My parents didn't go to Church, but my dad's parents did. They picked me up and took me every Sunday. I don't really know how the tradition got started, but by the time I turned 16 it was such a part of me that the first place I drove solo was the Church.
By that time though, I'd already become aware of the possibility that it was all a load of horseshit. In world history we learned that there were all the other people in the world, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, even athiests, and they were ALL going to HELL. Oh right - I should mention that I went to a Church school from kindergarten thru the 10th grade. So anyway I was a little disconcerted that were all these doomed people who, like me, pretty much just grew up believing the same thing as the people around them. In fact if my guys were wrong and one of theirs was right, then I was the doomed one! Oh God! I asked our Youth Minister about it, and he pretty much assured me that nice people like Ghandi and Mother Theresa were hellbound for not believing in Jesus, or for believing, but believing incorrectly. Well shit, that wasn't what I wanted to hear at all!
After that it was pretty hard to keep going to Church. Taking the communion crackers and grape juice just seemed like blasphemy, since I no longer believed in what they represented. But not going, and upsetting my grandparents was also pretty horrible. Shortly though I had half as much to worry about there when cancer took my grandmother. My grandfather moved back to OKC for some reason, and I went off to college where I got to hang out with neopagans, hedonists, atheists, and all sorts of bad sorts. In the long run things have worked out OK I guess. I don't resent anyone who had me go to Church, since in their belief they were doing the right thing for me.
I wonder what your wife and inlaws think about religion. Maybe you should raise your daughter with the freedom to choose, but let your parents tell her about Jesus, and let your in-laws tell her what they want to as well? In the end, the decision will be your little girl's regardless of what you decide now. Good luck with that all the same.
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Originally Posted by Thomas Henry Huxley
"When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last... So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic". It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant..."
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