Originally posted on Wordpress on 10 November 2023
I've mentioned before that I grew up in an atheist family, which is apparently really rare in the United States. I guess most ex-Christian atheists know how church works, they're familiar with Christian myths, fables, parables, whatever - the point is, I'm not. I know jack shit about that religion.
Given my upbringing, I never saw Christianity as the default. It was just one of the many things people believed in, like Greek polytheism or Chinese folk religion. There was nothing special about it; it was just as equal and "valid" as anything else.
Obviously, Christians didn't believe that. Their religion was the one true religion that all other religions were measured against. But it wasn't just Christians who did that - ex-Christian atheists also did this. They might have said that Christianity was no different from any other religion, but they definitely didn't behave like they believed it was true. Instead, they would behave as if every religion in existence was...Christianity.
Somehow, these atheists' realization of "if this other religion is untrue, then Christianity is just as untrue" led to "every religion is exactly the same as Christianity, just with different names". Just about every Western atheist I've ever met acts as if they believe this. They genuinely cannot comprehend the existence of a religion that does not function identically to Christianity. I understand that Western civilization has been Christian for 2000 years and Christianity is baked into every single aspect of Western culture, from laws to morals to holidays, but this is really something else.
But that's not all. It's one thing to believe that all religions function identically to Christianity, with a god to worship and churches and priests, but it's another to believe that religion is about worshiping a god. A significantly large number of Christianized people genuinely seem to believe that you need to worship a creator god in order to be religious.
This must be why so many Westerners don't see Buddhism as a religion. (That, and Christians don't want to admit they admire something created by heathens. And atheists don't want to admit they find something admirable in a religion after all). To Christianized people, "worship of a creator god" and "religion" are synonyms. They've can't really comprehend that anything else can exist.
This realization, while genuinely both baffling and horrifying, has helped me understand why Christianized people hold the beliefs they do. There's a failure of understanding on their part for some reason. An incredibly successful childhood indoctrination program, maybe? I don't know. I'm not one of those people. I'll let them figure out how to justify this level of ignorance.