Doubt Saved Me
A Brief Explanation of Who I Am
By
Rick Lannoye
Who is Rick Lannoye? It's not easy to answer the question, "Who am I?" but let me give it a try.
Basically, I'm just a regular guy who has had a few not-so-regular life experiences, experiences that first led to doubts, then to hard questions, and then fianally--because of a huge desire to settle for nothing less than the truth no matter what it turns out to be--to some good answers..
Phew! As usual, I have trouble speaking in short sentences. Hope you'll pardon me.
Anyway, allow me to procede:
I was born in 1956, in Racine, Wisconsin. My Dad was an Ex-Marine and a devout Catholic; my Mom, a transplant from rural North Carolina, and a not-so-devout Baptist.
They were factory workers. They had only one car, so my Dad worked the day shift, and as soon as he got home, Ma would jump in the car to go work the second shift. While the other one was at work, either my Ma or Dad took care of me and my two sisters. (One consequence of this arrangement was that I thought it was normal for parents to share equally in the care of kids and breadwinning. I didn't realize until much later that there was such a thing as a "housewife"). We lived a modest, blue-coller life style, but my younger, twin sisters and I had what we needed and a little extra every now and then.
I went to Catholic parochial school from the 1st through the 8th grades, which explains why I know how to read and write. But it also explains why I spent about 20 years trying to rid myself of feeling guilty, especially about things pertaining to sex, or what we were told back at St. Edwards were "impure thoughts."
But guess what? It was the 60s, and so I should have soon been automatically liberated, once in my teens, from all that sin talk and joined all the other young people who was having all that free love, right?
Wrong! Not me! (And from what I learned later, I was hardly alone in my somehow having missed out on all the sexual liberation of the 60s, the questioning of authority and "doing whatever turned me on.") No, instead, just when I was ripe for the seeds of the Hippy Philosophy to germinate in my soul, my folks converted to Neo Pentecostalism, and it wasn't long before they had me converted too. And when I "got saved," at the tender age of 15, I went all out for this new faith which seemed to provide a ready answer to every one of life's big questions.
So converted was I that I left high school to join up with a group of ex-hippies who had also gotten saved, and went traveling all around the country and eventually to Europe, basically working as a rodie for a Christian rock band. For a number of years, I thought I would spend the rest of my life living (usually on contributions to the group by sympathetic church goers) and working this way. I married my first wife while still in the same group.
My first marriage was a disaster! For one thing, we were both virgins. (I know, who can believe that either, but it's true. And let me just assure anyone out there reading this, that if any religious nuts are trying to tell you that being a virgin when you marry brings any kind of advantage to the relationship, I can tell you from first hand experience, it's an absolute lie!)
We were also very young, both of us only 22 years old at the time. As impossible as it is for anyone of any age to make a successful guess as to whom one will live with happily for rest of one's life, the younger you are, the worse that guess is likely to be.
But the thing that did our relationship in the most was getting married. The reason was because getting married has a way of almost immediately undermining the very thing that brought you together in the first place--love. Sure, natural love, or what I like to call the "wanting-to-be-together," does have a way of withering over time. But there are ways to reinforce that natural bond as long as you don't set it aside completely in favor of the artificial, "having-to-be-together" which is what the foundation of your relationship shifts to after getting married.
Like many a bad experience, though, some good came out of that bad marriage. We had two children together. I've got the greatest kids a dad can ask for. And even the horrendous divorce battle that concluded that legal arrangement gave me some very deep insights into Marriage that ultimately led me to write my book The Honeymoon Ends With "I Do."
Nevertheless, that insight, as well as all the others I now share whenever I can, weren't immediately forthcoming. I first had to sort out what I really believed. In the same year I married my first wife, we got out of that religious group. We were in the Phillipines at the time. We came back to the States, and I eventually enrolled in a Bible college with every intention of becoming a traditional missionary.
But something wonderful was already going on, though I didn't realize it at the time. I was beginning to have doubts. Yes, having doubts was a wonderful thing! In fact, I'll go so far as to say--as a way of paraphrasing what I was told to tell others in my evangelizing youth--that it was doubt that saved me!
I suppose my whole life has turned on that one, beautiful moment, when I finally stopped long enough to think about what I had been told to believe--what those who had converted me said I was supposed to believe, what they said I had better believe...or else--in order to entertain some doubts. It was then that the process began in earnest, the process of really questioning each and every assertion that I had in my youthful zeal swallowed hook, line and sinker.
Maybe it's easy for most Christians to passively accept all they're told they must believe. Things like God torturing billions of people in Hell and so on. But as one who was taking his faith so seriously--so seriously in fact that I meant to dedicate my entire life to bringing its message to some remote jungle on the other side of the world--I had to really think my beliefs through, and to sort out the doubts I was having.
At first, I thought I would find the answers and have my faith reconfirmed if only I studied the Bible more thoroughly. After all, I'd been told that all the answers were in this one book. So, study it in depth I did! But a funny thing happened. The more I dug deeper into what the Bible really had to say, the more doubts I began to have about the beliefs I was told I had to accept. (No wonder there's a big correlation between how little professing Christians actually read and study the Bible for themselves and how easy it is for them to believe what others tell them is in there!)
I started with the doctrine of Hell, and after only a short period of time of really looking at this belief with a truly critical eye, it became clear to me just how absurd it was. (By the way, my second book, that I've already begun writing, will go into detail on why this and so many other religious beliefs are not only absurd, but immoral. Stay tuned for that one). After concluding there was no Hell, I went on to challenge every other belief.
One by one, so many of the ideas I once held dear went to the wayside, and along with them, a great deal of unjustified fear, guilt and shame! My life became happier and healthier, not because I could now claim to know all the answers, but because the few things I did still believe were based on evidence! No more would I accept any idea on the basis of empty, unsubstantiated claims, assertions by people who could, perhaps, speak with authoritative voices, but without the authority that only scientific evidence can confer. Yes, I converted, you might say, to Science.
The odd thing about my conversion to Science, though, is that I couldn't just stop with religious issues. In time, I began to question a lot of different assertions we have ingrained into us from childhood. And so it was that I not only began to challenge the doctrines of Christianity, but also those of other institutions who claim to have the apriori truth. From the social engineers who have infiltrated and usurped a great deal of power and influence in our educational system to the undercover fascists who have penetrated our political, policing and economic instititutions, I found myself, again and again, doubting, then asking why, and then finally challenging them to change to something better, to something based on science and reason, to something based on making life better, happier and freer for all of us, and not just a special few.
Soon after the doubting began, and my beliefs started to change, I ended up changing my major also, from Religion to Communications. It wasn't exactly the best timing, in that I was in my senior year at Dallas Baptist University, which meant putting off graduation. Plus, my wife was about to have our first son. So, I left school for a while, took a job as a full time driver for UPS. I eventually started taking one night class at a time, and finally did get my BA, the same year my second son was born.
My life was in transition, and for a while, it appeared that I might be settling into a very "normal" existence. With a young family, soon came a house, and then the pursuit of all the things that one must have to put in it. On the surface, we should have been happy.
But we were far from it. The more we conformed to the American Dream of material success, the quicker the happiness of acquiring things faded. The fact is, the one thing that had first brought us together was long gone, and all that was left in its place was a man-made obligation. While my sons were only 3 and 1 years old, my wife filed for divorce.
What followed was a year and 3 month long nightmare. We had a knock down, drag out, custody fight. I suddenly found myself having to set aside all my ponderings and put all my focus on what mattered above all--my children. It was only when we tried to get out of the contract my wife and I had made with the government, that it became all too clear, how profoundly it had invaded our lives. I'll spare you the ugly details of that "Family" Court war, but suffice it to say, that my upbringing, (wherein my father had, unlike most, been as much my caretaker as my mother) helped me to take on the biggest and most important task of my life, being a single parent.
Indeed, I finally did prevail in our custody fight, and I found myself with two little boys to raise on my own.
I spent those early years as a single Dad focusing entirely on the care of my two boys. But as they got older, I began to have more time and energy. My experience with religion, government, parenting had imparted a context on which I could reflect, compare and contrast. It was becoming clearer to me every day just how much we had been manipulated and controlled. Tough as it was to have to speak in a convincing way to a group of strangers in a courtroom, to prove to them everything from whether I knew how to change diapers to negotiate sibling rivalries, it was those lessons in how to make a case to others for my convictions, that helped me to speak out publicly on a number of issues. Little by little, I found myself speaking up, and not only making some noise, but having a real impact. Before I knew it, I had become an activist, a spokesperson for what Science and Reason had to say about educational policies, governmental laws and social institutions.
And I haven't stopped since.
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OK, I've skipped over a few of my other personal, historical details, and I suppose I'll mention some more of those as this web site grows, I publish more books, speak at more functions, and so on. But hopefully, you've got the gist of what I'm all about. I'm a guy who has somehow managed to embrace the beauty of scientific inquiry, that process of getting at the real truth by first challenging what we assume to be true, and perhaps even more importantly, being willing in the meantime to say, "We don't know yet.".
Yes, I must acknowledge that we humans have a weakness, a very bad tendency to believe things with no proof at all to back them up. Sometimes, we swallow entire ideas, even when there's a lot of evidence to contradict them right under our noses!
But this is where Science and Reason come to our aid. By allowing ourselves to doubt, to question and to challenge any and every doctrine, policy or assertion, and by demanding that they be supported by hard evidence or out they go, we stand a very good chance at getting to the real truth, and with that truth, making all of our lives better.
By applying this philosphy of Science, I've discovered some things, and I'd like to share those discoveries with you. Of course, feel free to challenge every thing that I assert, because that's the only way you can, and dare I say, you should embrace anything I say--from whether Marriage should be privatized to whether investment capitalism should be done away with--as something true and worthwhile.