ORIGINS V

26. January 2009 by Frank.

I’m not sure what caused me to start reminiscing about my early days as a Christian. I don’t actually dwell on the past all that much. It may have been because the friend who turned on me from several posts ago was from that time.

I willingly made Christianity my entire life. I embraced it as my entire reason for existence. What little I’ve related about those first six months should show how much I was willing to rationalize excuses for god’s failures; I would think most normal people would have run off screaming after experiencing what I did. I was promised love, forgiveness, redemption.

What I saw was the exact opposite.

Booze and drugs were my entire life. I couldn’t go back to them. I couldn’t go back to the despair and the emptiness. To accept the truth of what I actually saw Christianity to be was too painful of an option.

I had another vested interest in continuing as well. I met my wife in that little messed up church. In fact, the old friend who just turned on me was my wife’s best friend, we really met at her house when she hosted the young people’s group. My wife was born and raised in a local Baptist church and she only came to the charismatic church because they were best friends and did everything together. My wife never accepted their doctrines and teachings. I asked her to marry me three months and two days after meeting her (on Valentine’s Day) and we were married six months and three weeks after meeting. Sound slightly compulsive? Obsessive? That was twenty eight years ago and we are still together.

Our married life started disastrously. My wife has epilepsy. It was under medical control but the stress of getting married tripped it off again. She had a seizure while driving down I-94 that nearly killed both of us. But I was a man of great faith so I let her drive again a couple of days later, I was sure god would not let anything happen to her and we only had the one car. Well, god failed to deliver once again, she had another seizure and drove into the side of a building. Ironically the seizure actually saved her life at the same time it nearly ended it. This was before it was mandatory to wear seat belts and air bags weren’t all that common yet. The seizure left her completely limp from head to toe so she bounced like a rag doll and was completely uninjured despite folding the car up like an accordion. We saw that as a miracle from god.

Whatever character flaws I might have had at the time, I do not quit or give up.

We started going to her Baptist church because I didn’t have any alternatives. There weren’t any other charismatic churches in the area and I wasn’t sure I wanted anything to do with one if there were. The church was old and dying; the pastor’s sermons were certainly dead already. You can guess what I decided.

I was sent to bring that church back to life.

Notice a pattern here?

I became a baptist but I was a pentecostal baptist. I was functioning in a different spiritual realm than they were but I was determined to make it work. I joined the church so I could teach there. But I was alone as far as spiritual things went. No one shared my interest in the spiritual gifts or even in studying the bible as relentlessly as I did. I was an outsider the entire time I was there.

I kept trying to live by faith and god kept failing to honor it. And I kept making excuses for him. Eventually, sometime after my daughter was born, our lives had turned to shit again and I started drinking heavily again. Except for a few isolated memories this period of time is a big black hole to me. I know I battled ferociously with the booze and my desire to keep serving god. My faith finally won when I decided my desire for booze was demonic in origin. I cast it out and stopped cold turkey again. And I had my daughter to think of.

That second drinking binge ruined my health. I became overweight and my blood pressure started going nuts. The medicines they tried me on caused me all kinds of very bad side effects which eventually stopped parts of my body from functioning properly. The damage became so severe that I decided that I could beat the high blood pressure with diet, exercise, and massive doses of faith. I did everything I could to read and watch anything I could get my hands on that I thought would build up my faith. Not standard baptist procedure.

My radical search for more faith led me to sneak more and more pentecostal style teachings into my teaching. Eventually the pastor decided enough was enough and backed me into a corner. I had to take a stand on what I believed. So I did and he threw me out of the church. (This is an entire story all by itself – I’ll relate it some other time.) The result of this was great stress in my family and friends turning on me so viciously that you would have thought they were ravenous dogs instead of church leaders. I’ve mentioned before that you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Christians turn on you but it bears repeating. This wasn’t a matter of being an atheist.

This was a matter of not being the right kind of Christian. It was sickening.

I see atheists whining about Christian bigotry toward them all the time but I guarantee you haven’t seen anything like Christian bigotry toward other Christians. At least as an atheist you have the potential to be converted and saved from your evil ways. As a Christian with the wrong doctrines you’ve pretty much assigned yourself a permanent place in hell because although you might have known god you rejected the correct version of him. That is unforgivable.

So my faith eventually caused my stroke (because I stopped taking my meds) which turned my faith off. Once it was off my obsessive nature wouldn’t let go of the desire to know why. Why had I failed so thoroughly? How could I have been so wrong for so many years? How could I have done everything I knew how to do to please god and still not get results?

I started with the assumption that I must have believed the wrong things about god. So I began looking for other interpretations, other viewpoints. I kept looking in the bible but it seemed to have died with my faith. No words leapt off the page anymore. There was no more life in there. It really was poorly written, Shakespeare is far more eloquent. The great truths weren’t really so great and they weren’t unique to the bible. Eventually I started reading atheist writings which pointed out the flaws of the bible. Upon reading the bible again I saw that that was true, it was flawed, it was full of contradictions and errors. The very words which were my foundation now clearly showed themselves to be just words enhanced by faith. Take away the faith and they were nothing.

So I walked away.

In August this year it will be eleven years since the stroke. Eleven years of nonstop pain. Eleven years of financial ruin. Eleven years of one friend after another abandoning me. I still have a drink now and then to kill the pain but it doesn’t have a hold on me anymore. I really did manage to kill my compulsive side back in the day. I take my medicine all the time even though I still hate it and it still causes me side effects I don’t care to discuss.

I have no faith to fall back on but I wouldn’t trade being a clear headed atheist for anything. No more superstitious mumbo jumbo clouding the issue. No more non-existent sky daddy promising me the world but only giving me his leftover shit. No more delusions.

That’s where I came from. Originally.

What’s your story?

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