Rodrigo Neely - December 15th, 2008 in Feature 3 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

This is a post I have been waiting to write.

This week I will take two finals, which I am confident I will pass, and then I am finished.

I am graduating from college.

My approach to college, like most things in my life, has been unorthodox.

I started college at 25, unlike most college graduates, who begin at 18 or 19.

I dropped out of high school.

After I dropped out of high school I worked a phone job for a year, and then worked as a tattoo artist for several years.

During that time period I did things which would be unwise to disclose in detail in a blog written under my real name.

I also became a born again, charismatic, Sarah Palin-style Christian.

Christianity saved my life in hindsight. If I could disclose all the details I think everyone would agree it was an improvement, but it did not take long for Christianity to present me with its own problems.

I took my religion incredibly seriously, all of it. Including the magical thinking, more popular with Charismatics than anyone. I spoke in tongues, I believed God healed people with my prayers. I also believed the best thing in life was to persuade others to join my in a magical adventure in adoring Christ.

However this clashed with my own background in the punk-rock subculture, and its cynical and existentialist leanings.

I was beginning to feel Christianity had a low ceiling for me. The virtues it rewarded were not my strengths.

In time I became a radical leftist, though I persisted to do so in the name of my religion.

I traveled the US, and found myself active in the leftist youth culture of Santa Cruz, California, where I first got a real taste for politics first hand. Including some very proud actions against the Iraq War.

I returned to Lubbock from my beloved adventures in Santa Cruz ready to start the revolution, which would naturally result in Lubbock, TX. being a tofu eating, recycling utopia, of tolerance and independent bookstores.

It was in my aims to try to politicize Lubbock that I started a lawn business with my buddy Nick Simmons and started trying to organize meetings. A girl I had always known peripherally became my partner in political organizing, and we fell in love. I later married this girl.

My girlfriends mom told me that I was too broke to keep my girl long term. She suggested college. I took her advice.

I started at Texas Tech University as a Psychology major just a few months later. It was then that I began to learn about scientific thinking in my psychology classes. Particularly from Dr. Jeff T. Larsen. I couldn’t get enough.

In less than a year I was accepted into the HHMI Undegraduate Research Fellows program, where we were paid and trained to do professional level primary biological research. It was also the first time that I was in a culture of science, where all of the other HHMI fellows were very forward thinking scientifically informed individuals. I loved my peers in this program and have not felt the same as I did around them until I went to a CFI Leadership conference this summer.

Inspired by a new found love for biology I changed my major to neuroscience, and moved to Dallas with my wife who was getting a graduate degree in neuroscience.

It was shortly after this that both my wife and I read Richard Dawkins The God Delusion and I was persuaded that God did not exist. My wife came around a few months later.

College was an essential part of me coming to the ideas which now guide my life.

The love of inquiry.

A desire for humanity to have a greater cultivation of love for inquiry.

The idea that humanism should replace supernaturalism as the dominant ethics in culture.

The belief that science should have a strong voice in politics.

College was an incredibly positive experience for me. I suspect that most people who don’t go to college shortly after high school never do. I got to do a lot of interesting things in my life, and I count my weird days as a fundamentalist christian among those things. I have tattooed countless people, I sang in bands, I self published comic books, I traveled the country, but I still found great joy in the halls of the academy. It has enriched my life.

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