Easter Sunday, 1980.  After five weeks of listening to sermons about the glorious end of the world, I walked down the makeshift aisle of a little Charismatic church and made a profession of faith.  I got saved.

At first, it was wonderful.  The weight of the world was lifted from my shoulders.  I had gone cold turkey with my extreme boozing habit and psychiatry hadn’t done much for me.  I was at the lowest point of my life.  I had ruined my life and here was Jesus offering to forgive me for it.  How could I resist?

Indeed, resistance was futile.

But looking back I should have resisted.  I ran into Christian hypocrisy almost immediately.  A deacon’s wife started talking behind my back about my relationship with a girl who had been divorced.  We were just friends, she was dating a guy who became my best friend.  But because she was divorced she was a hot topic for gossip among all the godly women.  And here I thought it was possible to have a purely platonic relationship with a member of the opposite sex.  What a fool I was.

This deacon’s wife eventually went on to accuse the pastor of the church of being demon possessed which literally destroyed the church.

My mind was screaming, “HYPOCRITS!” at me furiously.  But I chose to ignore the warning flags.  I wanted to be accepted by god, I wanted to fit in with a group of people.  I wanted the godly love I was promised.  I wanted the bible to be true in all its promises.

I took it all literally.  I took it all extremely seriously.  I noticed very quickly that I was not like other people in the church.  Church obviously influenced their daily lives to some extent but not like it influenced me.  I was reading and studying the bible constantly, I was having hour long prayer sessions.  I was telling everyone I came in contact with how wonderful my god was.  I was positively giddy with excitement about my faith.

Other people were like that while in church.  But outside of church they were much more subdued.  Outside of church they were smoking and drinking, watching horror movies, being far more enthusiastic about sports than they ever were about Jesus.  They were like normal people.  Not me.  Jesus was my life.

It wasn’t long before they were telling me to calm down.  No way could I stay in that mountain top frame of mind.  It just wasn’t possible to stay that high on god for that long a period of time.  You can’t be so heavenly minded that you’re no earthly good.  Eventually they wore me out and I came down, hard.

Then the church destroyed itself and I found myself amongst the Baptists.  They weren’t about being up either.  They were about being guilty, they were about being miserable sinners saved by grace.  In fact, it was a frequent theme that whenever someone started feeling that god was really blessing them he suddenly thought they were too happy and would bring some disaster into their lives to get their heads out of the clouds and their feet back on the ground.  God enjoyed his children suffering.

This really didn’t fit with my god is wonderful and exciting philosophy. 

So I got very big into the whole televangelist phenomena.  Mostly the word of faith ministries, the preachers of the prosperity gospel.  These people were much more upbeat and less obsessed with suffering for their sins.  I began to wonder if the sole purpose of church was to make you feel weak and helpless so you’d keep coming back for the strength you could only get from god.  So there I was trying to bring some of the more positive upbeat teachings to people who seemed to want to remain miserable.

This eventually got me thrown out of the church.  You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a pastor telling you that he wanted you out of his church and that you could never be allowed to speak there again.  Ah, the love of god is such a wonderful thing.

Then I got involved with a big time ministry complete with its own TV network.  At first, I was in paradise.  Then I got too involved and much too close to the inner workings of this “business”  because that’s what it turned out to be, it wasn’t really a church.  They would even take you on a tour of their factory underneath the sanctuary, proudly pointing out the machinery of their Christian publishing ministry.  Some of the biggest names in Christianity passed through there and I heard and saw things behind the scenes with these people that was absolutely devastating.  Hypocrisy and fraud are too mild of words to describe it.

Then I moved on to small town, tiny little, just starting out churchianity.  This wannabe Pentecostal group was friendly enough and they were mostly upbeat.  They weren’t into oppressive guilt.  But they weren’t into serious study either.  They wanted emotion.  They wanted odd behavior.  They wanted signs they were blessed by god.  They wanted spirit-dancing instead of words from god.

Eighteen years had gone by and it was stroke time.  My brain was rewired and my personality was severely altered.  My job was gone, my health, my entire livelihood was over.  My faith died completely and utterly and no one cared or noticed.  I found out I had no friends in churches or out in the real world.  I learned how to manage constant pain without drugs on my own without any training.

I spent the next couple of years trying to figure out what happened to my faith.  I looked at other religions.  I considered viewpoints I would never even acknowledge before.  I tried to find some way to if not remain a Christian at least remain a believer in a god of some kind.  But ultimately I realized there is no god.

There are only mind control experiments.

Religion is about control.  Controlling your thoughts and your behavior.  It’s about controlling your money and/or your time.  It’s about taking something that is yours and giving it willingly to the people trying to control you.

The bible talks about bringing every thought into captivity to Christ.

Religion is mind control.

It had me for twenty years (the final 2 years not so much).  The stroke was in 1998, it set me free.  But I have been studying and pondering and reasoning ever since then.  Trying to figure out why.  Why did I fall for it?  Why did I want to preach it myself?  Why did I keep on when it was so obviously flawed right from the very beginning?

And now what can I do to set others free?