Churches

I grew up in Sackville, N.B.  That town had a lot of churches for its size.  There was a United church, as well as Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and two Baptist churches.  Someone said that Catholics in North America like to build their churches on the highest hill in town, and the one here was at a pretty high elevation. (There was a monastery nearby.) The Presbyterian minister's manse was across the street from us.

The biggest church was the United church.  Sackville used to be a big Methodist centre, and this church went back to Methodist times.  When the Methodists joined with the Congregationalists and some of the Presbyterians to form the United Church in 1926, no doubt it was a big deal here.  One of the town's streets is called Union Street, and I doubt that it's named for labour unions.

It was the United Church that we attended. (We regularly sat in a pew that was second from the back row.) I went to Sunday school for a few years, but it didn't really interest me.  I did notice that while they sometimes talked about Mary Magdalene in the regular church, they never did in Sunday school.

Iv'e almost never attended church since I was eighteen.  I'm kind of indifferent toward religion, but I do have an interest in religious culture, like how the name Jesus is ultimately a Greek version of the Hebrew Joshua.  On a recent internet thread where people were talking about their religion, someone posted, "I'm an atheist, and proud." I then posted, "I'm an agnostic, and not proud."