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As an addendum and excuse to share anecdotes, when I was in Catholic school I wasn't the only non-Catholic there. We had some mainline Christians of various Protestant denominations, because as I said the public schools are terrible in my area. I believe at one point we even had a non-Christian of some sort several years below me, but I wouldn't be prepared to swear to it.

What always made me confused was that many of the non-Catholic Christians would behave Catholic when called upon to do so. They'd take Communion. A lot of them. And they belonged to denominations which do not believe in transubstantiation. They'd say the prayers to the saints that their religion didn't believe in either. But whatever, Christians gonna Christian.

What I also found weird, and I mentioned it at length above, was my friends who were super rebellious, anti-establishment, the whole bit, until they got into church at which point they became model Catholics, knelt at all the right times, took Communion, the whole bit. It always seemed two-faced to me, but that's honestly how most Catholics do it. It's just rote for them at this point. They're on autopilot. It's a little disturbing.

Now, I was raised by two people who were nominally Quakers. Our attendance at Meeting dropped off after awhile because the nearest Meeting House was an hour away (it's fun being a member of a fringe religion) but as far as I know my parents still consider themselves Quakers, and that's really all that's necessary as far as the sect of The Religious Society of Friends to which they loosely belong requires for membership. There's no magic words to say or bread to eat.

The Quakers are split into two sections: the evangelical Quakers and the weirdos. I have just made a lot of Quakers mad by simplifying it to that division because if you get two Quakers in a room together there will be members of three different versions of the religion present, but the broad truth is that I grew up as a weird Quaker. My parents thought it would be a good idea for me to learn things about Christianity in the same way that it would be to learn things about Greek and Norse mythology. They're in common cultural parlance.

So I knew a fair amount about Christianity while being about as non-Christian as you can be while still technically belonging to a Christian denomination. Maybe if I had been raised Unitarian instead it might have been even more, but whatever, I like the Unitarians and based on what I know about their denomination I can't say it's that different from weirdo Quakerism. The point being that, by the time I got to high school, I was not really a Christian at all but knew a fair amount about the religion, including Catholicism.

I used to put this combination to great effect by flummoxing religion teachers. I'd make a real pain in the ass of myself. If I hadn't been forced to take classes in a religion I kind of feel is evil, I wouldn't be proud of this, but as I don't care for Catholicism and most of my religion teachers were engaged in indoctrination, I feel very little guilt. The worst were the seminarians, which if you're unfamiliar is Catholic for "priest-in-training." They'd show up full of the fire of the Lord, ready to teach a class full of obedient Catholic angels, and they'd get me instead.

I won't bore you with boasts about how my high school hijinks drove my religion teachers to distraction. At a certain point, my parents told me that as long as I passed religion class, they didn't care how I did it. I managed to do that.

But my hatred of Catholicism (which at that time was largely down to it being forced on me) was well-known by all. I might have been the first non-Christian who wasn't one of the other major religions that any of these kids had ever met. I remember one of them, with whom I was perfectly cordial if not friendly, asking me why I worshipped Satan.

This is what you're dealing with when you deal with Christians in this country. They've been taught that everyone who isn't a Christian must worship Satan. Sure, maybe things were liberal enough that Jews and Muslims don't count in that calculus as much, but they probably secretly believe it about Jews and Muslims too. A person who isn't a member of a religion they've ever heard of before? Yeah, they're a Satanist.

And the thing is, he wasn't being nasty. He genuinely thought I worshipped Satan and was cool with that, he just wanted to know why. He probably would have asked an actual Satan worshiper the same question.

I attempted to explain to him that no, I didn't worship Satan, and I think I just confused him, but maybe it made it into his head enough that he got the gist of it. I'd love to believe so. The other problem about all this was that I was so anti-Catholicism at that time that I probably would have pretended to be a Satan worshiper if it riled up my religion teacher.

Catholic school when you're not Catholic or at least Catholic-lite is a trip. And I managed to make it through without being molested or anything. I still hated that school though. So when I learned last year that it was closing (because the diocese apparently owes so much in settlements over sexual abuse that it can't afford to fund the school anymore, to which I say yikes) I was thrilled. I won't lie. Didn't feel anything but happy. No nostalgia there at all.

But several of my friends from high school, with whom I still have slight contact, were lamenting the closure as if it were a death in the family. And I just wanted to say, "You fucking dipshits, when we were in that hellhole you would have lined up to get to light the fuse that would blow it to kingdom come." Again, two-faced. I really don't get it.

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