Skip to main content

Introducing Myself

By dswrites ~

Hello, all. This is Daniel Sanchez (a long-time friend of Jason Blue's and author of the post "The 'A' Word"). I just wanted to introduce myself. I would never enter a room in real life and just start talking without permission or invite, and certainly didn't want to do it here. So let me introduce myself.

English: Bexar County Courthouse, San Antonio,...
English: Bexar County Courthouse, San Antonio, Texas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I am 44 years old, husband to a wonderful wife who shares my non-theist outlook, father to two girls: a college sophomore studying psychology at Loyola University and a thirteen year-old who is, well, busy being thirteen. My heritage is Spanish. My ancestors came from Madrid and settled in Bexar county (San Antonio) Texas. My "inheritance," if you can call it that, it that I am the first-born male of a Baptist preaching family. My father is a professor of missions at a seminary. My brother is a missionary. My grandfather pastored a church for most of his life. My uncles are pastors. My great-grandfather was a pastor. You get the picture.

I was born in Panama in 1968 in the middle of a civil war. I was held at gunpoint when I was 2 days old. When I was 4, my baby sister was diagnosed with Leukemia. We moved to the States (Atlanta, Georgia specifically) to seek medical aid. She died in my mother's arms. My sister was 2. I was 5.

I am divorced. The product of an unfaithful wife whom I was with for 14 years. My relationship with my older daughter is strong. The younger one is very much like her mother. I have married into 2 sons - one a 23-yr old former Marine with a son of his own and a lovely girlfriend, the other a 21 yr-old college student who is all about the girls and not so much the studying. The younger lives with his dad, the older lives with us.

I have been a "doubter" since childhood, and a "Super-Secret Doubter" since my teen years, when it was made clear to me that questions made most of the people in my life uncomfortable at best and desperately worried for my eternal soul at worst. I never received any satisfactory answers about my sister's death and God's role in it. I decided it was better to believe there was no God than to believe there was one who would do that on purpose. Paraphrasing every mother's edict, since I "Couldn't say anything nice about God, I shouldn't say anything at all."

I became a decent actor concerning this topic, capable of leading prayers, smiling at the right moments, etc. Later in life I became a real actor (briefly). Eventually, I found it hard to play roles that weren't me. The irony of that did not escape me. So I turned my creative side to communication, writing, and design. My current wife loves that part of me and I am one of the truly fortunate who gets daily support for everything I do.

I may never tell my parents about my beliefs. They certainly suspect, but we have never discussed it. My father is in his mid-70's. He is in excellent health, but I don't want him to spend his last 15+ years on this Earth locked in debate and worry over my soul. For her part, my mother would take it as a personal rejection of her beliefs and not a fitting response for her having brought me into this world. She would feel she already lost one child, but "at least she's in Heaven." To lose another and have him burn in Hell is not an option.

I once tried to talk to my father. I was 15. We were working on the car together. I asked him, "If God told you to kill me - would you?" He hesitated a lonnnnnnnng time, and it sincerely scared me. I don't remember his answer. It was half "Don't worry, that would never happen," and half "Well, son, some stories are more for teaching, you can't take the whole thing as fact..." I just remember he was as scared about telling me an answer as I was about hearing one. Both of us didn't want it to be the wrong one. The truth was - there was no good answer. It's either disloyal for him or horrifying for me. The thought that he could hear a voice in his head and take it seriously stayed with me for quite some time.

If he went through with it - what kind of a sadistic God would require that? Oh, yeah. The one that killed my sister. HIM.

If he didn't go through with it - he's defying a direct command from a God who hasn't spoken to anyone for thousands fo years and chose him. Beyond that, he's defying his whole life, everything he believes in, everything he taught us, everything he taught anyone ever, everything he was ever taught by his father...he's saying you can disobey God if you don't agree with Him.

It was theological checkmate.

Looking back, I think I was just hoping for some kind of reassurance. That my world was secure and my father's love was secure. I wanted to feel safe. I think that's what a lot of us want. To feel safe, so that then we can go out and do the things that need to be done in the rest of our lives. That's not an unreasonable request.

So I think a lot about how I can be a benefit to the world in a real way. A tangible way. What I can do for The Good. That much of my upbringing is very much a part of me, and I am grateful to my family for that. I value kindness. I am interested in your life, especially if you are very different from me. I let others finish their sentences when they talk, and I will give you the benefit of the doubt in every situation.

That's my introduction. That's who I am. I hope I can make a positive contribution to the group here. I'm glad to meet you all.

And I'm REALLY looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

How to come out to your parents as non-religious

By Marlene Winell ~  A fter going through your own deconstruction of religious belief, it can feel like a challenge to reveal your change to your religious parents.   You might have a lot of fear about their reaction – anger, hurt, disappointment in you, and so on.   You might fear being disowned.   This is a common concern because our families mean a lot to us.   It’s natural to want approval from your parents.   When you were young, you depended on them for your life; you absolutely needed their love, care, and approval.   So, even in adulthood, we long for our parents to love us unconditionally.     However, in terms of human development over the life span,  it is necessary for   everyone   to outgrow their parents.   Growing up to maturity involves becoming the authority in your own life and taking on the job of self-care and self-love.   This is true even if you aren’t recovering from religion.   Personal health and well-being, in other words, means that your inner “Adult” is tak

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo