Are You a Closeted Atheist, or an Open Atheist? I mean, do you fake it sometimes?

[NNadir]

44. It's rather amazing that our experience is so similar.

My Dad - who only had an 8th grade education was Superintendent of the Sunday School. (He set the record for raising money for the new Sunday School building.) My mother (with a 10th grade education) was a Sunday School teacher.

And yes it was an Episcopalian church.

With my parents I was in the atheist closet, and I was "asked" without really a right to refuse, to teach the 5th grade Sunday School.

I did it straight for two or three Sundays for my class which was all boys. I could see they were bored out of their minds. I told them if I had unanimous consent, we could skip the lessons and discuss any topic they wanted to discuss, so long as everyone agreed to keep the decision between us. They all agreed and that's what we did.

It seems in retrospect that I could have gotten in huge trouble, but I never did.

A funny thing was that in my folksinging days, I became fascinated with the great guitarist and singer Josh White, whose repertoire consisted almost entirely of spirituals. I had renditions of a few of his pieces in my performances. Why, I can't say. I just liked the music. My aunts told my mother when she got sick that I couldn't be an atheist because I sang and played those songs. They didn't realize that I used to also have a version of Joni Mitchell's "Woman of Heart and Mind" without being a woman.

At my mother's funeral my aunts wanted me to sing and play some Josh White tunes. I declined, but I did set up a record player to play a Josh White album of his rendition of "His Eye Is on the Sparrow."

I sing because I'm Happy.
I sing because I'm free...

It was a very beautiful piece of music.

That was an occasion where I faked religiosity. It was the least I could do for my father and my aunts, who had done so much to carry me through those terrible times, taking care of her as she died.

That was decidedly not a time to assert my views on faith or lack thereof.

It is notable that many of them prayed, brought in religious talismans so on and so on as my mother laid dying. The result of that experiment is that my mother died, which didn't change their hypothesis that a powerful and personal god exists in their minds but validated my hypothesis that no such being existed.