I was looking today at my childhood to allocate the time frame of which I stopped questioning my reality but to instead, submitted to what I was told and taught. Interestingly enough, although I didn't pinpoint the time frame, a specific memory came up and when I investigate the relationship between the memory and the information that I was working with, I found a fascinating thing.
My grandfather was a being in my life whom I had a strong relationship with, primarily because he was different from all other adults in my environment from the perspective of explaining things to me and/or sharing stories with me as if I was an adult. While everyone treated me like a child, he was communicating with me exactly as he would communicate with an adult.
There was one event where his words left a meaningful impression within me and this event was extraordinary from the perspective of him pointing out a way of reasoning thinking that I had never encountered before which was as follows:
We were coming back from the supermarket to my grandparents house and I was probably around 9-11 years old at that time. There was a bus station with a few very hard core religious people waiting for the bus to come and he mentioned something about the religious people being a burden on the economy of the country since all they do is praying to god the entire day on the tax payer money. He said that they do not have a job, they do not go to the army and that just sit all day, reading books and pray to God that doesn't even exists. That was the first time I heard anyone saying that there is no God. In fact, I don't remember myself questioning whether or not there is a god before, it didn't bather me much as I didn't come from a religion family and the God topic was not part of our family discussions. I asked him how did he know there is no God. So he asked me: Do you think that if God existed, he would allow for instance 6,000,000 Jews to be murdered in the second world war? (Here, a background information - my grandfather was one of the holocaust survivals and therefore, he could rationalize the God point within his frame of reference according to his life experience).
Obviously, I could relate to his question because as a child growing up in Israel, you will know anything you need to know about the holocaust from a very young age - you will hear stories about it, you will see pictures about it and if your family members were also there and live to tell about it, you will know the nitty gritty details of their experiences. And so, having that in my mind, the answer was within his question. If the God of the Jews allowed a cruel death of 6,000,000 than there are one of two options.
1 - God is Evil and should not be respected.
2 - There is no God.
For me, option number 2 made more since.
So - why did this memory came up. when I was looking at the memory and asked myself why this memory came up, a word flashed in my mind: "Respect". I realized that my relationship with my grandfather was of respect and integrity because he always took the time to explain to me a point when I asked: "Why". And as I go through my data base of information as I write here, I see more and more events when I asked him a question and he answered me while others did not. I also remember that when my grandmother for instance said: "No, because I said so", he expanded on the point and explained me the reason behind the answer: "No".
Will continue on this point in my next blog.
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