On her blog, Val posts her own Friday Five questions, which are a lot more interesting than the ones on the "official" Friday Five site. So I'm gonna answer 'em. 🙂

1. At what age did you start realizing how weird the concept of the Easter Bunny really is?

I'm not sure the concept of the Easter Bunny is all that weird, given some of the other holiday concepts we've got going on. I mean, yeah, he/she is a bunny that hops around handing out glitter-painted hard-boiled eggs and chocolates to good little children, but we've also got a fat guy who consumes billions of cookies in one night while traveling 'round the world delivering toys in a sleigh pulled by eight (or nine) flying reindeer. We've got naked babies with wings who go around shooting people in the asses with poison-tipped arrows that make them fall in love with the first person they see. We've got a holiday on which children dress up as fantasy characters and rotting corpses and go door-to-door threatening mischief and violence unless their demands for candy are met. And we've got a holiday that serves no purpose other than to indulge the gluttonous American spirit, to justify the murder of hordes of turkeys, and to facilitate the sale of plus-sized winter clothing. Suddenly the Easter Bunny doesn't seem so strange, and I never really thought much about him/her at all, really. The Cadbury Bunny was always an interesting character, though. He sounded like a chicken.

2. Were you religious as a child, meaning as a child, during your religious training (if you received this kind of training) did you attend weekly religious services? and if so at what age did you stop going?

I'm not sure any child is truly religious, but I did attend church on a weekly basis as a youngster and even sang in the choir. (I also played the part of the male bumblebee in the church's musical production of Noah's Ark...which I fought tooth and nail not to do since I had to deliver mushy lines to the lady bumblebee and girls had cooties.) In a recent blog post, Dawn writes, "There is a time in almost everyone's childhood when belief in God seems like the most natural thing in the world." I'm not certain that belief in God comes naturally to children, but such belief certainly isn't unique to God -- children believe in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, closet monsters and things under the bed, men without noses who will snatch you up if you stray from your parents in the store, and so forth. I believed in all of these and more when I was little, including God, and when I thought I was in danger I used to steel myself by chanting under my breath, "Nothing can hurt me; God is with me." But what I was familiar with were the Disney-esque versions of the Biblical stories that they told us in "children's church" -- with singing animals in Noah's Ark and Jonah pacing about with a candle inside of a cartoon whale (like in Pinocchio). We knew the stories of Noah's Ark and Exodus, but God's respective drowning of everyone else on earth besides a select few, and Pharoah and his army, was never really made clear to us. No one would think of telling the story of Job to a child. We sang songs about how Jesus loved us, but what we knew of the crucifixion was considerably limited. And I think I stopped believing and began to question these things when I grew too old for "children's church" and stayed upstairs to listen to the longer sermons. Of course, I found them boring. But there were also more disturbing questions that came to mind: "If God loves us; why should we fear Him?" "If God is perfect love, why would God damn and torture so many people to Hell for all eternity?" And so on. (Many of these are questions that I still don't think Christians can answer without actively rejecting certain parts of the Bible -- or at least interpreting them in curious ways.) I had nightmares about Hell and the Devil. So I probably stopped going around the fourth or fifth grade.

3. Have you gone through the stage or are you going through the stage in one's life, where you are questioning the motifs and themes you learned during your religious training and what is it that you are or were questioning?

See the answer above. 🙂

4. Are you now in the stage of your life where you have come back to your religion either for personal reasons or for the sake of your children for whom you desire a similar religious upbringing?

Nope. I generally think that religion should be kept from children until they're old enough to even begin to comprehend the gravity of it, and old enough to question it and voice their concerns when things don't seem to add up.

5. Are you in a committed relationship with someone of the same faith as you or someone of a different faith and how is that going?

Nope -- I've never been in any kind of committed relationship. So there. 😛

And that about does it for this post, I guess. There was a "Sliders" marathon on SciFi today, so that was great. I miss that show. And I'd totally slide to parallel universes if I had the chance. Wouldn't you?