3. April 2010 by Frank.

I began my christian walk on Easter Sunday in 1980.  I was an emotional/mental wreck, literally at the lowest point in my entire life.  I was desperate for change and even though I thought of killing myself, I really didn’t want to go that far.  I had crashed and burned severely because of all the drugs and alcohol I had been indulging in.  I was a mess.

Through a ridiculous series of coincidences I became convinced that god was calling to me, offering me a new life.

Oddly enough, the preacher at the little church I got pulled into wasn’t preaching so much as he was lecturing.  About the Book of Revelations to be specific.  His style appealed to me because it wasn’t like any preaching I had heard when I was younger.  And the subject matter fitted my interest in science fiction, fantasy, and just plain weirdness.  You had world wide devastation, wars, natural disasters, demons, mystical creatures, zombies, and a whole plethora of magical events.  What self respecting, stoned, alcoholic wouldn’t find that cool?

After five weeks of that, I was ready to take the plunge.

Not only did I become a bible reading fool (the entire new testament the first week), I also became obsessed with “the end times” which was really becoming popular.  Hal Lindsay was making headlines and many, many more christian writers were offering up their interpretations of the end of the world.  I found it all fascinating and wasn’t bothered in the least by contradictions, speculations, and cross purposes.  All that wanton destruction and mayhem was really exciting to visualize.

The death of billions of people didn’t faze me.  Cool action scenes were the important thing.

I’m not sure when my interest in that sort of thing started to wane but I know it had to be a few years later.  By then it was becoming obvious all the dire predictions were not coming true.  In fact, none of the predictions were coming true.  So much effort was directed at making current events fit the prophecies.  A real biblical prophet has to have a 100% accuracy rate, 10% to 15% (I’m being overly generous) just doesn’t cut it.

As you may be aware, the world did not end in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, or any time before or after.

Which makes me wonder how this sort of thing is still thriving.  1948 was the major indicator that most agreed on began the countdown to the end.  It’s 62 years later.  That’s a long time for the “final” generation.

There are many other dates in history that were supposed to signal the end.  The Seventh Day Adventists came up with an elaborate doctrine to explain away their misinterpretations back in 1844.  Despite numerous other date setting failures, other denominations keep indulging in the same practice.  Now you have the religious right and the tea baggers carrying on the misguided tradition.

So, for awhile, Easter was a big day for me.  Resurrection Day, I liked to call it.  Easter was actually a pagan term.  Christian use of pagan holidays bothered me.  And the bible gives no command to observe those days like the ancient holy days the Israelites were required to observe.

Now it’s a day my store is closed but it makes no difference because I don’t work on Sundays anyway.  It makes a difference to other folks because it isn’t a paid holiday.  It’s also a day for a family gathering which I am frankly tired of, these people don’t have anything to do with us any other time of the year except holidays even though we all live less than 5 miles apart.

The really obnoxious part is that this is the religious holiday that all the non-religious family members feel compelled to attend church.  Every single one of them in the whole area will be packed tomorrow morning.  More people seem to think god will be impressed if they show up for Easter rather than Christmas.

Once a year whether they need it or not.

Yes, I will be forced to go myself or I will never hear the end of it.  My wife is singing a solo so I have to be there.  Essentially, it isn’t worth weeks of fighting not to go.  I have more than enough stress with buying a new car and the rapidly deteriorating situation with my job.  Our finances are right back in the toilet again, my daughter has been out of work for nearly a year and they are going to move back in with us.  The house is literally falling apart.  I think I can tolerate an hour of church and a family dinner to keep my wife from going apeshit on me for being such a heathen.

I’m sure god will be impressed with my piety.

Just do me a favor.  Send someone around to revive my corpse after this is all over, would you?

Posted in wild guesses, interpretation, communication, humor, listen, prophet, emotion, hearing, easter, religion | Print | 4 Comments »

11. April 2009 by Frank.

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?

Posted in wild guesses, interpretation, easter, education, religion, emotion, stroke | Print | 5 Comments »

14. January 2009 by Frank.

I was a giant religious sponge for 18 years. I soaked up everything I could for my new lifestyle. I couldn’t get enough of it and became a true Christian fanatic. I was determined to get into the ministry from the first week on.

This was the late 70’s. All you have to do is watch a movie from that era to know how screwed up American culture was at the time. Just as lactose intolerance was an unknown condition back then, so too was OCD. I can’t recall any reference to it from that time frame. I was an obsessive personality type but I wasn’t compulsive, everything I did, I did very deliberately with great planning and forethought. I never felt driven to do it but I figured if I was going to do it, I should do it thoroughly. I even operated that way with my drinking and drug use, I was completely committed to them. I was a fanatic about my stereo system, I spent a fortune trying to get perfect sound from vinyl records. And I was also a voracious reader. Even though I was blasted out of my mind most of the time I still managed to read three or four novels a week.

The night all that came crashing down on me was devastating. I was empty inside but the thought of the booze I used for comfort now terrified me. A few days of climbing the walls sent me to a psychiatrist. That got me to go to an AA meeting which didn’t help at all – it disgusted me. These people were begging god to help them because they were so wretched and couldn’t possibly solve their problems on their own. I found that incredibly offensive. (Incidentally – if you have a drinking problem I advise you stay away from AA. Their philosophy is that you are an alcoholic, you will always be an alcoholic, and you can never stop being an alcoholic. You just beg god for help every day while continuing to declare that you’re an alcoholic. You’ll never get free thinking like that. IMHO.) The psychiatrist’s next piece of advice was to go to church. I didn’t exactly care for that suggestion either.

So my emptiness consumed me.

I had been exposed to church as a teenager but I never understood or believed any of it. Nevertheless, a chance encounter with a youth leader from my past planted the idea in my head of going to church the next morning. Miraculously the next morning I awoke to a voice screaming in my head, “GO TO CHURCH!” It was a command, there was no question but to obey it. The only church I knew of to go to was the one I had been invited to just the night before. So off I went.

It wasn’t church like I had ever been to before, it was more like a college lecture with music. The subject was Revelations and the end of the world. That really appealed to the science fiction nut in me, I loved end of the world stories. So I kept going back for the next month.

There was plenty of guilt and condemnation being preached. Somehow, it all emphasized the emptiness I was feeling. It also played on my deep abiding loneliness. But it also offered hope and purpose, two things of which I was absolutely void.

So five weeks later on Easter Sunday I took the plunge and gave my heart to god. I felt as though the entire weight of the world had been lifted from off my shoulders. I felt free from guilt and condemnation. I knew I was forgiven of all my bad thoughts and decisions. I was cleansed inside and out, not just of sin but of all the booze and drugs as well. I was part of a group now, something I had never been before. God had a plan for my life, I actually had a purpose even though I didn’t have a clue what it was.

If anyone had known what a voracious reader I was I don’t know if they still would have given me a bible that day. A week later, when I told the pastor I had read the entire New Testament, he was shocked, he didn’t believe that was possible. I had understood enough of it that I knew I wanted it all. I wanted all the promises and all the power. I also knew the church I was seeing was not the church I had read about. I was already getting the idea that I had been called to correct that situation.

I think that says more about how arrogant I actually was at that time than anything else.

Was it really a miracle that a voice woke me that morning? No. I had extremely vivid dreams, I still do. Was it hard to get me to feel guilty and condemned? Not at all. I was already wretchedly miserable. Was the offer of hope, love, forgiveness, and purpose something someone like me would likely reject? No, it was exactly what I wanted. It was exactly what I needed. I had ruined my life and I desperately wanted someone to save me.

Religion stepped in at just the right time and offered me precisely what I wanted. So I embraced with every fiber of my being. Religion was very beneficial to me, it changed the direction I was going in life. It gave me something to believe in and something to study. It gave me purpose. It changed the way I think and the way I behaved. It gave me strength and helped me overcome many problems.

It also hurt and disappointed me. It caused me tremendous grief. It made me lie to myself to keep from admitting its failures. It caused me to go off on some extreme tangents. It led me to do some incredible stupid things all in the name of pleasing god. It led me to make some horrendous decisions ultimately leading to the decision not to take Blood Pressure meds which in turn caused the stroke.

It’s somewhat ironic that the thing which saved me from self destruction nearly caused me to destroy myself.

TO BE CONTINUED ……..

P.S. I want to thank my father for saving my life this afternoon. I was eating some pot roast over at his house after work, talking and not paying attention. A very big piece went down my throat and just suddenly stopped. I have never been choked like that before. I managed to croak out, “CHOKED!” before my body went into total panic mode. My dad applied the Heimlich maneuver which works remarkably well. Thanks, Dad!

Posted in wild guesses, communication, easter, hearing, religion, emotion, stroke | Print | 2 Comments »

7. April 2008 by Frank.

I occasionally go to church to keep peace in the family. A couple of weeks ago for easter was practically a no option, you’re going kind of affair. Back in the day I could find some joy in any worship service no matter how dreary the music or the message. Indeed this church has gotten away from a lot of the old hymns (but not entirely.) They are rather contemporary in musical tastes now although the vast majority of music was contemporary in 1980 in charismatic churches. Now the baptists have discovered it. They even have drums. Unfortunately the drummer doesn’t know how to set the beat. That’s like a major shortcoming in a drummer. You also have older German ladies trying to sing very high notes with that peculiar German inflection that frequently renders such notes flatter than a board. The music often seems designed to rub my nerves raw.

The sermon was “Dialogue with God” which I was pointing out the other day. Obviously this dialogue doesn’t involve actually hearing god speak in any manner that makes coherent sense. If you claim god actually speaks to you in words you can understand good christians everywhere will look at you like you are some deranged psychopath. But if you relate some bizarre event as some kind of sign which you received guidance from, then that’s perfectly understandable and acceptable. Unless you are a practicing pentecostal.

You get words of wisdom and knowledge as well as interpretations of tongues all the time. Never mind that these are almost always exactly what you want to hear for any given situation. Never mind that they are usually so vague and general they could apply to anyone or anything or if they are personally relevant they should be taken with a grain of salt. Never mind that these thing only seem to happen when everybody wants them to happen. Never mind that they also sound suspiciously like something the person speaking would say normally if given the opportunity.

I once listened to a woman speak for an hour and a half, supposedly prophesying. We were informed she was a true prophetess of god. I had never heard of her before or after this appearance (I can’t remember her name for the life of me). Her most prominent characteristic was her pronunciation of “almighty gawwwwd.” She must have said it several dozen times. Anyway, she spoke for a long time supposedly moved by the holy spirit to reveal gods plan for his church that coming year. She droned on and on and on with absolutely no indication of inspiration of any kind. An hour and a half of pure mindless drivel. This was greeted with loud applause and amens and other rites of approval.

Funny thing is, however, the bible says that to be a true prophet of god you have to be 100% accurate. Nothing the woman said ever happened that year or any year thereafter. Now how is it that our spiritually enlightened leadership had no idea she wasn’t really a prophet? Why couldn’t anyone in the congregation get clued in besides me? If this is god speaking, he’s a horrible public speaker.

I spent twenty years of my life trying to listen to god speaking.

I finally realized he wasn’t saying anything.

Posted in listen, prophet, signs, easter, hearing | Print | 1 Comment »