Do any of you remember a christian childern's television program called "CIRCLE SQUARE" (still in repeats) well.......

.....on that program was a kid with very bright blonde hair for about four years from 1976 till 1980ish. Guess who? Yup, me. My parents were/are so thick in it that I was a tele-evanglist at the age of eight!

After Circle Square, my parents threw me into a christian private school. I guess they wanted to protect me from going bad. Basically the same thing that every other parent of the school was thinking when their new teenage son or daughter enters that rebellious stage in life. ( You end up with 30 rebellious students)

I ended up street preaching at sixteen, that's where I started seeing reality for the first time. I had come across an eleven year old girl who sold her body for food. Not a single church in Toronto, nor my so called christian friends and family would lift a finger to help. That's when I started to lose faith in the "church", but I still had belief in "god". It's been really hard to come to the conclusion that it is all a bunch of bull. I guess it started with someone asking me to "PROVE IT" when it came to my beliefs. I found that I couldn't. I ended up living on the street myself, unable to cope with the conflict inside of me and live with my parents view of the world. being on the recieving end of christian charity for the first time in my life, I was shocked to find that it was a trap. A street kid never gets any real help from missions, just enough to keep them there. It took me two years to escape the street life. And I escaped cult thinking at the same time.

I had started wondering about the difference between right and wrong. While I was living in the downtown core, a guy offered us a cup of coffee while my wife and I were panhandling. I guess he wanted to check us out. To see if we would rip him off. He offered to let us stay with him off and on, sleep over once in awhile, take a shower or something like that. We took his offer, thinking he was christian or maybe even a nutbar of somekind. It turns out he is the most rational person I have ever met. We got into a conversation about right and wrong one nite, he put what I was looking for in one sentence: "The dividing line between right and wrong is HARM". From that nite my life took a sharp turn, I started think from a rational viewpiont. Oh, I still believed in god, but now I was trying to rationalize my belief. I started to question it, with a tool. My friend Phil who first offered my wife and I that cup of coffee has no idea how much he helped me. Not only by helping us get off the street, but helping me think. Nor does he know how much his friendship means to me. ( He won't even, after reading his copy of this)

My life is less then perfect now, But it's MY LIFE! And it isn't bad at all. I have a loving wife, (yes the same one, 13 years) and four handsome boys. I own my own house in coquitlam bc (actually a mobile home) and make ends meet with research report writing, and pottery.

I want, in closing, to thank two people. First, my wife Carol, who has put up with my ramblings on god, morals, and paranoia. (one I'm still working on, hense the joining of this list).

And second, my best friend, Phil, for that cup of coffee.

Daniel Foscarini

information_broker@consultant.com

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