When I was young, I was the victim of mental molestation. It was the kind passed down from generation to generation, the victim would become the perpetrator and a cycle of mind-fucking and adherence to an outdated myth continued with the encouragement of those were capable of knowing better, but chose to feed it fresh blood at every opportunity.
When I was growing up I was raised to believe that there is a God who resides in the heavens and that Jesus was his son who gave his life up on the cross at Golgotha/Calvary for the sins of mankind. I was told that were it not for his sacrifice, everyone who would ever be born would be destined to suffer in hell for all of eternity. Millions of children before and after were taught as I was that:
-All people on Earth were made in his image and in order to serve him.
-That you must have absolute faith in god, and observe all his commandments without question.
-That everything that exists is explainable by the divine will of our creator. He did it all, and not only that, he did it all for us.
-All bad things were punishments and trials set forth by God, and temptation towards breaking God's laws were at the behest of a fallen angel named Lucifer who arrogantly wanted to usurp God's power and was cast into Hell, where he was granted free reign to tempt humanity.
A young child is going to believe whatever the parent tells them. Credulity is the most exploited trait of young children, and it is not always assaulted with vile intentions. I was raised to become a Christian by loving parents and my doting grandfather. They were former victims of the cycle who were now -with no malice, but only love and the assumption that they were teaching me about the true nature of our reality- continuing to preserve it. Being a child, I accepted everything I was taught as the infallible truth. Bad things happen as a direct result of Lucifer's actions and the only way to be saved from eternal torment was to put absolute trust in God.
My faith was unshakable until I reached what George Carlin described as "the age of reason," which for me was around 14. The great irony in the chipping of my devotion was that, the more I sought from the bible, the more I tried to learn, the less it made sense, the more compellingly defective the logic became. At that age, I was still a Christian, but I was becoming a very tortured one with every intellectual excursion into biblical reasoning. If there was something I did not know, the answer I was "God." This kept emerging over and over again during my intellectual awakening, and it went from irking me to driving me into an agonizing state. God kept making less and less sense, but faith is the cornerstone of my former religion, and to doubt God is to invite an eternity of anguish. Within the confines of the Christian religion I found nothing but cerebral strangulation.
I gave up my pursuits for relief in the scriptures the rest of my teenage years. In my early twenties I toyed with the idea of "opening the case" again. I would go to churches in the area and sit quietly in the back and listen. Perhaps my perseverance and faith would be rewarded with coming to a place on the exact night that a person or passage could tie everything together. The only thing I got from the church visits was frustrated. I was looking for people who thought things over and all I found were those who never shucked their juvenile gullibility. Perhaps I was simply destined for hell. I found that I had a fascination with Lucifer, who I began to see as being perhaps stood in defiance of a malicious dictator. I never dare told anyone about this, because I knew it would yield nothing but prayer with no real answers. It felt to me like I was living in an alternate dimension inhabited by caricatures of what I thought were supposed to be actual humans. Could these people really be the ones "in the know?"
I had a genuine fear of treading the waters of atheistic thoughts. Entertaining such a notion, even in a passing manner, would unleash a profound chill that would jolt through my heart and make me feel as if I was being looked at through a sniper's scope. I was lacking what my religion was supposed to have offered me. Their answers were re-presented questions. As my mother would have said, "they were talking the talk, but couldn't walk the walk." I had anger, I had resentment, I had frustration and fear, but worst of all, I still had my faith. In 2006 I was in a book store killing time when I saw a new release being featured, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. That title seemed to warm the inside of my mind. I remember that I stood there for a minute looking at the display, and mulling over in my head the word "delusion." I did not buy the book at that time, but what I took from it was the realization that, in my searching for a way to make sense of the world as it has been taught to me, I have been too afraid to think that the reason none of it made sense was because it was all nonsense. What if it actually WAS nonsense, what if all of it was a delusion?
I will not lie. At the time this happened, the thought that I would not live forever after death made me sick to my stomach. It was the only time I was ever afraid to think. This is the part in the story where some pillar of light or some spark of insight occurs and changes everything, but in my case, it was me standing up and saying "fuck it" that launched my assault against the way I was raised.
It was like playing with fire and finding out you were supposed to have been doing so from the beginning. There were many questions that I had, but unlike the Christian faith, I was able to find legitimate answers that were settled and not redirected, and more than the answers, I started feeling less and less tortured. Finally, on a trip back to the bookstore, I came across The God Delusion once again but in paperback. I bought it and read it in its entirety in the parking lot of the book store during the course of a day. This is not intended to be a book review or endorsement, but this book put everything in place, and soon I was not afraid, I was excited beyond words.
I went home and stayed up for another two days on the internet reading everything I could find from both secular and religious perspectives. I was obsessed. I felt like a slave that had found his way into the palace. I learned a great many of things, and even taught myself how to scrutinize what I was presented with, not only on matters of faith, but also with the claims of the secular. I spent the rest of the month thinking on the hundreds of questions I had stored since I was young.
I was driving on interstate 35 when "everything clicked."
I was driving for the sake of driving. Megadeth was playing as loudly as the speakers could stand and the wind coming through the open windows smelled so clean. The sky was parted, the front of an oncoming storm was moving in on the setting sun. I thought it was funny, I would usually dismiss looking at these things as poetic. Then a thought crossed my mind, "so many people see something like this and think its God interacting with everything," then in my head I started going over the causes for everything I was seeing, and with that, I was hit by the beauty, I was stricken by the majesty, I was overcome with the indescribable joy of being freed from anguish and fear. I pulled the car over on the side of the highway next to a field of long yellow grass and ran into it. I was not in control of myself, my feet and legs pumped away and my arms flailed and my head tilted back as sprinkles of rain started patting my head. The earth on my feet, the wind in my hair and the air in my lungs sent me to heaven in that field. In the end, I sent the last of my faith away with the oncoming storm and went back to my car a person freed from the bondage and tyranny of dead ideas and irrational fear.
It was ok to not believe. It was ok to see life for what it is. It was ok to ask questions. It was ok to doubt, to scrutinize, to think for myself. It was ok to know my friends and good people who did not subscribe to my religion were not going to suffer till the end of time. It was ok to finally realize that my life was my own and I am utterly responsible for the way I should live it. I felt like an adult, I didn't have to worry about what "dad" would say or think, I only had to worry about what I thought. My morals did not vanish with my faith, and my appreciation for beauty, for justice, for truth, for the simple things in our glorious life intensified beyond what could ever have been attained by servitude. To this day, thinking back on that moment, I tend to want to tear up. To this day, I look back on that day as the day everything was unvieled for what it was.
My head feels like a swimming pool full of date rape spikes. At any moment a proponent of intelligent design could leap out from the shadows and try to skull fuck me into a coma. There may be some twisted plot waiting to be sprung upon me, but then again I may be underestimating the situation.
