THE AFTERMATH

The stroke and its aftermath signaled a massive change in my entire life. I was devastated physically, mentally, emotionally, and very soon, financially. Very little of the man I was before would remain and what was left was so severely different that I changed my name.

 

I’ve already mentioned the “I don’t care about anything” syndrome. Other stroke survivors knew exactly what I was talking about but no one else has ever shown the slightest understanding. My mother in law had suffered a series of strokes which left her in an increasingly vegetative state for 8 years. None of us at the time had the slightest understanding of what she was going through, including her idiot doctor. But, when it happened to me, I saw the exact same behavior alterations in myself that I had just witnessed in her.

 

That scared me to death. Because in those first few weeks all I wanted to do was sit in a chair all day long and drool on myself. That isn’t an exaggeration.

 

Nothing was (or is) important to me. Things I placed a high value on before became absolutely worthless to me. I used to read 3 or 4 novels a week, I was voracious. It took several years after the stroke before I was able to drag my way through a novel by my favorite writer. I had absolutely no interest in that book or any other. I didn’t care about my favorite TV shows, movies, music, anything I used to spend time with.

 

But worse than that, I lost all interest in my god.

 

I prayed through the stroke because that was what I trained myself to do in a crisis. It was actually a wonderful feeling. It was bliss, it was death, it was the presence of god. It was perfectly peaceful. I was never afraid. But I was completely and utterly alone. There were no angels or white lights. There was no Jesus with open arms, no pearly gates. There was nothing. Nothing. And still more nothing. Not that that was a bad thing. I wanted to stay there forever. I still do.

 

I wasn’t praying by the time I got to the hospital. My only thoughts were, “I wonder what happened?” and, “I don’t care.” I didn’t care what they were doing to me. I didn’t care what all their tests would show. I didn’t care if I would get better or be trapped there forever. I didn’t care about god. I didn’t care about praying to him. I didn’t care if he would heal me. I didn’t care if I never heard another word about him.

 

Not that I instantaneously let go of my faith. No, I began to ponder what had happened. I started with the assumption that my beliefs were in error, that somehow I had misunderstood the true message of the Bible. I began searching for something, anything, that would confirm that. I started thinking that maybe Christianity actually didn’t work from a collective viewpoint, that it was completely a matter of personal interpretation. After all, that’s exactly what you see if you look around at all the various denominations. People gather together with others who hold the most similar beliefs to their own.

 

Ultimately, that seems to be what we have but it in no way matches the Bible’s teaching about being one in Christ and the unity of the faith. Sure there would be minor variations but there shouldn’t be these gigantic rifts. If what the Bible says is true there should be no way for one church to claim the members of another church aren’t even saved. I’ve seen so much of that firsthand going both directions that I have to wonder how anyone claims Christianity is real.

 

So then I considered the opposite idea that maybe all the things in the Bible that I took to pertain to individuals really referred to groups. I considered the idea that maybe, just maybe a letter written to a church in Corinth only applied to that specific church 2000 years ago. Maybe something written to and about Israel only applied to Israel. Possibly the whole thing was only for the Jews. Could it be that a promise of God only pertained to the whole group and not the individual?

 

Keep in mind I was slogging though these concepts while in a deep mental fog that I couldn’t shake off. Quite a lot of time passed without any progress. But I kept going through the motions. At least I did until Easter the next year.

 

The church we were going to was 25 miles away from our house. Two trips out there every Sunday was becoming quite a nuisance. It wasn’t a straight through trip so it took 40 minutes each way. As is the tradition of most churches, Easter morning required an Easter morning sunrise breakfast which we felt obligated to attend. What we didn’t know was that this particular group did not continue their services immediately after the breakfast. No, they waited two hours until the regular start time with everyone just going back home. Everyone knew we lived way out of town but no one invited us over to their houses for those two hours. It was already obvious that these people really didn’t care about me because none of them ever visited, called, wrote, or made any attempt to see how I was doing or offer any compassion or comfort or assistance of any kind. Easter morning was the next to the last nail in the coffin of my time there.

 

I had been teaching on the gifts of the Holy Spirit for nearly a year. I used the New International Version of the Bible the vast majority of the time although I referred to other translations frequently. Somehow, unknown to me, the pastor decided that he was a “King James Only” Christian, and by golly, his church was going to be the same, too. So after I finished one morning, he got up and proceeded to denounce everything I had just taught because I had used the NIV. I don’t know if you have ever had a sermon preached condemning you specifically, but I can assure you it is not a pleasant experience.

 

I resigned shortly thereafter.

 

My wife immediately wanted to go back to the Baptist church we still belonged to because she had been born and raised there. Her friends were there and she was comfortable there. Not so for me. Only a year and a half earlier their pastor had thrown me out (yes, I mean that literally) for being to Pentecostal. He had been replaced and the new pastor wanted me to feel free to come back.

 

But I didn’t. Not at all. These people had rejected me. They did not have any compassion for my stroke, indeed, they acted as if nothing had ever happened. So I started avoiding church with an increasing frequency.

 

This put a strain on our marriage but I didn’t care. These same people had not been there for my mother in law’s 8 year ordeal and they weren’t there for me, either. I could not fathom why this didn’t bother my wife but it was too much for me. Where on earth was the love of God I believed in and read about in his word?

 

Although the mental fog did not abate, I continued looking for an answer. I stumbled upon a group of ministries that preached preterism which I had never heard of before. Preterism puts all the prophecies of the Bible in the past, Revelations has already happened, Jesus already came back the second time. This actually made sense to me up to a point. Jesus, Paul, and a few of the other New Testament writers all believed and stated clearly that Jesus would return in their lifetimes. It’s in your Bible plain as day, you have to go through some heavy duty mental contortions to make those statements apply to 2000 years later. Since all the end time prophecies had been fulfilled quite a few dogmas all neatly disappeared. A huge amount of guesswork and error was also explained away (this is actually a huge subject, I can’t do it justice here). This belief actually seemed to be what I was looking for.

 

Except for one giant glaring flaw.

 

If what we see now is the fulfilled Kingdom of God that Jesus returned to build, what on earth was the point? If the world in its present state is the best God can do then who needs God? Jesus returned to establish the Kingdom. Where is it? I could not find any explanation among any of the writings of any of the people who held this teaching. Preterism neatly removes a massive amount of conflicting doctrine and blots out many major contradictions. Which is a very good thing. Unfortunately, it leaves a gaping hole in their place.

 

As I was studying this, I was spending less and less time going to church. I didn’t realize it at first but I was also getting out from under a massive layer of guilt. Christianity is a religion of guilt and condemnation. No, it’s about love and forgiveness. You think so? Before you were saved, you were a vile wretched sinner. Jesus took you in and forgave all your sins, washed them white as snow in his blood (which makes no sense at all if you think about it). He made you a “New Creation” in Christ. So what do Christians tell you you are now that you’re saved?

 

Yes, that’s right, you’re still a sinner. Saved by grace. But a sinner nonetheless.

 

You’re still controlled by sin. You still sin daily, you still want to sin. You’re constantly failing God. You’re still guilty. You still need to be forgiven all the time. You still need to repent. You sin without even thinking about it. You don’t pray enough; guilt. You don’t read your bible enough; guilt. You overeat; guilt. You said a dirty word when that moron cut you off in traffic; more guilt. You look at porn on the internet; lots of guilt. You’re a normal human being; you guilty unclean bastard! After a week out in the world you’re covered in sin and guilt.

 

So you slink back to church every week to hear that you’re guilty and condemned but Jesus wants to forgive you and make you right so you can go out and do it again next week. I’ve always wondered how his supreme sacrifice which supposedly removed the sins of the whole world somehow has no power to keep you from going right back to it repeatedly. How is it that you’re a new creation but still a sinner?

 

I will tell you this: stop listening to these weekly reminders and you will find you feel less and less guilt as time goes by. Feeling less guilt is a wonderful way to start thinking better of yourself. Feeling less guilt is a wonderful way to start letting go of God.

 

With a mountain of guilt gone from my life I felt free to start examining some of my more radical doubts. Having been encouraged by what I learned of the Preterists but still far from satisfied by their doctrines, I suddenly found myself willing to find out what atheists had to say. I would never even allow myself to think about anything like that before, let alone actually read any of it. I stumbled around the internet not sure exactly who or what I was looking for. I found a lot of unsatisfying garbage at first but I kept looking. I happened upon Dan Barker, Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Paine (Age of Reason – go read it), and even Mark Twain! but not necessarily in that order. Look up Twain’s “Letters from the Earth” if you want to read something funny that also shows clearly what’s wrong with religion. Check out writings by those other men for some highly intelligent, extremely well thought out, and in Ingersoll and Paine’s case downright eloquent reasons for not believing in God. I read everything online by these men and others that I could find.

 

And I started thinking what if God wasn’t real? What if there was no god?

 

I wish I could say that it all became crystal clear at that point but it didn’t. My experiences in religion seemed all too real to me and my all or nothing nature made me completely devoted to it. The stroke didn’t make the all or nothing attitude go away but it did make all the things I was devoted to lose all their importance. I suddenly found my life to be empty and meaningless.

 

I found writing to be helpful. I started blogging before blogging was a word. I became somewhat of a stroke activist, trying to help other survivors cope with the bizarre changes they were going through. I found out that very many stroke survivors were abandoned by their families, friends, and churches. It was almost as if people were afraid stroke was some kind of highly contagious plague and just associating with a survivor would infect them. That prompted me to research stroke effects.

 

When I found out that brain damage can bring on all sorts of religious phenomena and that it could be reproduced under laboratory conditions, I started realizing that my out of body experience could be scientifically explained. The loss of emotions was a documented fact. Perceptual changes were common and could be extreme. Euphoria (which neatly sums up the perfect peace sensation) was a matter of electrical impulses. I even came across a documentary about a man who couldn’t make decisions after a stroke. None of these bizarre things required a spiritual explanation.

 

While all this was going on, I had learned how to walk again. That prompted me to think I was ready to go back to work long before I should have. My boss began harassing me the day I went back, telling me I was too slow to be useful when it was all I could do to stand up. He kept this up every day for a month before finally calling me into his office and informing me that I was the most worthless excuse for a human being on the face of the earth. I quit. That was a mistake as I quickly discovered that I couldn’t get unemployment. I should have sued my boss and the company for their atrocious behavior in getting rid of me but I could not emotionally handle the ordeal. By then I had realized that nearly everyone I knew had turned their backs on me.

 

My so called friends joined the rapidly growing numbers who never called, visited, or wrote me a letter. It was like I had ceased to exist. There was no compassion, sympathy, or even pity from anyone. I have still never figured out what I possibly could have done to deserve such universal loathing. The fact that other survivors had endured the same was little comfort.

 

We quickly used up my retirement money, mainly to keep from losing the house. 23 years of my life in that damn factory had resulted in enough of a retirement fund to keep us going for six lousy months. Then the money ran out and we were really in trouble. I had applications in everywhere but I was determined never to set foot in a factory again. Nine months went by before I found my current job in an office supply store. I’ve been there nine years now and have accomplished nothing. I have more responsibility than anyone else and I have to do everything the managers do but I have no title and no pay to go along with it. We’ve been living on a real low level for all that time.

 

I always used my full name on applications or any kind of business forms but I was always called by my middle name, Duane, for the first 43 years of my life. The people at the store called me by my first name, Frank, because it seemed normal to them. I never corrected them. I had changed radically. I did not act, feel, think, behave, or believe like I did before the stroke. Somehow calling myself Frank seemed appropriate although I actually hated the name before.

 

Sometime during the midst of all this, the fog began to lift. I found that I had more going for me than ever before. I was actually far more positive than I had ever been as a Christian. Somehow living in constant pain made me much more determined. Battling the side effects of all the medicines revealed spunk I was never aware of before. People get on my case all the time because I don’t smile but I tell them I must be the happiest person on earth because I enjoy living despite all the pain.

 

My perspective changed. My perceptions changed. There was no spiritual explanation for what happened to me. All my faith, my carefully constructed and nurtured faith, could not help me. It couldn’t stop the disaster of the stroke from happening. It couldn’t heal me afterwards. There were no answers or explanations to be had in the Bible or in prayer.

 

So I wandered further and further away from religion until gradually I came to realize there really wasn’t any god, not because of the experience. It was because the stroke removed my faith colored glasses and let me look at the Bible as it really is, a collection of ancient myths, legends, stories, and fairy tales. Without faith, without magic, that’s all it is.

 

Somehow I was wired with an off switch. Desperation at the lowest point of my life had turned it on (faith) but the stroke had turned it back off.

 

But that wasn’t the end. I continued studying the Bible. Religion still fascinates me. The Bible disproves itself and the existence of god quite obviously. How millions of people can’t see that or even admit to the possibility is of major interest and importance to me.

 

So this blog is here to share my explorations with you. Hopefully I can help you see reality or at least challenge you to consider something other than what you’ve always heard or been taught.

 

Or maybe I can just piss you off.