Skip to main content

The Intensity of Hell

By ooglyman ~

After leaving home I stayed away from church for several years. I had no pleasant memories of being raised by fundamentalists, and didn’t want to waste any more of my life inside church walls. After some time I married a lapsed Catholic who expressed less interest in religion than I did, and I thought I’d grow old with her. Within a few months she began attending mass at the local parish chapel and laying a head trip on me that I was in need of god.

Stairway to HellImage by Christolakis via Flickr

It also annoyed her that I was writing poetry and short stories which were being accepted for publication by alternative and new age focused magazines. I was also smoking a great amount of weed and drinking beer with my friends. We were together for three years, and then we split immediately after our son was born.

I followed my ex back to our home town so I could stay in my son’s life. I had him with me on most weekends. One day when my son was two he asked me to take him to church. I had attended my ex-father-in-law’s funeral service at a Catholic church, and I knew I didn’t want to take him to that type of church. I hated the formality and ritual. I found a Protestant church nearby and we began attending occasional services. Usually I dropped him off in Sunday school, walked a few blocks to the local park to smoke a joint, and then walked back in time to take him home.

About this time I stopped writing.

When my son was nine or ten his mother sent him off for the summer to visit relatives in another state. I was lonely without him and hooked up with a lady I had been infatuated with when I was in high school. She was pentecostal and laid down two rules for me if I wanted to date her: stop getting high and to attend her church. It was easy for me to stop smoking weed, but attending church was awful. Not only did they adhere to fundamentalist teachings like the churches I grew up in, but they also did a lot of moaning, wailing and strange utterances that they referred to as “speaking in tongues.” It was nuts, but this lady was a babe so I let my penis do my thinking for me. I even learned to tolerate both of her spoiled brat daughters.

About a year later we were married, and then when my son was twelve his new little sister was born. I noticed tension between my wife and my son, but thought it was something we could work out. His mother thought differently, and she kept me from seeing him for about 18 months. I tried to resolve the issues and get back into my son’s life, but my new wife had other ideas and sabotaged all my efforts. Even into high school his mother insisted I only see him outside of my home. One pastor even advised me to entirely remove my son from my life. According to him my new life should be with my new wife.

Before our daughter was born we moved to a new church, but after several months we left it and started attending the local Calvary Chapel. For me it was a relief to not be attending a church where I was constantly hearing cackling and moaning during the services. CC calls itself charismatic where they believe in “tongues,” but they use it with more restraint. I felt more comfortable among the faithful, and I started studying my bible.

Though I had been raised attending fundamentalist churches I had never read the bible more than was necessary to complete my Sunday school lessons. Even at the IFCA church when I was a teenager I only read what the pastor had us read for the services. Now as an adult it still bugged me to read “scripture.” I enjoyed reading fiction, poetry, world history and science articles, but the bible was dry. I knew how to type so I decided I would type the bible instead of read it. This was in the nineties before I bought my first computer so I started typing scripture on my electric word processor. (I also started to write poetry again.) It took me about a year and a half to type out the complete NIV and New American Standard versions of the bible, and I was about to start in on the New King James when my wife began to behave in a really crazy manner. (Even crazier than typing out the text of the bible.) She had shown some signs of mental illness earlier in our marriage, but now she went completely over the edge of reality.

One evening we were at church when she told me she had to go to the restroom. She was gone for about twenty minutes and I wondered what was keeping her. Fortunately it was dark in the sanctuary because when I looked back toward the last pew I saw her standing totally naked. Without making a fuss I went to her and asked her what she was doing. She mumbled something about it being god’s will, and then I walked her back to the restroom, picking up her clothing that she had removed along the way. I’m not certain if anyone saw her. I kept it low key, and I only spoke to the assistant pastor about it.

The diagnosis was Schizoaffective Disorder. Life began to resemble the intensity of hell. Church was no help. I was told to have faith, to trust in god, to pray. I was even told that I was “blessed.” Then the situation became even worse when my wife’s oldest daughter died shortly after turning twenty-one.

We split up when our daughter was seven, and were divorced a year later. My daughter is sixteen now, and I’ve been raising her without the help of her mother. The truth is her mother can’t even help herself. She has alienated her entire family, including her surviving daughter, and she has gone on extended psychotic episodes where she calls up everyone we know in the middle of the night to tell them that I am a mass murderer and rapist, that I am in league with the devil, and that I am a practicing homosexual on my way to becoming the Antichrist. None of these accusations are true. She still attends different churches and seems to be highly influenced by prophetic studies of the book of Revelation. Occasionally I’ll receive a call from someone I used to know at church who asks me why I have mistreated my wife so badly. Often they hang up before I can reply.

But these aren’t the reasons why I left CC and no longer am searching for another church. What disturbed me about the people at the churches I was attending were the small things they would say. One guy told me that living in a dictatorship would be fine with him as long as the dictator believed in Christ. Another person said he was grateful for the churches distribution of voter guides because he didn’t like to have to think for himself about the issues. Then I finally pulled my daughter out of her Sunday school class after her teacher said that his purpose was to make the students believe that the creation myth was truer than the Theory of Evolution.

There is always a change that my daughter has inherited an inclination for her mother's mental illness, but I don't want it to be fueled by the insanity of biblical teaching. That would be too crazy.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not