how you thought of others who didn’t know what you “knew?” How would that kind of logic affect your everyday thinking and decision making? And be honest with yourself when you answer that question. Now imagine that the fear of Hell genuinely means something to you, how does that affect your motivations and actions?
If that thought experiment doesn’t work for you, and you do have a fear of Hell or Satan, imagine something that you think will cause you to go to Hell. Now replace that thing or action with the action “owning a toy” or “playing with a toy.” Do you see the insanity here? Do you see why I found that discussion so despicable? To think that I, a child, could have been forced into Hell, a pit of fire and eternal suffering, for owning and/or playing with a toy? Worse, that some of my peers clearly believed that in that moment?
It was something that I could not abide and it was something that had profound impact on how I thought about the supernatural. Instead of giving it the occasional pass, I quickly abandoned most all of it, except for clinging to some bits of religiosity (like prayer).
I didn’t stop watching all of those paranormal based TV shows that I had always enjoyed. Rather, I began watching them with a more certainly modified point of view. A more critical and questioning one. I won’t say that I had all of the logical tools or that I could reasonably call myself a skeptic then or that I even had the ability to do the proper research when examining an extraordinary claim. But, what I did know was that something was up. Something wasn’t right with all of these claims. Maybe, some of them were true, but there were just too many inconsistencies and questions to be answered. And maybe there was some real damage being done to people by others who proclaimed some position of authority. By all means, at the time, I considered that youth pastor to be an authority on Christianity. Then I found out he was nuts. I began to wonder, what if some of these other beliefs that I had were wrong, too?
I told my mom about the nonsense that I had witnessed and what I was told. While I wouldn’t say she was as offended as I was, she did seem to agree that it was a rather ridiculous thing for me to have experienced. She also didn’t argue when I told her that I would no longer be attending that youth group. A small, but important, victory for me.
When I had this moment, I didn’t consider the harm that Ouija Boards could, potentially, cause to people by encouraging a belief in spirits, ghosts, poltergeists, devils, and other nonsense. A harm and superstition that played directly into the hands of this youth minister who exploited it. I had only considered the board to be a toy that was not meant to be taken seriously, but rather something, like I said, akin to telling campfire stories.
I was well on my way to skepticism, without really understanding the word. I was less a skeptic and more of a doubter by then. Or, to use Sagan-esque terms, my baloney detection kit was still missing a few key components.
To be continued…
