Carlos Romero
Professor Lunday
ENGL 1301
3 April 2011
Freethinker
What is a freethinker? You might be asking yourself, well; in order to answer this question I will describe my self since I consider that I fit in this category.
I was born on December 31 1973 in Bogota Colombia, in a big house own by my grandfather on my father’s side, a hard working man that accomplished success after a wide assortment of occupations including boxer and policeman; finally he ended up as general manager in a company own by Jew immigrant that saw in my grandfather the discipline and commitment to fulfill that position. This was a great achievement since my grandfather highest level of education was only high school.
My grandfather was one of the biggest influences that I had while I was a child; he was my role model since my father most of the time was not around.
I remember that my grandfather was always dressed up wearing tie and shiny shoes which he devotedly polished every Sunday, clean hair cut, designer suit made of English clothes and his inseparable pocket watch.
Beside polishing shoes my grandfather always took me to Sunday’s mass and to do that we had to walk for about 30 minutes to get to that church, I did not like the mass but he always bribed me with an ice cream and that was enough motivation for me to walk that distance.
His house had two stories and a terrace, 8 bedrooms, two bathrooms, and two kitchens. I was the only child in this huge house until I reached five years of age when my brother was born. As you can imagine I was very spoiled since all the family on my father’s side resided in that house, I had two married aunts living in there with no children of their own.
My grandmother on my father’s side was the hardest working woman I had ever met, she cooked for every body in the house and she did it on a coal stove in which she burned her hands more than once, she also washed the clothes by hand, I remember helping her to twist the blankets to be able to hang them. She was a sweet woman with a wrinkled face, grey hair and tough hands. She also took me to mass but she did it on week days, she was a devoted catholic woman and for her was normal to attend every single day to church and to say the rosary every night.
Thanks to my grandmother I memorized every single prayer available, I knew all the religious songs and even the rosary’s mysteries, since we had to pray it every night before going to bed.
When I started to think a little bit deeply about the facts of life around eleven years old, I stumbled with a book called “Theory of the Origin of Life” by Alexander Oparin a Russian biochemist, thanks to this book I began to discover that religion was not an absolute truth, it was just another theory trying to explain the origin of life. After Oparin I covered a wide range of books, scientific like Darwin’s The Origin of Species and not scientific like the Bible which I read at least seven times trying to understand its explanation of our history as humans, but every page that I read just gave me more doubts and uncertainty. Since then I became a pragmatic and skeptic individual.
I became a freethinker, the more I read the more I built a solid view of my world, I remember that I loved to open the door to Jehovah’s witnesses to argue about the bible but they always got to a point that logic gave them no other choice than to talk non sense, that usually was the end of the conversation.
After my parent’s divorce back in 1984, me and my little brother stayed with my mother at that time the was a secretary in a court room, my mother has been always a fighter, even though my father was always late with the child support, she managed to provided everything we needed. When I was twelve my passion for reading was huge, I was reading almost a book every two weeks, it became my routine.
The only person in my life that never knew my way of thinking was my grandmother; I knew that if I told her that I did not think that any god existence was possible, she would die of sadness.
When I told my father, as usual he laughed in my face like if he was a child burning an ant with his magnifying glass, he had lost my respect way before than that because of the way he treated my mother, but after that laughter I never spoke to him again.
My “father” as you may know by now was a man that could not control his instincts and cheated on my mother when I was 10 years old. Of him as a child I just remember that he used to hit me with some black rubber slippers when I misbehaved, or if it suited him then pulled my ears until I felt like they were about to split from my face. This person never kept his word, he was a politician always saying yes to my demands but never fulfilling the promise made.
The only good thing about my “father” is that I promise my self to never resemble anything from him, and so far I have a lovely wife that I respect above everything and an adorable boy that I kiss and hug every time I can because those are the things that I want him to remember from me.
My mother suffered my adolescence, I always have had a strong personality and common sense and logic are the only weapons that can be used to convince me to stop or to do something. This is why I said she “suffered”. Every time she wanted me to stop doing something and she did not have or did not wanted to give me a reason to stop, I just kept doing whatever I was doing. Even when she used those final words “you do as I say if you want to live in this house”, I just left and live on the streets for two weeks. I was young, stupid and stubborn. But this was not that bad after all because for example I never felt because of peer pressure. I was always the one applying the pressure, and usually for good causes, I never did drugs and loved sports.
When I was in my senior year in high school I never used recess to play instead I always went to the library with my only two friends of that year to read about and play chess, I was the one that had a notion of the game at the beginning but they became so good that in the interschool’s tournament of 1991 in that city one of them beat me in the final game, we won the first, second and third place for the school that year, that was the only accomplishment that this small school had until then.
One of my teachers of psychology back in Colombia used to say that I had an obsessive compulsive personality and that might be truth, because every time that I like something I do it or think about it every second of the day and I might be able to dream about it as well.
But definitively when it comes to religion nothing is more important for me. I know that religion is necessary because many people of weak character need guidelines of behavior, but what makes me sad is that enormous amount of people that never ask themselves if those beliefs that they were introduced to when they were children are truth or not, they just go through life with a passive approach to this decease. I called religion decease because it is the cause of almost every war in history, mass murder, discrimination, rapes etc.
