Wayne Wilson

My great-grandparents were Mormon pioneers who crossed the country into Utah pulling handcarts. Some of their offspring settled in Panguitch in Southern Utah where I was born in 1950, one of the "baby-boomers." The story goes that my father took one look at me and said that he was not going to raise his family in the depressed economy where he grew up. He promptly packed up and made a trip to Provo where he secured a job as an apprentice at the Geneva steel mill. We went to the Provo area and then just before my 6th birthday we moved into the house in Pleasant Grove where my parents still live.

Both of my parents are active LDS, in fact they are currently serving on a "Mission." They raised me to be faithful to LDS doctrines and I graduated with honors from "Seminary" (LDS daily classes where students are excused from regular school-work). It is ironic that one of the first sparks of humanism I encountered came from these religious classes. In my senior year the instructor vowed to prove "beyond any shadow of a doubt" the existence of God. He disassembled a pocket watch and placed all the parts in a shoe box and challenged anyone to shake the box and have the pieces come together so that the watch would work. This, he argued, was analogous to the building blocks of life being able to come together and produce the world as we know it without God's intervention.

I doubted that I would live long enough to shake the box so that the watch would come together but I imagined that it might be possible to design some kind of shaking apparatus that would keep the box in motion for hundreds or thousands or maybe even millions of years and that maybe, just maybe, the parts might come together in a working piece. I was not alone; two or three of my friends were of similar opinion and we had many lively discussions over the subject.

As I have said this is all happening in Pleasant Grove. The High School student body was 95% LDS and the staff was virtually 100% LDS with one very notable exception: Max Shifrer (a Unitarian) who taught math. I had his class for four years and he was a truly great teacher. I remember Max raising his voice maybe once or twice during those four years. We all hated to sit in alphabetical order and would complain vociferously in other classes, but not in Max's (I sat behind Jackie West for four years: no questions no comments). If I completed 39 of the 40 homework problems, Max would call on me to demonstrate the 40th one on the blackboard. He nearly always responded to questions with another question that would lead to an answer for the student's query. (This is making me nervous referring to him as Max instead of Mr. Shifrer!)

Anyway back to the watch in the box: we were seniors, yearbooks were distributed, and even Max could not hope for much school work. He overheard some of our discussion, asked a couple of questions and presented what I now call the Carl Sagan argument. Namely, that by counting the number of observable stars in the visible universe and by taking very conservative estimates for the conditions for life to spontaneously evolve, the chances are overwhelming that life exists, did exist and/or will exist elsewhere in the universe. That was the beginning of the end of my Mormonism; I call it my personal Awakening.

I went on to be the only graduate from my class to attend the University of Utah (Sin City) for a year. Early in my second year I was successful in the only lottery I have ever won in my life: the Draft Lottery. I was very naive about military service and had not maintained enough credit hours to keep my student deferment. When I found out that service was inevitable, I elected to take four years in the Air Force instead of two in the Army as I thought this would decrease my chances on going to Viet Nam. I spent the four years in Germany and had a chance to see that life and living elsewhere are indeed very diverse. This is in stark contrast to what I had been taught at home, church, and school. I read and studied Existentialism, Faulkner, Shakespeare, and others. I came to an uneasy conclusion that I was an atheist, but I did not know why I was uneasy until several years later I read a letter to the editor in the Salt Lake Tribune saying how dehumanizing it is to be non-anything (non-white, non-Mormon, etc.). But I am getting ahead of myself.

I was naive about everything Military. I had no idea that a codified class system existed. I did not know how precious I held the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and it's Amendments until the Uniform Code of Military 'Injustice' was inserted between me and freedom. My four years of service were an enigma: I hated everything Military and yet made many life-time friends and had a chance to go places and see things in Europe that I may never have again and might not ever have had. One of the most enduring impressions from my travels is the feelings I experienced within ancient cathedrals where everything is on a grandiose scale and you look up until your neck aches. The effect is to feel puny in the presence of God. (Thousands of people died building those shrines.) My dismay and questioning of Christianity grew into aversion, resentment and revulsion.

I attended the University of Maryland Overseas while stationed in Germany. There I had the opportunity to study under two more very good teachers: one a German national who taught physics. He impressed me with the concept that there probably isn't anything that is not knowable--not that we know everything--only that it can be found out through application of the Scientific Method. The second professor taught Shakespeare. We had a group of eight or nine who worked together for two semesters on about ten of the plays. Each of us had a different interest or orientation in our studies. Professor Stephens emphasized the importance of a different point-of-view and showed us that if we listened to each other, we all came away with a better understanding of our subject.

The Scientific Method and tolerance for other's point-of-view are the two most important things I learned in the Air Farce. I was discharged and returned to SLC in December, 1973. I went back to the University of Utah where I never managed to earn enough credits in one department to qualify for a degree. One day I saw a production of Kurt Vonnegut's "Happy Birthday Wanda June." I was amazed and went back and saw a different actor play the lead role and experienced a different play--equally good. I became a Vonnegut fanatic buying and reading all his books. Some of his middle works I read backwards, last chapter first then next to last chapter and so on to the beginning. They are as cohesive in reverse as in normal page order, which I consider a remarkable achievement. I think it is very appropriate to have Mr. Vonnegut as our Honorary President.

About this time I began to notice the right-wing decrying the evils of secular humanism. I found a definition somewhere in a dictionary or encyclopedia and decided that I was not an atheist after all: I am a humanist! I was very proud of this discovery and told nearly every one but nobody really seemed to care. Then, one Saturday a couple of years ago, I happened to notice the word "humanists" on the front of the Religion section in the Salt Lake Tribune. I read that there existed a formal organization of humanists and that a Chapter was alive and well in Salt Lake City. I could not believe it.

Since there was only one Florien Wineriter in the telephone book, I called him and he had a packet of information sent and invited me to the next monthly meeting. I have been a regular member ever since.