It's very easy to retrofit mythology, lore, and conspiracy into a framework when there is no room for breadth of nuance.

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Again, as an example: Many things O'Hair did and said were absolutely indefensible. And those terrible things have nothing to do with prayer or religion in public schools or official government activities. But I didn't know about a lot of it, or was skeptical of its truth for awhile, because I was socialized into 1-dimensional thinking.

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To be clear, I still consider myself to be an atheist. There are as many ways to be an atheist as there are ways to be human, and really that's true of anything. But, evaluation and criticism can (and should) be based on more than a single, pass-fail criteria.

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I was conditioned to believe this was the nature of all paradigm; you are always at war with the opposite of whatever is most important to you. It took a long time for me to unpack that. And it took longer to understand than it did to unlearn it.

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Everything was all or nothing. No room for discussion, question, or nuance. Only joy in the fall of perceived enemies. As an example: My youth group held prayer for the comeuppance of Madalyn Murray O'Hair after she had been kidnapped. We had a pizza party when it was confirmed she'd been murdered. The war jargon and imagery are not analogies.

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In my early 20s, after I came to accept and lean into my loss of faith, I went through a prolonged period of strident, overarching "strong" atheism. I know many people who experienced the same. I've always thought it was rooted in bitterness and youthful search for identity. While I still think those are factors, this morning it occurred to me that it might have more to do with how the evangelical church taught me to believe.

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