Origins: My personal Testimony.

My story really begins before I was even born.   It begins with my father, as do all stories necessarily.

My father grew up Catholic.   The family boasted of a Mont Signor and my uncle was at one time studying to be a priest.   (He has since become a Protestant Christian and is a missionary to El Salvador).   My father, in his own testimony, tells of the alarm he would feel after having gone to confession, of thinking about a dirty joke on the bike ride home as a young boy.   Already, he had sinned and would have to wait a week before going to confession again.   ‘What would happen to him in the interim if he were to die?’.   As he tells it, “Well, I would go to Hell”.  When he was of college age, my father speaks of being an angry and militant atheist and, in the blessed hind-sight of years, how he was really just angry with God.   Apparently many of his friends thought he was ‘of Satan himself’ he was so angry and even violent with his words.

But my father finally relented to read a portion of the new testament; the specific passage I don’t recall.   Whatever it was, he had a deeply religious experience and changed dramatically over night.   He cut his ‘hippie’ hair, quit smoking pot and began witnessing in earnest to his own family; often arguing with his own father for a period of time before he too cast off Catholicism and accepted Jesus into his heart.   The rest of the family, more or less, followed suit and it was into this atmosphere that I was born.

My birth place is situated in the western part of Virginia.   Coal mining country within the heart of crowded mountains, and ol’ time religion.   I often get the sense that those were the days when the local churches were in the thrall of strong evangelism and early-church type zeal.

There were tent-revivals and movie nights.   Hell-fire preaching and alter-calls abounded and many were saved.   During one viewing of the film “A Thief in the Night”, sometime around 1976,77, a very young me answered the altar call and gave my life to Jesus.   The atmosphere was one of fear; being left-behind on earth while my family and friends were ‘raptured’ into heaven.   I remember the alarm I felt that I might wake up one day and everyone would be gone, everyone that I cared about would have vanished, in the ‘twinkling of an eye’.

Still, despite my conversion being based on the acceptance of Love through fear, I sincerely wanted to please a God who sacrificed everything for me.. ME!  Who was so unworthy and so hopeless.  At the age of fourteen, however, I was not really living a walk-with-God.   On one Wednesday, knowing my parents would be going to Church soon, I hid under the bed until they left.   They couldn’t find me and I was left with my older siblings and to my own devices (which probably involved watching T.V.).   When they came home, they had some literature from a group called New Tribes Mission.   There had been a presentation and this missionary organization had a program called ‘Summit’ which allowed believers to travel to far-off places and volunteer their physical labor so that the missionaries could concentrate more on language-learning, bible-translation and other aspects of the ‘Lords’ work’.

This was exciting and I expressed an interest in going to help out.   I had been reading books of missionaries like Paul Fleming (founder of New Tribes), as well as “Peace Child” (Don Richardson) and others which told the exciting tale of Christian missionaries penetrating tribes that had scarcely seen white men, much less heard the truth of the Gospel.   I was fertile ground for beginning my own missionary career; going on a trip like this, I knew, would change my life and help me to be like those heroes I had read about.

That summer, after much prayer and raising money, I left for Baborigame, Mexico to help work with the Tarahumara and Tepehaun indians.   Here I was in an atmosphere of hyper-evangelism, deep spirituality and constant practicing faith in God.   For six weeks we dug trenches, made adobe brinks, built walls and tacked on tin roofs.   In the evenings we would sing around a campfire, pray and renew our commitment to God.   And after six weeks, we went home.

There was a reverse culture-shock that left me depressed and at the same time, more devoted than ever.   I shut myself off from my family and friends, reading and memorizing scripture and spent long hours praying to God.  I carried my Bible with me in High School and the only extra-curricular activities I had at this time were playing guitar, high-school soccer and running outside of practice.   But all good things must come to an end, and so they did when we moved to Ohio.

Some other kids in Church introduced me to Led Zeppelin (I remember asking, ‘Who is he?’) and I began to back-slide; enjoying the things of the world and struggling to shut out God and the guilt I felt for letting my walk with him lapse.   I thought my last trip would change me and make me into the shining servant of God that I knew he wanted me to be, but nothing had really changed after all.   I struggled with ‘the flesh’ and struggled in the spirit and I just struggled all the time.   At the same time, none of the other Church kids seemed particularly concerned with God or Christianity.   They partied in high-school, dressed like all the other kids, didn’t care which version of the Bible they happened to have (KJV here) and didn’t read it at all unless called upon.   If they weren’t going to walk with God, why should I?   And so, I struggled.

When I was seventeen, I went on another trip with Summit to Senegal, West Africa.   Oh it was so good to be around others who gave God the seriousness and earnestness he deserved!   But again, I came back largely unchanged and with some of the same nagging doubts about what I was doing and why.   I even then began to suspect that I wasn’t alone.   That all of the Christians I knew were probably struggling with the same issues for which the remedy was always the same, ‘Just believe’ put in the form of some inspirational story or some touching portion of scripture.   Perhaps even a song would be all that was necessary to draw one back into the Father’s loving embrace.   And if all else failed, guilt.   Guilt for being so weak and foolish when God had been so loving and kind.   Thus I vacillated between a deeply rebellious spirit and a deeply zealous walk for years.

Then another opportunity to deepen and strengthen my walk with God opened up after High-School when I attended one of the Bible Schools operated by New Tribes.   This is part of their missionary program; two  years of Bible School, followed by one to one-and-a-half years of ‘Missionary Boot-camp’ and then one to one-and-a-half years of Language School.   Finally I was really on my way to being what God had called me to do.   While there, I joined the Chorus and we sang our way through churches on the east coast all the way down to Florida and we sang all over Michigan where the school is located.   But again, despite the deeply spiritual nature of my surroundings, I was left feeling as though I was faking it all.   I wanted to be sincere and have a deeply religious life, but I continued to see the others throwing themselves after some elusive spiritual high just like I was.   When a friend came to visit me, he really dropped a bomb-shell by telling me how uncomfortable he was there; that everyone was so holier-than-thou.   And he was a Christian himself!   He gave me the impression that what he saw was nothing less than a cult ~ and this shocked me deeply.   While I didn’t adopt his criticism fully, I didn’t completely dismiss it either.   Here was a view of myself and my fellow-believers from the outside looking in, and what that view said was, ‘This is phony and self-serving’.

While there in the Bible school, I continued to waver and my deep insecurities manifested in relationships and really my entire walk.   I didn’t excel in my classes and much of the course-work involved things I felt I already knew.   Others were constantly getting up to relate how deeply a particular verse affected them and their fervent telling spoke to me of a deep desire to convince; something I was certainly no stranger to.   Faith was something thrown in our faces as a means to an end, an unjustified defense of real questions; ‘Just beleive’, ‘Help thou mine unbelief’.   But at the same time, and perhaps unwittingly, one of our instructors would always say, “Don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see!”, and this had a profound effect on me.   Especially when applying it to Christianity and Theology.   While he was saying this in regards to current events and new stories, I was hearing it in regards to my personal walk with God.   Still, I wanted to believe and I wanted to have the security of an unshakable faith in God.   I continued to witness and pray, getting up in the wee hours of the morning to join others in the boiler room of the building for a kind of spiritual prayer-orgy.

After my two years of Bible School came to a close, I had my ‘Senior Interview’.   The leadership there felt that I still had some growing up to do; they would not recommend me to the next phase of missionary training at that time.  It was over.   God was leading me in a different direction and it wasn’t to be a missionary in far away tribes; not with this group anyway.

I went home completely deflated.   But still I didn’t give up.   I was very active in my church and didn’t miss any meetings.   I spoke ‘as the spirit moved me’ around the Lords Supper and was invited to teach the adult Sunday School.   And still I struggled with the silence of God.   Still I struggled with the answers to prayers that didn’t seem like answers at all; one had only to have faith that God had answered the prayer in the best way possible.   This, and many other instances, felt as though we were being compelled to put on blinders.   To rejoice in putting on those blinders.   To believe with no reason to believe and to hope with no reason at all to hope; no reason but that disbelief was sin and punishable.   No hope but the hope that despite any kind of evidence, blind-faith would win the day.

Belief for the sake of belief is not belief at all.   Throughout my early twenties this was the predominant argument with which I struggled.   It is submission par excellence to something which has not convinced you and refuses to even try to convince you outside of intimidation, guilt and fear.

And so, for the first time in my life, I had a real religious experience with that thought; This faith of mine and this faith of my fellow Christians, is not of God.  This faith is an arrogant attempt to super-impose a false reality on the true reality.   It has all the hall-marks of a cult-ish, mind-controlling  phenomena.    It demands adherence without any reason.   It allows no question.   It criticizes and attacks all dissent, usually in an ad hominem fashion while ignoring the reasoning behind honest questions and dissent.   It assumes it’s own truth and value, independent of any corroborating evidence.   It is “..evil precisely because it requires no Justification and brooks no argument.” (R. Dawkins).  

The scales had fallen from my eyes ~ it really felt as though I could see clearly for the first time, the sunlight in my face and the light of truth out of those many years in darkness.   While I had finally been emancipated from the idea that the god I grew up worshiping could not  possibly be true, I still had not let go of spiritualism in full.   My progression was something of a winding journey through New Age, Wiccan ideology, Tarot and Buddhism.   While I do think all of them contributed in some way small or large to who I am today and what I believe, it was always the reasoning of unsubstantiated faith that broke the spells these systems wove, as well.   At some point, it seems, most if not all belief systems require one to believe for it’s own sake.   To cite as evidence that which has no citation.    To simply accept as true something for which no reasoning exists.  This to me has been a red flag that what I might be  involved with at any time is less than honest, needs and relies on mind-tricks to persist and is, therefor, false or at least, not sufficiently true to stand on it’s own.

Today, I am an Atheist as regards my belief.   While it may be possible that some kind of god exists, I feel it is not probable and I will live my life accordingly.   Where it might be possible and I cannot disprove such, inasmuch as what I ‘know’, I  am Agnostic.   I hope the contrast of these two views isn’t lost on you, dear reader; Agnosticism deals with what we know to be true, while Atheism deals with what we believe to be true; they are not mutually exclusive.

And remember, “Don’t believe anything you hear, and half of what you see!”.

I have much more to say, and will say in previous and subsequent blogs.   Please feel free to comment and rate what you see here and thank you for taking the time to read my testimony.