I came from a VERY disfunctional family. My family background was full of depression, narcissism, drinking, adultery, physical and verbal abuse and neglect. My parents hated eachother and divorced when I was eleven. My mother married my dad based on his bravado and his representation that he would be Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" by the time he was 30. This narcissistic nonsense hid his basic insecurity. When my mom discovered that dad had become only a fat, balding college professor who drank beer, ate junk food and watched TV all night, she stopped sleeping with him. He basically went nuts after that and became verbally and physically abusive to us kids. He later had an affair with her best friend that broke up the marriage, but their marriage was DOA a long time before that.

My mom was so depressed when I was growing up that she hardly keep us properly fed and groomed, much less having any energy for love or affection. And of course my Dad hated me, because he thought my mom loved me more than she did him. So I was pretty starved for affection when my best (and only) friend got into the Jesus movement. This was in 1973, and we lived in a college town.

I'm not going to knock the Jesus people. They were the first folks who really loved me and showed me attention. I was only eleven or twelve and they were all college students, so it was like having a bunch of older brothers and sisters. I overlooked their narrow, fundamentalist approach to the world because they were so nice to me.

Unfortunately, I took to religion like a drunk takes to drink. (This may not be a bad analogy, because I later found out that my great-granddad spent half his time drunk on skid row, and the other half when he sobered up preaching to the drunks. My family history is full of religiosity and drinking). For about 18 months, it was like one long bout of substance abuse. I was HIGH, HIGH, HIGH, on Jesus, soaking up the Bible like a sponge. I read my Bible every day, witnessed to everybody, learned to hate atheists, Jews and gays, confessed sins at all hours of the day, spoke in tongues, and attended church at least three or four times a week.

After every binge comes the hangover. Mine lasted for nearly twenty years. It started when blasphemous thoughts ("God Damn the Holy Spirit") started going through my head uncontrollably. I tried everything I could to stop them, but I couldn't. As a little thirteen year old, I was convinced I had committed the unpardonable sin. I began living under a dark cloud that cost me most of my high school and college years.

The other thing that happened is I began spending more, and more, and more time "confessing my sins." They became more and more trivial, then absurd (like playing in the "wrong" key on the piano, or sneezing in a classroom). I didn't know it then, but I had an emotional illness called "Obsessive- compulsive disorder" (OCD). While I was probably predisposed to this illness, fundamentalist Christianity played a huge part in it. We were taught that ANY unconfessed sin hung like a dark cloud between God and the believer, and that if you died with an unconfessed sin, you would go straight to hell. There was not a single moment for the next ten years that the thought that I might have an unconfessed sin didn't haunt some part of my mind.

As time went on, I became more and more confused about who I was and what Jesus meant to me. I never felt "the presence of God" any more. My Christian friends told me this must be because of (you guessed it) unconfessed sin. When I couldn't stand confessing my sins any more because it was driving me crazy, I learned that it was time for "the next stage" of my Christian life: the Deeper Life Teachings. This "cure" was worse than the disease. You could stop having to confess sins all day if you didn't sin any more. The way to stop sinning was to "reckon yourself dead to sin." The Christian was truly dead to himself and dead to sin; he just had to realize it. This was a disaster for me. I ended up lying in my bed for hours, afraid to move, afraid to do anything, because it was coming from "me," not from God. I had been taught that God was like a puppet-master, and if we let him live through us, we could live a sinless life. But in my case, I was willing, but God never showed up!

The deeper life fiasco was in 1980. I didn't stop being a Christian until 1991. After I decided to leave, I experienced a series of panic attacks that required medication and I have suffered from bouts of anxiety ever since. In the time since then I have read hundreds of books about every imaginable religion, about science, evolution, sociology, philsophy, etc. I think my current religious beliefs are similar to those of Einstein or Spinoza: the universe is a tremendous place, but there is no personal god who cares about what happens to us. Everything, in my mind, is at some level a miracle.

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