Bad_religion from your youth?

I'm trying to avoid writing this in such a way that I fly off into a rant about my church growing up, but I lay my eventual turn to edgy atheism, edgy Satanism, and return to edgy atheism at their feet. Here's a list.

I don't recall Islam ever being mentioned, and that's probably because I stopped attending church at 13 which was months before 9/11. I do recall being taught that Buddhists worship a "fat, bald guy wearing a diaper" and some charming bits about the Catholic Church. Namely that the Pope is a servant of the anti-Christ, Catholics worship a demon they call the Virgin Mary and believe she is greater than Jesus, and if you commit any sin at all you have to be saved again on the spot because if you suddenly die Catholics believe you'll go to hell.

My youth pastor once told us in Sunday school that "the Devil wants to make all you young boys into sissies, and all you young ladies into men". Apparently the Devil is queer as fuck and gender nonconforming

We used to get cassettes of a Christian kids radio show, I think it was Keys for Kids Ministry and the name of the program in particular was something-something Uncle Charlie or Uncle Charlie's something-something. Either way, one show stood out in particular with me; the episode was titled "Evolution Revolution" and this thing had it all. I can't really remember the set-up, if they were going to the big Godless Evolutionist Conference because one of the kids relatives was a scientist or what but most of the set-up was spent trying to explain to small children the basic concept of biological evolution and a YEC objection to it, so they defined evolutionist and atheist as synonyms and scoffed at them for believing our ancestors were monkeys, essentially.

They get there and our additional cast for this episode is the well-meaning, inquisitive scientist who built a time machine and the smug, close-minded British scientist who we are supposed to hate. In hindsight, I'm actually thinking the smug Brit may have been an expy of Richard Dawkins but I'm not sure if the timeline there would match up or I just really want him to be an expy of Richard Dawkins. Either way we go back in time to see evolution happening I guess, but instead they run into Adam and his family post-Garden of Eden.

So you know how Young-Earth Creationists have weird ideas about what dinosaurs were in order to square away the possibility of them existing alongside humans or to avoid taking the position that dinosaurs are lies by liberal scientists? Well we first meet Cain & Abel defending their crop from a dinosaur, I can't remember what but I wanted to say a T-Rex but that wouldn't have even made sense by YEC standards. The two scientists have a chat with Adam who lays out the simple YEC talking points - you didn't see evolution happening, you didn't prove it in a lab, ergo I'm right by default. Of course this is Adam saying this so maybe it carries a bit more weight.

They return to the present and it ends with the inquisitive scientist announcing to the others at the Godless Evolutionist Conference that evolution is a lie and he recites Genesis 1:1. The audience reacts with understandable confusion and they ask smug British scientist what happened (who was also there) and he flatly denies the whole thing. The audience breaks into a spontaneous riot and they go after the protagonists, we last hear smug British scientist tell you that "we must destroy him before he destroys us". We then have a moralizing final lesson about how science leads you to killing people, or something.

And that's what I thought of evolution until my late teens.

/r/bad_religion Thread