It wasn't my parents' fault that I became a Christian. It was just one of those things.

My mom and stepdad (my mom and my biologial father had divorced when I was four) were atheists and raised me to be one too. Like any child, I was fascinated by ghost stories and magical TV shows like "Bewitched", but I was knowledgable about science and knew that such things were make-believe. As fun as it might be to really believe in them, ghosts, goblins and gods were fantasy.

Or were they? In fourth grade, we were given papers for our parents to sign if they wanted to to be excused from class for "religious release".

I was surprised--almost half the kids got their papers signed and were duly excused from class an hour or so early. Maybe I just envied the kids for being able to get out of school early, but clearly there were an awful lot of grownups (the kids' parents) who believed in this supposedly imaginary God. Maybe they knew something my parents didn't?

When I was 12 my stepmom took me and my sister to church for the first time in my life. I was desperately afraid of what my mom and stepdad would think, but the experience itself wasn't so terrible. The people didn't do anything that was so terrible, and although they passed around a plate into which you were supposed to put money, you didn't have to if you didn't want to. The songs were pretty and it felt good to be there. My mom and stepdad were kind of upset, as I expected, but I was 12 after all and they felt I should have the chance to make up my mind about religion, so they decided it was OK if I went. I guess they thought my rational upbringing would prevail. They were wrong.

The more I got involved with church, the more the idea of God appealed to me. They didn't present him as a cruel or judgmental figure (that came later), but as a loving Father. For whatever reason, I needed that big Daddy in the sky watching over me, so I believed. I learned to pray, I read the Bible (rationalizing away its many contradictions with all the power my teenage mind could muster), I "accepted Christ", I got baptized (twice--first time in a Methodist church when I was 13, and later by immersion in a Church of Christ after having been convinced that a proper baptism, i.e. immersion, was necessary for salvation and that I'd go to hell if I didn't), I tried my level best to be a Christian. Oh sure, I wrestled with "sin"--like I say, I was 13 when all this got started so you can probably guess what my number one "sin" was :eek: Stiil, I was "saved", and I was happy.

The beginning of the end came on December 12, 1982. On that date, a friend of mine named Steve Riemer was killed in a car wreck. The girl who was driving lost sight of the road in the early morning fog and crossed the center line into the path of a semi. Needless to say, she was killed too, and the two other people in the car (one of whom was also a good friend of mine) were seriously injured. I was in my third year of Christian college by this time and this incident was just devastating to me.

Why did God let this happen? Did Steve do something to deserve that punishment? He was a teacher in a Christian school and one of the finest people I'd ever met--why should God single him out? His dad was a minister! How was Steve's dad supposed to continue preaching to his congregation about a loving, merciful God when God had killed his son?

Where was God when all this happened? I began wondering if they'd done like most of my friends usually did and prayed for a safe journey before they'd left. (Years later, I asked my other friend, who had been in the car when it happened, if they had prayed. "No," he said, "we didn't, and I've always ondered if that made a difference." All I could think of was "poor Glen--God puts him through an accident that kills his best friend and damn near kills him too, and he feels bad because he didn't pray!") My grief lasted over a year, during which time I saw all the suffering Steve's family went through, all the emotional suffering Steve's surviving friends went through, and the only answer anybody could give me was "God knows best".

As the years went by I saw many of my other friends suffer meaningless torment as they suffered everything from bad marriages (my best bud in college) to cancer (my favorite teacher in college, one of the "godliest" people I ever met, who died less than a year after one of his sons died of muscular dystrophy), to various greater and lesser physical ailments, alkl of which they felt obligated to bear graciously because "God has plan for our lives and it's not for us to question." Well, _I_ questioned--after all, I "knew" myself to be a worse sinner than they and yet this crap wasn't happening to me, it was happening to all my friends! (Oh, and Glen, the guy who survived the car accident? A couple years after he got married, his firstborn son was born with a rare incurable blood disease which would, according to the doctors, either kill him before the age of three, or leave him in continuous pain while allowing him to live somewhat longer.

As it turned out, the former happened. I'm sure Glen and his wife plastered on the appropriate smiles and forced themselves to be happy with God's benevolent will.) Well, nobody shits on my friends without me telling them just what I think about them--not even God. If God was going to treat my friends that way when he knew damn well they didn't deserve it, then he could just find someone else to play his cruel little mind games with. I was finished.

I set fire to my Revised Standard Version Bible that my stepmom had given me when I was 12, with my name on the cover. It didn't burn very well, but it was the thought that counted. My heart was broken, my soul was bitter, but my mind was free. I had been taken in by the cruelest con game ever perpetrated on the human race, and I would never get those wasted years back again, but at least my path to eventual happiness would be mine alone. No celestial boogyman watching my every move, no more committing intellectual suicide for the sake of harmony with my peers. Knowledge instead of faith. Answers instead of platitudes. Certainty instead of hope.

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." Ironic, ain't it?

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