How Synthaetica got this way

I’ve never been great at putting things into concise terms when it comes to telling a story. I can manage sometimes not to ramble, but I have an eye and a mind for details, and as a result, the details are important to me.

My story is probably not functionally different from anyone else who was raised religiously and who later stepped away from delusional thinking, but I hope that in writing this, I can offer some insight and perspectives that some of you who are just now, or just recently going through this, may not have. It’s been twenty years since I started the process of stepping away. Those insights are probably not all that unique, for what it’s worth, but they’re mine, so I relate them. ;-)

I was adopted at birth and raised by a loving family who were only slightly left of the “fundigelicals” of today. Basically, if you didn’t go to their congregation, you were going to Hell. I was adopted because my adoptive mother couldn’t bear children anymore. We had a lot of physical similarities nonetheless, and I don’t recall there being public mention of my adoption, but inside our family, I was told about it early enough that I don’t remember a singular, pivotal moment of being told. Unfortunately, tied to that was a clear expectation that I “live up to the standards of their bloodline”, and my personal failings as a youth were continually interpreted as offenses against those standards.

I was hyperactive, probably of that very finite set of individuals who are legitimately hyperactive and not just maladjusted. While I happened to look a lot like my adoptive mother, our personalities definitely clashed. I learned the word “bastard” directly from her mouth. The arguments were screeching scream-fests. I ran away the first time at 12, again at 14, and moved out at 16 and lived with various friends until I finished high school.

Through it all, I maintained an adamant faith in Christianity. Their particular form of it was actually somewhat liberal in comparison to other Protestant denominations, but that’s fairly relative in terms of a purely conservative dogma. I kept trying to please them, kept failing miserably, and was continually reminded that everything I did dragged their name through the mud. It was, yes, all about them, and basically only about me when I screwed up.

At 18, I entered a ministry school, and that was actually the beginning of my wild ride away from delusion. The most profound experience was that first week away from “home”, when it became readily apparent just how woefully untrained I was for living on my own. My adoptive parents had failed me miserably. Admittedly had a tough row to hoe with me, as by the time I was old enough to start preparing for life in the big, wide world, I was listening to them the least. But the end result was that I was not half as self-sufficient as I should have been at that age. I was learning life-lessons all the way through the age of 25 that my peers had mastered in their early teens.

Related to that was the fact that thanks to having been sheltered so much, even after moving out (the friends I lived with went to the same church), I really had no idea how to function sociologically, either. My way of thinking was incredibly limited, and my ability to interact positively was severely limited. I was, in the most classic sense of all, a “user”. My “friends” and girlfriends of that time in my life all had something in common: I needed something from them, and that was the limit of it. I was a horrible person at that point.

And then, in my second semester at ministry school, two interesting things happened. What felt like the most significant thing at the time, was that my girlfriend told me she was pregnant. But earlier on the same day, in our language class, Koiné (biblical) Greek (I was in advanced classes for that because I had studied Koiné prior to attending the ministry school), we were sitting there in a class of 12 students, with eight different versions of the Book of Mark: eight different, self-contradictory and mutually-exclusive versions of the Book of Mark.

I asked our instructor, “So with all these different versions of Mark, how do we know which one is the right one?” And his response was, “Well, that’s the beauty of faith.”

Something just clicked in my head, right then and there. I swallowed my instinctive response, which was along the lines of “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me”, finished class, and dropped out of school that same day. Still possessed of the best of intentions, I spent the next few weeks trying to figure out with my girlfriend what the best thing for us to do was, and ultimately, I let my adoptive dad talk me into enlisting in the Army.

Of course, my adoptive parents weren’t really through with me yet. I was lucky enough to get a week’s worth of leave between Basic Training and my Advanced Individual Training, and when I came back home, I had adoption papers to sign. My adoptive parents and her parents had convinced her to give up the baby for adoption, despite the fact that I had tested for, and been awarded a highly predictable career track in the Army. My adoptive father, who was a Brigadier General in the Army Reserves, contrived to have me sign the release of my right to my child at Fifth Army Headquarters, in San Antonio, our home town. It was definitively presented as a no-option thing. There were two MPs outside the door.

I served for two years, including during our incursion into Panama, then applied for and received an ROTC scholarship. I had originally applied for, and been accepted to Georgetown University, but wound up taking the scholarship at Abilene Christian University, because that same girlfriend and I were still trying to do the right thing by each other. Abilene, Texas happens to be the town I was born in, and where I was adopted from. So, during my first semester there, I went natural-parent hunting, and found them.

Apparently, I was supposed to be my natural mother’s ticket out of the house at the time, but I was born a month early, so her parents had forced her to place me for adoption. It’s funny how history repeats itself, isn’t it? Nevertheless, she had married my natural father, and I had a full-blooded little brother and sister. The meeting was strange and joyous. My girlfriend, with whom I’d basically been together, off-and-on now, for almost five years, met them of course, but given their lifestyle (considerably more liberal) saw the writing on the wall; she was afraid she was going to “lose me”. So, she told my little sister after about a month that she had gotten pregnant again “to keep me”.

By then, my thinking was clear enough to smell just how bad that stank. As much as I felt I was ready by then to settle down and all that, there was no way I could continue on in a relationship with her. I couldn’t really fathom how a “Christian” could do such a thing to someone else, let alone her own child. The moral duplicity of that act simply stank of a level of disregard that I couldn’t force myself to condone. Of course, my counselors at ACU didn’t give a whit about that. They just expected me to “do right by her”. But, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. So there was a second child that I wouldn’t get to raise, and since my girlfriend was adamant about raising her herself, not only that, but she would be raised to hate me. And ultimately, she was.

I dropped out of ROTC, and served the remainder of my original enlistment, including Desert Shield and Desert Storm. I didn’t re-enlist, because I’d noticed another pattern in my life, which was the epitome of “third time’s a charm”, and I’d already been in combat twice. Credit it with what you will, but the unit I would have been assigned to had I stayed in, was the one that was shot up in Haiti.

It was during those last years in the Army that I completed my separation from the church and delusional thinking as a whole. I was an Intelligence analyst and forward-area observation specialist, which honed my critical thinking and decision-making skills, and organized religion quite quickly began failing all sorts of “smell tests”.

When I left the Army, I found it very easy to gain employment and even finish my education, because I had taught myself how to think, how to adapt, and how work with limited resources. I worked actively to make myself into a responsible adult, and I have by and large succeeded at that. Of course, I still learn, I still strive to make myself better, and I raise my children to do the same. I met my wife at a wine festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and we married a bit over a year later. She, and her entire family, are atheists, and are a great source of understanding and feedback as we raise our children without religion.

My adoptive parents disowned me (literally, legally, and actively) when I found my natural parents, fairly proving the fallacy of the “unconditional love” under which they had purported to raise me. My last attempt to contact them was responded to by a friend of the family who instructed me, curtly, not to attempt to contact them again. That was in 1993. I have violated that from time to time by mailing photos of our kids to them anonymously, but with a return address. There have never been any responses.

I’ve never heard from our eldest child, the one who was placed for adoption. Part of the criteria his mother chose was that whomever adopted him subscribe to the same religious fallacies that we did at the time. I have no idea if he even knows he was adopted, or even alive, for that matter. All I do know is that he is male, and if his adoptive parents kept his given names, he was named for a long-time friend of his mother’s family.

When she turned eighteen, my daughter (the second child) opened communications with me, and even came out for a couple of weeks this past summer to get to know us better. We have a good relationship, despite the fact that she’s a missionary, and we love her very much. We even put her on our phone plan and we txt/pix-message almost every day. She has been a great addition to our family, and while I certainly respect and love her for who she is, she also represents a closure of most of the circles that were opened around the time of her birth.

So, that’s my story. I’ve tried to refrain from commentary on my adoptive parents’ actions. You know what it felt like, and how hard it was to recover from it. But recovery, my friends, is not only possible; it’s self-evident. However you separate from your own sources of delusional thinking, the bottom line is that separation is unfortunately necessary. It’s toughest with families, because the elder members of the family will almost always be inclined to view your atheism as a form of rebellion, and will thus tend to treat you like you need to grow up, unaware of the inherent irony in that premise. But if they are in any way open-minded they should, at some point in the future, come to accept you on your terms.

But yes, the separation is necessary. It’s called self-integrity. I don’t recommend sacrificing it for the appeasement of the emotional instability of those who can’t, or won’t, mentally evolve with you.