Introduction: The Un-Indoctrinable

I have always been immune to religion - out of a mixture of luck and outfoxing its plan.

I was lucky due to the family I was brought up in. Mother came from an Anglican family but in no way practiced or spoke of it to me. Father was a non-intellectual atheist who spoke to me of "Holy Joes" and "Bible Bashers" and that the Pope had collaborated in the Holocaust.

You could say that my atheism was the product of indoctrination from my dad, the same as religious families bring up their children to be like them from the moment that they are born. And I suppose that is true to an extent - I would no way have been an atheist from such a young age had I been brought up in a different environment, but I wasn't.

I was enrolled into an Anglican Primary simply because it was better than the closer community school. But before they could tell me anything about a man on a cloud who made everything in an illogical order in six days, I had my antidote. I had already read about the Dinosaurs, and how they had been around 65 million years before humans.  It was a Eureka moment - I could not believe any further word on Christianity if I knew that their load-baring idea - their creation story - was a fallacy.

I was amazed by the atmosphere at that school - of about 350 students, I can only remeber about two or three Christians, and they were children of ministers. In the battle of indoctrinating those too young to make their own decision, the Church was losing out.

As a child I did not know what atheism was - the school left the word off their curriculum for some reason - so I, and my friends then, thought that the only other option was Satanism. We filled in our information reports as Satanists, and changed the words of hymns to allude to Hell instead of Heaven and Satan instead of God. It was only after telling that to my Dad that he informed me that it was "shite" and that "you've got to believe in God to believe in Satan"

Our non-denominational opposition to Christianity spread. One friend, whose Dad was an avid reader of atheist philosophy, made a flow diagram showing that hymns were simply an extension of ancient pleas to animistic Gods. He sent it to the assembly office. We didn't hear anything of it again.