For me it was simply logic. Even at an early age I knew that something was wrong with all of the ridiculous answers I was given to my questions. My big sister (Tyrdis, see her story on this site, "A Witnessing Asshole for an Asshole God") would try to rationalize everything to me, which didn't work because none of it made sense. My other sister would avoid my questions. As for my Mom, she would get all freaked out and tell me that I shouldn't ask so many questions, that it would only confuse me. With our friends, who were also the Pastor's family, I kept my mouth shut, because they would just try harder to save me. I said something to the preacher's son once and he ran in to the other room and started telling everyone that I wanted to be saved. It was horrible. Everyone got excited and made me pray. I did not ask for it, I did not want it, but the ball was rolling. That week I was paraded out in front of the church congregation (Southern Baptist), and baptized. It was really traumatic for me. I hated every minute of it. I felt completely alone. There was no one to tell how I really felt. Later I tried to defuse it by saying that I had been too young to understand it all. But that only made it worse because I was pressured to do it all over again (at Melodyland Christian center this time.) I was getting older, and getting over my reading problems (I have dyslexia), so I was able to read for myself and found the answers to my questions, and the truth, on my own. The day I finally took a stand and walked away from the church for good was the day that Melodyland crushed hundreds of music albums on the stage. It felt like Nazi Germany. When the pastor held up a KISS album with a picture of Gene Simmons holding his hand up with his pinky, index finger and thumb extended, and said it was the sign of the devil, when it actually means love, the crowd gasped and blindly accepted his words as the truth.

For me it never made sense. Not only were my questions never answered by Christians, but I wasn't even supposed to ASK. My experience parallels what you hear from gays who say that they always knew that they were gay: I always knew that Christianity didn't make any sense, and they finally come out of the closet: I came out of the closet as a freethinker - even though I "got saved" twice!"

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