From mrh Tue Mar 14 12:12:58 1995
To: SECHUM-L@UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu
Subject: Friendship Bio

It would be difficult to top the many excellent biographical sketches that
I've seen in the past week: that almost deterred me from writing my own.

Religion influenced me from the earliest possible age: my young Catholic
mother bore a rhythm-method baby along the teachings of the Church.

I wanted to be a scientist at an early age, and knew some things to disbelieve
in quite young.  I remember an older friend walking me to school at age 5:
when he asked me if I believed in the Easter Bunny, I told him no, it was
unscientific.

My family was not nearly as zealously Catholic as I was.  My father never
thought much of the Church, but went along with my mother.  My mother's
faith was initially cracked when she confessed (while pregnant with my
sisters) to a priest that she had used birth control because the rhythm
method had failed.  When he said "Did you ever think that God might punish
you with a deformed child", she was so appalled that she never got her faith
back.  Later, on her route to her PhD, she learned enough more that she
gradually dropped out of Catholicism and religion.

I was spared Catholic school because 1) my mother was a public school teacher,
2) the public schools were better, and 3) my mother remembered the cruelty of
the nuns when she was a child.  Still, Saturday confraternity classes taught
me to be a zealous Catholic, so much so that at one point I reasoned that I
should keep a list of my sins so that I could be sure to confess them all.
I told my mother my clever idea, and she was shocked, and told me that I
shouldn't do it.  I wondered why for years.

At age 15, I finally found the intellectual lever I needed to reject the
teachings of the church on faith.  It suddenly occurred to me one day that
faith in the Bible and the whole apostolic succession were nothing more
than a big game of telephone.  All it would take is one cynic or liar in
the entire chain (likely at an early stage, long since forgotten) to
invalidate the whole thing.  I walked out with a clear mind and never felt
tempted to look back.

It hurt to leave the Church.  Initially it was like revisiting one of my
earliest memories, when in a neighbor's yard under their apple tree I
realized that one day I was going to die.  I felt that way again giving
up belief in an afterlife.  I remember painfully unhobbling myself of many
Catholic ideas, which mercifully I don't remember specifically.

Other religions affected me a little as a child.  I remember in kindergarten
that I was embarassed when the other kids were saying what religion they were
and I didn't know mine.  (This was merely an exchange between the students:
the teachers did not instigate it.)  Shortly after that, my mother started
bringing me to church.  My community was mostly jewish, followed by protestants.
I was usually the only Catholic in my classes, and was actually snubbed by
many of the jews for not being jewish.  I've always enjoyed this as a sort
of irony, considering my family history.  My father's side of the family
(Austro-Hungary) listed itself in documents as "freethinkers", a common
euphemism for jews, and my grandmother spent WWII in a concentration camp,
probably for being a jew (hearsay from her boyfriend: she never would tell
us.)  AND my father was a Hitler Youth in Austria, until he was sent here at
age 14 (and later drafted and sent back to Europe to fight.)

What I did get from my parents, my community, and the public schools, was a
healthy sense of skepticism.  This was taught directly: it wasn't something
born of a reaction to being misled.  I have clear memories from eighth and
ninth grades of the exhilaration of being expected to apply critical
thinking and skepticism in social studies classes.

Since then, I've always had a sort of faith in my core values of liberalism,
skepticism, and science which have vaccinated me against the myriad lures
of religions, cults, objectivism, libertarianism, communism, and conservatism.
This has usually expressed itself as agnosticism: confidence that they don't
know either.  And for purposes of discussion, specific disbelief, to test the
actual foundation of their claims and show that they are built on sand.

In 1975, while at Cornell, I got onto the PLATO network (an early system of
more than 1000 users on one of that era's supercomputers.)  Electronic mail
and (shortly thereafter) newsgroups were available.  (A number of features
were copied for the internet and X: they're just now beginning to catch up.)
There I began arguing with creationists and other believers.

After about 4 years of arguing, I remarked to a friend that somebody ought to
write a book rebutting the Christian arguments.  He said "They did: haven't
you read 'Why I Am Not A Christian' by Bertrand Russell?"  I'm amazed that I
never tapped into the skeptical literature before age 23, but it was
thrilling to see many of the arguments I had constructed for myself had
already been written.  (An experience I enjoyed again when I read "How To
Think Straight" by Robert Thouless, about fallacies of argument and "On Human
Nature" by E.O.Wilson, about human sociobiology.)

I worked for 3 years, and took my first sabbatical to travel around the US
collecting insects.  While hiking in the mountains, I experienced my first
religious epiphany: but over a peculiarly secular subject.  I was reading
an unconsequential book titled "The Breakdown Of Nations", when it struck me
that for every form of organization, there was a workable set of sizes, and
that most of the problems of the world occurred due to a form of organization
being applied at the wrong scale.  Fortunately, the feeling subsided over the
next three days of hiking, so I didn't embarrass myself proclaiming this with
religious fervor.  :-)  The intensity of feeling was as high as that of my
first, painful, unrequited love.  This has lead me to respect claims of
religious experiences in a way I wouldn't have believed: as real, powerful,
and mind altering.  But of little consequence and no intrinsic validity.

I spent a second sabbatical year collecting insects in Ecuador in '88.  Shortly
afterwards, I settled down to wife, job, kids, house, garden, Aikido, Iaido,
and entomological research.  I was married by Harvard's Secular Humanist
Chaplin, Tom Ferrick, and have attended a fair number of his organization's
meetings, as well as those of the Atheist Debate Group that he sponsors.

A little over two years ago, I was tired of debating Christians (and the FAQs
had gotten fairly good), so I changed newsgroups to alt.politics.libertarian.
The parallels are striking to me, and offensive to most libertarians.
I'd long wanted to take them on: their intrusive interjection of their views
into various newsgroups (and the Atheist Debate Group) had much the same
flavor as Christian, Marxist, conspiracy, and other fringe points of view.
There are many aspects of libertarianism that I consider anti-humanist:
when I finish enumerating them for myself I will be interested to see if
there remains some form of libertarianism that could be humanist.

At home, the issue of religion for children is raising its ugly head.
My wife had a rather migratory childhood, and wants the tie-in to the
community that a church provides.  Her belief is sort of fuzzy, perhaps
even uncommitted.  She wanted to start bringing my 5 year old daughter
to church (she doesn't attend herself.)  Our current compromise is that
I will do all the churchgoing with the kids, and I don't see any reason
to start yet.  There is a reasonable UU church nearby, but I like the
idea of visiting lots of different congregations of different faiths.

Mike Huben