Why I Am Who I Am

The truth of a proposition not only justifies but places a moral obligation on those who possess this knowledge to educate the ignorant.  This obligation to teach the truth to others is the basis for and lifeblood of civilization.  To reason away or reject this obligation is not only immoral but is an act of cowardice.  Worse, it is an act of treason and a repudiation of all those on whose shoulders we stand who suffered and died for the truth. We are approaching the end of a war against the truth that began with Darwin, became an organized ecumenical movement in reaction to the German school of textual criticism of scripture in the early 20th Century, then grew exponentially in the last half of the century and to this day beginning with government complicity in the home schooling ruling to appease racists by allowing parents to refuse their children an education and, instead, to pass on their ignorance to their children without fear of intervention and with the FCC decision (lobbied for by Christians for 15 years) to allow the public access time required of TV stations to be used for Christian propaganda, to the point our country is now more divided and are politics more acrimonious than it was in the years building up to the Civil War. My own involvement began when I was born to a uneducated holler preacher in West Virginia.  As a result of religion, both my parents were sexually dysfunctional.  Their idea of sex education was to give me a church pamphlet that condemned masturbation as sin and taught me with ever orgasm men lose a tablespoon of blood that can never be replaced.  When I was eight, I began having Night Terrors.  With no education, I took the events to be evidence I was possessed.  I could not speak of this to my parents or anyone.  At the age of 24, horribly scarred both sexually and psychologically, I became a Charismatic.  I was looking for an exorcism.  In the course of five years I was subjected to a deliberate regime of abuse both mentally and physically.  I was exorcised on two occasions in the Pentecostal Holiness tradition.  My controller attempted to murder me by claiming to heal my 20/200 vision knowing I had to drive 20 miles on the interstate to and from work.  My controller went behind my back and prophesied to my wife I would die in a car accident.  When the inevitable wreck occurred and I called my wife to let her know I was safe I heard my controller in the background screaming in frustration "You mean God spared him?"  I was led to beat my children to drive Satan out of them.  I almost killed by 18 month old son in a four hour marathon beating session prompted by his refusal to say "Jesus Is Lord."  He married recently and took his wife's name as his own because of his hatred of me.  I don't blame him.  I hate myself. After the Jim Jones Guyana murders, when everyone else in the church was praising God that they had the true Holy Spirit and not some Satanic counterfeit, I was sitting quietly in the back because I knew in my heart that if my controller had ordered me to I would have drank the Kool-Aid.  On 9-11 when everyone else was asking how those men could do such a thing I was silent.  I knew I left shortly after and was told one of my children would die if we didn't 'return to the Lord.'  A year after I left my daughter Katie was born with a genetic defect called Turner's Syndrome, a form of dwarfism with associated sterility and heart, immune system and kidney problems.  She went into heart failure when she was three days old and was pronounced clinically dead when we got her to the ER.  They brought her back.  She's thirty now and has a Living Will with a strict DNR order.  There's more, a lot more, but the upshot is I have PTSD and am heavily medicated so I can go to work in an office of 'good Christians' without having a panic attack whenever I hear a 'God bless you' or 'I'll pray for you.' Before you jump to the conclusion that my experiences are atypical of religious institutions two facts.  James Dobson, the current head of American fundamentalism, got his start with a book called Dare To Discipline that was a defense of the physical abuse of children.  And in the last few years the Catholic Church has funded and built a center for exorcism in Europe where children have their demons cast out for such Satanic involvement as playing with a Ouija board. I'm sixty-one years old and the only relief I have found from the damage done to me and by me to others came after years of study in Biblical criticism and historical research I became an atheist.  I found that every promise made to me by religion but not kept has been made good by atheism.  I am at peace, or as much at peace as I can be.  I've only woke up cursing and screaming three times in the past month.  I am not afraid of death.  Accepting my own mortality has led me to be one with this world and all of the people who live and die here. I do not judge others, I have forfeited the right to judge.  I have come to realize that I am not one of the good guys and that's OK.  "A hero ain't nothing but a sandwich." I have come to learn that my personal ethics are the only valid judge of the rightness or wrongness of my actions.  That people who need to be told by others what is right and wrong with the threat of eternal punishment in Hell for disobedience are morally deficient. I bow down before no man nor do I require others to bow to me. I am an atheist.