24. October 2008 by Frank.

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22. October 2008 by Frank.

I have been told that my stroke survivor story would be of great benefit and inspiration to suffering Christians the world over. All I have to do is give god the glory.

I can’t do that.

I did not survive the stroke with any help from god. I didn’t pray. I didn’t praise. I didn’t worship. I didn’t bow down. God did not deliver me from evil.

During the actual stroke event I was praying. I was very much god centered and oriented at that time. I knew something was horribly wrong with me but I didn’t panic because I had full trust in god to get me through it. There was no doubt in my mind that god was right there with me. You can see why Christians would think this is the beginning of a wonderful testimony.

I’ve mentioned before that I was planning to become a full time preacher. I was completely sold out to god. The thought of becoming an atheist had never occurred to me. I had absolutely no desire to leave my faith. I had no reason not to believe in god.

My blood pressure that morning should have been fatal. In a way it was. I know there are all kinds of scientific explanations for near death experiences. I understand that most such experiences happen in the mind and aren’t the least bit supernatural. But knowing that does not diminish the “realness” of the experience.

I left my body and was looking down at myself quite clearly while I was laying on the floor. That was just as real to me as it is sitting here typing and listening to music on Pandora. But I know that can be explained. It can also be explained that I felt I was drifting away to nothingness. Everything had gone black, sound was rapidly receding, there was no pain, there was no sensation. I thought I was almost dead and I was perfectly content with that. I wanted to keep going into the nothingness forever.

I thought I had entered the presence of god, it was perfect peace. But there was no one there. There was no light. There was no sense of another presence. There was no sense of anything. I was on a tour of a cave once in which they turned off the lights to show you what absolute darkness was like. I think everyone stopped breathing simultaneously. The complete absence of light is devastatingly shocking. We were each completely alone and isolated. My experience was like that. But it didn’t scare me.

Your HDTV would need a 10,000,000,000 to 1 contrast ratio to demonstrate that.

To say I was confused afterwards would be quite an understatement. I was confused and I also didn’t care. About anything. Nothing had any importance to me. I didn’t care what the nurses and doctors were doing to me. I didn’t care about myself, my family, my friends. But what was really surprising was that I didn’t care about my god either.

He was gone from my thoughts. It never occurred to me to pray. I didn’t want my bible. I wasn’t eager to get back to church and teaching the word. My attitude struck me as odd but didn’t really bother me any. I had made a complete 180 without the slightest bit of emotional reaction whatsoever.

A large part of my memory was gone. My personality was radically altered. I had no emotions except anger. The “I don’t care about anything” syndrome kicked in full force. Naturally, I was then diagnosed as being depressed. I was quite sure I wasn’t depressed, it was far deeper than that. My brain was no longer functioning in any manner approaching normal. I knew that deep down at my most fundamental level I was no longer the same person.

I did not get any support from friends or family and certainly none whatsoever from either of two churches I belonged to. People started acting like I had some kind of highly contagious plague (probably either the Rage Virus or the T-Virus), and while they weren’t actually running away from me, they sure weren’t drawing near. Neither was god even though he had promised to draw near to me if I drew near to him.

My faith wasn’t doing anything for me. It wasn’t long before I came to realize that the failure of my faith had caused the stroke in the first place. I really believed I could beat my high blood pressure just by believing. I hated the side effects I was getting from all the medicine I was taking. So I was highly motivated to believe in faith healing. I knew in my heart that faith in god could beat any medical problem. So I stopped taking the meds even though I had been warned that to do so could prove fatal. Oh yeah, I was a faith giant.

I was a fucking idiot.

Just a tiny little minute amount of blood got blocked from my brain and all the sudden I couldn’t control my body. My memories were wiped out. My personality, who I was – my identity, my “me” was eliminated. I embarked on a life of continual pain, filled with altered perceptions, without the comfort of god to fall back on. He was quite literally gone.

I couldn’t find him anywhere. His word which had been alive and vibrant to me was dead and lifeless. There was no hope or encouragement in it. Verses and phrases used to jump off the page but now sat there meaningless and uninspiring. I became aware that I wasn’t even praying anymore. I don’t recall making any conscious decision to stop. I gradually became aware that I didn’t want or need any help in the form of faith. Faith had utterly failed to keep me safe.

Instead I started reasoning things out. I started researching various aspects of the stroke online. I found scientific explanations for all the bizarre things that had happened to me. I started communicating with other survivors and I started seeing disturbing similarities in our experiences. I started seeing inexplicable things that had happened to my mother-in-law were happening to me. I came to the conclusion that the best thing I could do was to keep my mind active.

The spectacular failure of my faith led me to research church history which in turn led me to question church doctrines. That led to further bible study. When you study the bible with the faith blinders off you become aware how poorly written it actually is. There is no consistent eloquence in its words. There are literally hundreds of pages of the poorest written drivel you will ever read. There are contradictions of contradictions, errors, and flat out lies. The god depicted in the old testament is a monster, the behavior of his saints is atrocious. But that shouldn’t be surprising because they act just like him.

Or is it he acts just like the barbarians they are? I get confused.

Jesus is no better. He is exactly the same yesterday, today, and forever. That being the case, he must be just as much of a barbarian as his father. He said all of god’s promises were yes and amen in him, he said faith could move mountains, he said he would never fail nor forsake you, he said he was coming back in his follower’s lifetimes. He lied.

Then he said he would send you to hell for all of eternity for not believing him.

All this studying finally convinced me there is no god. Everything I believed was clearly contradicted by the very same book I used as a foundation. Faith requires you to make excuses when the words of that book fail to be true. Faith means choosing ignorance over reality, hopeful imagination over solid evidence.

But all I have to do is lie and praise god for bringing me through the crisis. I could inspire millions of Christians if I would just do that.

I would much rather tell the truth that religion and faith did absolutely nothing for me. Only by using my mind and its marvelous ability to reason was I able to survive. Millions of atheists would probably be inspired by that.

Posted in interpretation, emotion, religion, stroke | Print | 1 Comment »

14. October 2008 by Frank.

I’ve been burned out lately. Hell, that’s not quite accurate; I’ve been burned out for several weeks. Stuck in a rapidly going nowhere job I’ve been getting screwed over and taken advantage of to an alarming degree. It’s physically and mentally exhausting me. And my pathetic excuse for health isn’t helping any.

So what do I do to make things better?

In the past, I would have prayed. And prayed. And prayed some more. I would not have gotten an answer but I would have kept on praying anyway. I would have had other people praying for me. I would have had spirit-filled super-preachers praying and laying hands on me. I would never have gotten an answer to any of it but I would have sworn to you wholeheartedly that prayer works. I would have been totally sincere.

But I look back at that now and all I think is, “What an asshole!”

I knew it didn’t work. I knew I wasn’t getting any answers but I would never admit that. You admit that, you’ve lost your faith. Without faith god can’t do anything for you. It’s amazing how readily eager Christians are to make excuses for god’s lack of performance. Christians are supposed to be able to speak to mountains and have them move with only as much faith as a mustard seed. Christians are supposed to be able to do greater things than Jesus did. He wasn’t subject to the laws of physics, why are we?

My particular branch of Christianism usually prefered the you don’t have enough faith excuse. God’s failure to deliver was always your fault. Because you had a doubt. Because you said something wrong. Because you indulged in some sin. Because you didn’t pray hard enough. You didn’t offer sufficient praise. You didn’t put your full tithe in the collection plate. Whatever it was, you somehow tied god’s hands so he couldn’t get the answer to you.

On the other hand, I also spent time amongst the Baptists. Their favorites were, “It’s not god’s time,” “God said, NO!,” or the ever popular, “God only promised to supply our needs not our wants.” I never much cared for any of those because they directly contradicted scripture.

It’s only in looking back at it years later that I can see how absurd my beliefs really were. So many crises came and went without an answer from god. But I kept praising him anyway. He was just teaching me to trust and depend on him. Even when I got sued for not paying my bills after a series of financial disasters wiped us out, why, I was just leaning on my own understanding instead of seeking the will of god.

God never helped me out of any of these messes but I kept on praying.

Obviously I survived. I managed to solve one thing after another because I had to. I managed to get the money from one earthly source or another. I always gave god the credit, however. Even though he had nothing to do with it. It always struck me as odd how god was supplying my needs by my own hard work. That’s sort of what happens even if you don’t ask for his help.

Even now, my wife and my former SDA friend give god the credit for the SSI check my wife gets every month. Funny, it seems to me the $4000 lawyer was the one who won her case for us. And the money comes from the good ol’ US of A government which, by it’s Constitution, has nothing to do with god.

I haven’t prayed for over ten years now. Disasters far worse than anything before have come and gone. And I have survived them all. The only thing that’s different is that I didn’t waste my time and energy praying to a god who was never going to answer, I just put my mind to work and found a solution.

The scary thing about that is simply that that is precisely what I was doing all along but I wasn’t taking any credit for my own actions good or bad. It was all the will of god. Exactly the same results whether or not you call on god.

The reson is simple: there is no god.

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