I was born a catholic and went to catholic school. When my headmistress told me at the age of 7 that I would go to hell for saying the F word I began to question the sanity of it all even then. Some years later I walked away from it all completely, without even noticing.

Many years later I met this girl at college. She was pretty and we got on well and after quite a while we ended up falling for each other in a huge way.I had always known she was a Christian but innocently believed this to be just a case of nodding at the right time and not going to bed with her until we were married. She made it very clear that unless I became a Christian our relationship had no chance. I should have heard the warning bells going off even then.

She took me to a church in West London which was pretty straightforward and I kind of enjoyed all the pomp and ceremony. 'Oh!' I thought 'She's not the happy clappy type'. I was very relieved. My relief was shortlived. It turned out that this church was not the normal one she went to. The very next week she took me to another one. And this place was nothing short of barmy.There were all these people jumping up and down as if they were in a rock concert, smiling and whispering madly to themselves and looking as if they were about to have some kind of erotic episode. And they all had these vacant expressions on their faces. I was a little freaked out to say the least but I trusted her completely so didn't worry too much.

As the weeks and months went by she began to reveal to me exactly what it was to be a Christian in the practical sense. I had always thought her to be a very centred and warm-hearted person but gradually it became clear that she was a hate-filled bigot. The first great row we had was about homosexuality. I was appalled at her attitude. It would have looked at home in the Third Reich. I was seeing a different person. Entirely different. But the more I fought, the more she retaliated so I thought the only option I had was to really try with Christianity to see if there was any truth in it all and to see if our relationship could work.

I went on my own to a 'Welcome to Church Party'. I thought that if I could make some Christian friends, I might get somewhere with it all. After all, I believed there was a God, I just wasn't sure if the Christians were right. So I turned up at this place expecting to be welcomed in with open arms. I couldn't have been more wrong. People stared at me quizzically and had this look on their faces of quiet disapproval mixed with contempt. I wasn't one of them and they could sense it. Basically, I wasn't an empty minded bigot with an unquestioning faith in an elderly book. But I was still willing to learn. There had to be some truth in it all, I thought, my girlfriend wasn't mad was she? I walked away that night full of disappointment. I hadn't made a single friend. Even the pastor looked uncomfortable when I introduced myself. I reported back to my girlfriend. She sounded disappointed. But to my surprise she was not in the slightest embarassed at the behaviour of her like-minded brethre

Let me tell you about this church.It's like a circus full of mad people. They use video and sound systems and pretty people that they stick on a stage and get to jump up and down. They hug each other and shake their heads in wonder at their awesome God. They say nothing is impossible for God. They talk about personal relationships and how important every member of the church is and then proceed to ignore every new face that doesn't fit. They pat each other on the back for being such great Christians but as a church they spend more money on publicity,hiring theatres and flights all over the globe than they do on the poor or the needy. They are nothing but a huge clique. They are a club, and the only way to join is to smile a lot and tell lies about how much they care about the world. They don't care about the world a bit. They don't know about the world. I was appalled at how ignorant these people were. Not long ago the pastor was moaning about the new laws in France regarding the wea

But I loved this girl so much, I stuck with it. To be honest, I loved the idea that there was a God who loved me, that he would fill me with his holy spirit and turn my life around.I called myself a Christian, who was seeking to be filled with the Holy Spirit. And I kept looking for it. But I didn't find it. All I got were these morons banging on about how good they were and about how wrong the rest of the world was.Of course, it was always my fault. I'd done something wrong, or I wasn't giving myself to Jesus. Whatever the hell that's meant to mean.In the end I started to get angry. She would even get her mother to preach to me from Australia about how the scales would soon drop from my eyes and how I just had to trust God. And of course, when my personality got too strong, and they realised they weren't going to make a good little convert out of me they began to give up. I was rejected by the woman I loved time and time and time again. In the end we split up and I had an affair wit

We split up for the final time and for a long while afterwards I still tried to get with this Christianity thing. I went back to the church in West London.But after a while even that place started preaching things that just weren't real or good or believable. I even tried Alpha and for a while thought I'd had a breakthrough, but I hadn't really. It was all so much rubbish that I realised I'd lied to myself. God didn't love me, and nor had she. Ever.

Of course, she won't ever talk to me again. She thinks I'm bad news. Well, no I'm not. I'm a good man who tried very hard to accomodate a woman with extremist views that have no place in the modern world.

It took me a long way to walk away from it and I'm still struggling. I hate that girl, which I guess is normal after a bad break up. But I hate her and all her horrible friends for making me feel so inferior and so evil. I just hate them all. If there is a loving God, he's in those of us who will never preach homophobia and threats about the afterlife. I've been hurt by people in my time, but never as badly as the church has hurt me. They might have done it twice. But they're never going to be allowed to do it again.

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