Conversions and De-conversions - Brutus, thou sleepest...

The articles about my years as a Fundamentalist Christian are particularly difficult for me to write about. I think I cold write dozens of articles describing my years of attending Calvary Chapel, and consolidating all those disparate memories into only a few short articles is a bit of a challenge. Ultimately, my purpose in writing about these years is, not just to describe the stress and guilt I felt as a Christian, not just about the humorless ignorance that Calvary Chapel encouraged me to live in, and not just about the bogus apologetics they taught me to believe or the hypocritical behavior they engaged in. My purpose in writing this series is to explore why I converted into religious faith, and why I left religious faith. By 1990, simultaneous with my most fervent years as a Christian, I began to crack out of the ignorance that Calvary Chapel imposed on me. It took years, but the real beginning of my de-conversion from Christianity began out of necessity. I needed to learn a real trade in order to escape my life as a short order cook. My real education and my escape from Christianity finally began, slowly and tentatively, in 1990.

I can summarize my years as a Fundamentalist Christian in Calvary Chapel this way:

I was convinced that I had the exclusive truth about the nature of reality. Us Christians, especially those of us who did not rely on mere religion, but on our personal relationships with Jesus Christ, were the only humans on earth who had the unmerited favor of the Almighty, and had exclusive rights to eternal paradise through the Blood of Jesus Christ. All other humans were self-deceived or liars. Knowing their backgrounds or their stories was irrelevant. It did not matter what other religion or religious tradition they followed, and it did not matter why. It did not matter why they did not worship God as he One True God. The bottom line was that every single one of them was no better than Lucifer. Like Lucifer the fallen angel, they were prideful enough in the face of God Himself, to want to set themselves up as their own god. Non-Christians were guilty of the most heinous sin of all, that of pride, and they wanted to set themselves up above the heights of the clouds, to be like the Most High, and rely on their own wretched strength for their salvation. Anybody who did not take Jesus Christ as their own personal Lord and Savior was, in effect, spitting in the face of Jesus Christ as He hung on the cross. They were telling Jesus that they were good enough, and they did not need His blood to atone for their sins as the wrathful God demanded, but could face God clothed only in their own, pathetic, fleshly righteousness, which was no better than filthy rags before the Almighty.

This is what I truly believed while attending Calvary Chapel. I had confessed and repented of my sins there because I was miserable and unhappy, and I wanted to make something better of my life. It had nothing to do with Salvation. When I initially converted, I was not fearful of Hell. I just wanted to finally find peace and contentment in my life, and give it a sense of meaning and purpose. Calvary Chapel took these inner desires and piled on the baggage of Christian dogma. I was suddenly to believe that I would attain Heaven because of my Faith in Jesus. All others who did not believe as I did were damned, not due to God, but due to their own prideful lusts. The Truth was self-evident, but they were too deluded to accept it.

Believing this dogma was like hanging a millstone about my neck. I told myself that I was finally happy and at peace, but the truth was that I never felt more guilt in my entire life than when I attended Calvary Chapel. Most crucial of all, I lost my sense of humor. Christianity, as taught by Calvary Chapel, forced me to view nearly every human I came into contact with as a lost sinner, bound for eternal flames. It did not matter if they attended church, or even if they professed to be a Christian. I met many who claimed they were a Christian, but if I asked them about the specifics of salvation, sin, who Jesus was, or any other crucial matter of dogma, it was obvious to me that they were not really saved. They professed to know Jesus, but Jesus did not know them. They did not have a true relationship with Jesus, but were relying on their religious affiliation to do the saving for them.

I did not ponder too long on the uncomfortable questions that this dogma brought up. What about those who have never heard of Jesus? Crazy, I thought. I was certain that everyone in our modern world had heard of Jesus. What about those who were not raised in a Christian cultural backdrop? Pastor Skip once told us about his visit to India where he met a group of Sikhs. “They were still Sikhing,” he would chuckle. But seriously, what about people like them who were not from our Christian-saturated culture? I did not think too much about these questions. They were uncomfortable to me. Besides, God knew what was best, and He was a compassionate Father and all-knowing Judge. I had faith that He would ultimately do the right thing in determining their eternal destiny.

Questions like these became increasingly uncomfortable when I decided to enroll in the local community college. By 1990, I realized there was no future in odd cooking and dishwashing jobs. I needed to learn a trade, so on a whim I enrolled in a course in basic electronics. I finally had my foot in the door of higher education, and I started to meet people outside of my own social circle. At the age of 26, for the first time in my life, I met somebody who was not raised in the familiar traditions of Western Christendom. Trinh was from Vietnam, and everything about her was alien to me. Her thick accent was almost impenetrable, but we somehow managed to understand each other. I think I naively found her to be wild and exotic, since she was the first Asian I had ever really met. My curiosity got the better of me, and we became fast friends. One afternoon, over lunch outside the classroom, I asked her about Jesus. She did not understand what I was talking about. That was startling to me! Everybody whom I ever met, when asked about Jesus or God, gave some kind of opinion. They may not have been a true Christian, but they had an opinion about who Jesus was, or who God was. Everybody knew who Jesus was! But this girl from Vietnam, while she had heard the name, had no opinion about Jesus. She had as much opinion about Jesus as I had about the Buddha. That is, none. This Jesus character was not part of her culture, and she was not raised with this tradition, so why should she have an opinion?

Should I tell Trinh more about Jesus? I could tell a neighbor, a friend, a homeless guy on the streets about the salvation from sin that the death of Jesus gave us, and everybody would already have some basic idea of what I was talking about. Our culture was that of Christianity. Trinh was Buddhist. Since she did not share my cultural religious identity, I would have to describe to her, from first principles, about who Jesus was, why she was a sinner, and why she needed Jesus as her Savior! How could I possibly cross that cultural divide? It would be like her telling me about the Buddha – a name I had heard, but one that I knew nothing about. I was slowly learning how to view things from the point of view of over a billion humans whom I had never met. That was just a tiny step, just a tiny crack into viewing my Christian beliefs form another point of view, but it was a start.

“Are you going to talk to me about religion?” She showed her distaste by squeezing her eyes shut as if she bit a sour lemon.

“No.” I never brought up the subject again. I don’t think the thought that she was doomed for Hell ever crossed my mind.

Trinh was a whiz at math. I was terrified of math, and had never passed basic algebra in high school. I realized that I had to enroll in a basic math course if I wanted to continue studying electronics. My education began, but it was still tentative. I was still unsure of what I wanted to do, or how education was going to benefit me. Electronics did not really interest me, but the school catalog started to intrigue me. I could have a night course in Mexican archeology! American History! Creative Writing! Even as a lousy cook, I could afford these courses in the trade school! So one by one, on nothing but a whim and a newfound curiosity, I started taking night courses at Albuquerque TVI. I suddenly found that I missed all the reading that I had done in high school. After high school, I found one addiction in alcohol, then I found another addiction in Jesus. I did little of my own reading during this time, except for the Bible and John MacArthur biblical commentaries. The night classes in Albuquerque TVI taught me to be curious again. They taught me to be curious about dangerous subjects like history and sociology.

Back in Calvary Chapel, Pastor Skip taught me that curiosity in worldly wisdom was to be viewed with suspicion. Pastor Skip often spoke of his personal distrust of secular philosophy and psychology. He said that even Christian psychiatrists often had to do studies and readings of how the human mind works from secular labs and universities. “Why would I need to read these books of human wisdom,” Pastor Skip would preach, holding up his Bible, “when I have the Owner’s Manual right here?” Philosophy could be a good thing, Pastor Skip would say, since it literally means ‘the love of wisdom’. But true wisdom only comes from one source, again referencing the Bible, and secular philosophy leads to nothing but despair and sinful pride. Pastor Skip sometimes told us about his brother who once majored in philosophy. “He read all the philosophers, and came out more lost and confused then ever!” Well there you go. What more evidence did we need than Pastor Skip’s word on the matter?

Pastor Skip openly admitted that when it came to his Christian beliefs, his goal was to remain as ignorant and close-minded as possible. He did use those very words, and that really amazed me at a time when I was just discovering night classes at Albuquerque TVI. Pastor Skip implored us to read, study, and rely on nothing but the Bible. We did not need to bother ourselves with pseudo-intellectuals who studied the Bible as literature. We did not need to read about church history, religious thought or those Catholic church fathers. We did not need to entertain other ideas or points of view. All we needed was the Bible and the inspiration of the Holy Ghost to guide and teach us.

So for a short period of time, I alternated between two different ways of attaining knowledge and wisdom. Calvary Chapel insisted that it was by the Word of God alone, but at the same time my natural curiosity was being reawakened, thanks to some night classes at the local vocational school. I discovered that I was actually good at studying. I had an extremely long attention span, and I could sit for hours on end, doing nothing but reading, writing and taking notes. I followed Pastor Skip’s advice and read the Bible in its entirely. Then I read it again, cover to cover, in a different translation.

But I could also go to the library to check out some books assigned by my American history teacher. I particularly remember a shocking book written by escaped slave Frederick Douglass. My history teacher told us about how the Bible was used by Christians to justify slavery. “He certainly hates Christianity,” I would muse about my teacher. But I did not quit the class. As offensive as I often found American History, particularly my teacher’s condemnation of the role of religion, I did not drop the class. Instead, I went to the library in the attempt to verify some of the shocking things he said. Time and again, I found he was correct. He once described the horrors that the Spanish perpetrated on the southwestern natives in the name of Christ. I had never heard any of this information before! He told his shocked class, “Look, this is not a Disney movie. This is history.” I should have been offended, and I was. But I was addicted to learning more. If it were true, then I would have to deal with it. If I was to be honest with my Faith, I had to learn to reconcile this suppressed history, as shocking and offensive as some of it was, with my Christian beliefs.

It was a bit of a dichotomy. Pastor Skip, Calvary Chapel and my Christian beliefs on the one hand, and my burgeoning curiosity on the other. My high school education was next to useless. I had spent my entire high school career trying to avoid bullies and getting into a fair share of trouble. I had somehow squeaked through graduation after repeating my entire senior year and barely avoided repeating it a second time. I was given no educational direction from my parents, whom I don’t blame, because they did not know any better. I don’t think I was ever taught to appreciate the joys of education, or the thrill of discovery. I shuffled from class to class for five years at Albuquerque TVI, still with no direction, and with no intention of gaining a degree in anything. Some classes I excelled in, others I failed. I learned to face my fear of math. I enrolled in basic algebra, the same dreaded class that I had repeated and failed multiple times while in high school, and discovered that I had a natural affinity for it. I shocked even myself! I had come to believe that I was a failure at math, and that I would never understand it. It was a true self-fulfilling prophecy. I believed that I would never understand it, so I did not understand it. But I had no idea how talented I was in math, given a little confidence, discipline and attention. I learned to view the math problems as entertaining puzzles, much like crossword puzzles – and after much work, study and practice, I excelled. I was finally, after years of failure and self-loathing, learning to have some self-confidence.

Pastor Skip told me that confidence in my own strength was not pleasing to the Lord. I learned to repeat the wish of John the Baptist in reference to Jesus: He must increase, while I must decrease. Life was not about me. I was weak in my own flesh. I could do nothing on my own, without Christ who strengthened me. Of course Pastor Skip was right! I could see how lost we were when relying on our own strength! But when I pondered my own fleshly nature, and our lost and sinful state, I would sink into despair, guilt and self-loathing. There was nothing good about me, Pastor Skip taught, and I was wretched and wicked from my mother’s womb. Self-confidence only came when I was allowed to rely on my own strength, yet this confidence in my own power was offensive to God.

I was torn. Calvary Chapel taught me that I could not do anything. I was worthless without God. I had no power. I had to give it all to Jesus. Doing the seemingly impossible, by finally passing my dreaded math classes, and passing them after overcoming much self-imposed fear, was a tremendous victory for me. I was beginning to believe in, dare I say, myself. Just a little.

Despite my newfound love of learning, I was being pulled in two different directions. I could learn about the Bible, about Jesus and delve deeper into the meat of my beliefs, or I could rely on my own strength, develop some kind of discipline, and learn things in school, hopefully to lead to a better job, but ultimately just for the joy of it. I knew I wanted to study what I loved. And I loved Jesus. That love, I swore to myself, would never die.

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Conversions and De-conversions – my damned parents

By 1990, I was 26 years old and I was thoroughly immersed in the world of Fundamentalist Christianity. I was convinced that I had a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ”, that is I could talk to Jesus every day, at any time I wanted, and that Jesus was listening intently to every word that I said. Jesus was concerned when I brought my troubles and worries at the foot of the altar. Jesus was pleased when I witnessed his Gospel to my friends and family. Jesus showered me with his blessings when it was his good pleasure to do so. Jesus was scolding and correcting when I fell into Sin (“Correcting” was the term that my church used. We never actually used the Biblical terms of a “jealous” or “angry” god unless we were actually reading it from Scripture).

I talked to Jesus constantly. Of course, he never talked back. I never expected him to, because nobody I knew ever actually expected to have Jesus audibly speak to them. So it was a constant struggle for me to discover what the Will of God was for me. Apparently, from the way Pastor Skip used to preach, Jesus had a special and unique plan for me and my life. I would talk to Jesus, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk some more. He never said anything back, so instead I had to try and decipher seemingly random events in my life as if they were clues that he was sending to me. In other words, my relationship with Jesus was essentially a game of charades.

I found special and insightful meaning in that Psalm I read this morning. I wonder what God is trying to tell me with that?

My friends at work were especially receptive to that Chuck Missler cassette I played in the prep room today. God must want me to play some more of that tomorrow.

That checkout girl at the grocery store sure is cute. I wonder if God placed her in my life so that I could ask her out on a lunch date, and share the Gospel?

Jesus, when I bought this bicycle, I dedicated it to you for your glory. As I ride it today, lead me to a place where I can be an effective witness for your Kingdom.

Yes. I said all these things to myself – and much, much more. I went to the sermon cassette library and checked out all the messages I could find on the topic of God’s Will for the Christians’ life. “Discovering God’s Will for Your Life”. For the life of me, I don’t remember what any of them specifically said, but they all boiled down to, pray, be patient, live in the Spirit, and God will guide you to where He wishes you.

I took my Christian Faith very, very seriously. I figured I was not a powerful Bible pastor like Pastor Skip or Chuck Missler, but I could do my tiny part for the Kingdom working and spreading His message in the restaurant kitchen where I worked. I was happy with my small part in God’s giant plan.

But was I happy at that time? Looking back on that time over 20 years later, I don’t really know. I was certainly well liked at church and at work. My workmates put up with my constant witnessing and proselytizing, but while they loved spirited debate their constant pounding of my Faith really wore me down and tired me out. But I gained satisfaction from that by knowing that I was doing the will of God in spreading Gospel seeds among receptive unbelievers. Those seeds would surely germinate when they hit the ready and responsive ears of a willing heathen. I felt, probably for the first time in my life, that I was on a correct and constructive path. I felt like I had finally found my moral bearing. I had quit smoking and drinking, and abandoned almost every secular activity and pleasure from my life. I also felt like I was a tiny part of something much bigger, and that I had exciting, secret inside information concerning the spiritual realm of God and His coming Kingdom, that only those few of us who had genuine relationships with Jesus were privileged to. Those were exciting times for me.

But on the other hand, Christian beliefs could fill me with terror, uncertainty, anguish and moral disappointments. I sometimes felt as if I was constantly struggling to maintain Faith, fighting off guilt for not witnessing to a person I met in the streets, or keeping too much money when I knew I could always give more to Calvary Chapel’s coffers. I struggled to find the balance of being pious enough to be a good Christian witness for my friends, and not pious enough that I was making a disgusting show of myself. I struggled not to privately judge those who did not take their Faith as seriously as I did. I once gave a sermon to the singles youth group about how much Satan hated us, and wanted to take all of us down with him. I shuddered when I spoke, and I know I had the attention of everybody in that room, and several commented favorably on my powerful message. But it was a message that pulled from deep in my heart. I was convinced that Satan hated me, and that he hated everybody that I loved, and that my entire family was going straight to Hell. When I contemplated on that fact, I was terrified.

Sometime in the midst of my years of Christian fanaticism, my dad converted to Mormonism. My hard-scrabble lumberjack father finally put the booze down and devoted himself to the teachings of Joseph Smith. To this day I don’t know why he converted, but I am certain that it gave him a community, and allowed him to clean up his life a bit. But at the time, all I knew was that he was following heresy – a heretical temptation placed before him by Satan, the Father of Lies, and that the deception would land my dad into an unquenchable lake of fire. As I mentioned in a previous entry to this series, I have never been close to my dad. Especially during this time of my life, the blows of his fists were still fresh in my memory, and even though he lived several hundred miles from me, he still intimidated me. But he was my dad. He was the only dad that I would ever have, and I forced myself to love him because Jesus commanded it. I still remember the night where I, along with some other Christian friends, prayed for the salvation of Dad’s soul. I presented a photo of my bearded and smiling dad to my Christian friends, and told them about his damnable state as a Mormon convert. I asked my friends to pray with me. So we put the photo on the floor, and we sat on our knees, and out of habit, formed a circle around dad’s photo. I still remember that prayer. Everyone chanted and prayed all at once, while I cried. I cried and cried. I cried until my eyes swelled and my sinuses hurt. I distinctly remember staring at dad’s smiling face while imagining that smile burning in the flames of Hell. I remember that photo becoming wet with the tears that dripped from my face.

Mom was more difficult for me to figure out. She had long since moved back to my childhood home in San Ysidro. I knew she no longer attended any kind of church, but she did not appear to me to have joined any heretical cult, like dad did. She had clearly backslidden though. At best, she was the type of Christian that Pastor Skip warned us about. He called the type of Christian who had lost the passion and fire of their First Love, and now wandered about in Christian apathy, as a Carnal Christian. I did not know if mom had lost her Faith or her Salvation, but I saw enough disturbing signs from her, that I had become concerned. First, she did not attend any church that I could tell. I remember her mentioning that she believed that God does not care what you believe, but he does care if you are sincere in your beliefs. I felt that was a sure sign the mom rejected the belief in the exclusive salvation through Jesus Christ alone, and just not a very smart position to hold. My concern for her had nothing to do with her actions or morals. It had only to do with her beliefs.

I once got her to accept an invitation to attend Calvary Chapel with me. It was a Sunday evening service, which was the night that Pastor Skip typically did his expositional studies. I was very excited. I could not wait to get mom into the sanctuary of that church, and let her listen to the magic words of Pastor Skip as he presented the Gospel to her. I wanted her to see for herself how attractive my kind of Christianity was! It was not the half-crazed Pentecostalism of my youth that I knew that she was familiar with. No! This was the contemporary, modern and reasonable faith – a true, non-judgmental and genuine relationship with Jesus Christ, without all the baggage of religion!

When she accepted my invitation to attend Calvary Chapel, I decided to do a little early prep work. I had no doubt that mom was once a born again Christian but had abandoned her faith sometime after her divorce from my step-dad Michael. So I spent the afternoon praying. “Dear Jesus, I ask that you open mom’s heart to your message, and that the Holy Spirit gently, lovingly but ably convicts her of her Sin. I ask that you put power into the Pastor Skip’s sermon, so that he will say those words which will affect mom. Dear Jesus, I want mom to join me in having a loving relationship with you”.

I rode my bike to Calvary Chapel about an hour or so before mom was to meet me there for the evening service. I went to the back room behind the stage, which was the prayer chamber where I had given my life to Jesus a couple of years before. I told the assistant there that my mom was attending Calvary Chapel for the first time, that she was a Christian but had fallen away, and that I would like them to pray with me.

Out of habit, we joined hands in a circle and prayed. As we blessed Pastor Skip’s upcoming sermon, one of the assistants thought that maybe we could go into Pastor Skip’s office and ask him to personally pray with us. My heart leapt! Surely, this was going to be an anointed message from Pastor Skip!

We walked down the hall towards the pastor’s office and one of the assistants gently knocked, walked inside and told the pastor that he had a visitor. Pastor Skip was busy preparing for the evening’s message, but he graciously invited us all in. I told Pastor Skip that my mom was coming in for the evening’s service, and that she was a Christian in the early 1970’s, but had fallen away.

“Is your mom saved?”

“I don’t know. But I want her to meet Jesus”

Pastor Skip stood and joined us in front of his desk. Out of habit, we joined hands in a circle and he prayed. “Dear Jesus, I bring Joe’s mom before your throne of grace….”

After his prayer, he beamed a broad smile as he always did, and I thanked him and the pastoral assistants for their time. I sat in the lobby and waited for mom. When she entered the building, she was amazed at the size and beauty of the sanctuary. “Such a big, beautiful church! I can tell wonderful things are happening here!”

The worship band rocked as usual. Mom really got into it, and clapped along. She no doubt remembered the guitar-based music from her Jesus Freak days. Following their usual pattern of two up-tempo songs, the band slowed down and performed a more contemplative and praise-worthy song. The hands started to rise in worship. What would mom do? I watched her nervously. She kept her hands clasped in front of her, her mouth stopped singing and she watched.

Pastor Skip began to preach. I remember nothing about the message in particular, but I do remember when he began to wrap it up for the evening. Pastor Skip rarely gave altar calls. It was just not his style. But this particular evening, with my mom in the back of his mind, he got as close as he ever got to giving one. The piano played a few quiet chords under Pastor Skip’s exhortation:

“Perhaps you are not a Christian. Perhaps you do not know God. Maybe you have a lot of questions and doubts, but Jesus will meet you where your doubts are. Maybe you think you are not good enough to be saved by Jesus and that you can never be forgiven, but Jesus will take you just as you are. Perhaps you were once a Christian but have fallen away…

He looked immediately, with laser precision, directly at my mother.

“…but somebody who loves you very much dragged you here kicking and screaming. Jesus loves you. He wants to save you. Will you accept his invitation?”

The service ended. As people filed out the door towards the foyer, mom silently rose and slowly walked to the front of the auditorium. She stood at the foot of the stage, all alone, head bowed. I did not follow her. I just stayed at my seat and prayed fervently. What was she thinking? Was she giving her life to Jesus? Was she crying? Was she repenting of her sins? To tell you the truth, I will never know. She stood up there for at least 10 minutes, and refused all offers of help from the assistant pastors. She just needed time alone with Jesus.

She finally walked back to collect her things, told me she enjoyed the service, and without a word of explanation, she left.

I never spoke to her again of that evening. The next week she came again to Calvary Chapel to watch special guest musician Darrell Mansfield perform some Gospel blues. And that was it. She never returned. As far as I am aware, that was the last time mom ever attended church.

I was afraid to talk to mom about that evening. Watching her at the stage, deep in contemplation with her head bowed seemed like such a private and intimate moment for her, that I did not want to spoil it. She asked the assistant pastors for privacy, so I thought I would give her the same privacy by not intruding on her thoughts. But I finally figured that she was up there deciding if she wanted to return to Jesus or not, and in that tense moment of decision, with all her memories of religious belief to reflect on in that moment, she made the crucial choice to reject her religious beliefs.

Mom was teetering over the edge. She nearly gave her life to Jesus. We had circles of prayer warriors asking God for his salvation upon her! But in that crucial moment of decision she walked away. My heart sank.

One evening, several months later, I was visiting her in her home. My heart was sick knowing that she had known a taste of Christianity, but had decided to ultimately reject Jesus. She was deceived, lost and damned. For several months, I was very uncomfortable when visiting mom. How could I convince her? How could I tell her what she did not already know? How could I make her accept Jesus again?

She asked me what was wrong. I mumbled something about her not being a Christian, and that I could not get over it. I still remember her forcefully asking me:

“Joe! Do you think I am going to Hell!?”

“Yes!” I remember crying again. I remember that familiar feeling of snot clogging my nose, and tears running down my flushed hot cheeks. I cried out of terror and fear of my god. I cried because nobody seemed to understand the damnable fate that awaited them! I cried in frustration that nobody that I talked to, not even my own family, not even my parents, would accept Jesus as their Savior and accept a home in paradise. Nobody listened to me but a lousy street bum!

I cried and cried and cried. My god I cried so much when I was a Christian. I cried until I could not see from tears. I cried until my face hurt. I cried until I hiccupped from interrupted breathing. I had no time for God’s promised Peace that passeth understanding. I was too busy crying over the miserable survivor’s guilt that I felt. I was saved. Everybody that I loved was damned.

Mom, as usual, told me that there was a lot that I did not understand. But she asked me what kind of Heaven I could expect if everybody I knew was burning in Hell. How could Heaven be joyful, she asked, when everyone you know and love is burning forever? How much will you enjoy heaven with that in the back of your mind?

I never witnessed to my mom again. I never once witnessed to dad. The burden of guilt was unbearable. I could not hold myself responsible for their rejection of God, but I could not help feeling guilt whenever I was with them. So I just left them alone. I loved my Jesus, but I was terrified of the awesome power he held over us mortals. He held us from a thread that hovered over the fires of Hell. Why couldn’t anybody understand this obvious truth?

I was happy as a Christian. Sometimes. But I remember mostly the fear, the guilt and the tears.

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The Omnipotent Mr Softie

Christian pop culture has changed immensely since I was a fervent Christian. I had never heard of many things that are common with today’s Christians. I always feel a bit strange when I feel the need to criticize some harmless aspect of Christian culture. It is not up to me, a non-believer, to decide what is theologically correct and what is not. It is not up to me to decide if Christians are acting in an edifying manner. It should not concern me in the slightest if Christians want to ask themselves, “what would Jesus do?” If it helps them with their own moral reflection and contemplation, then I wish more power to them.

But sometimes I see something that seems so juvenile, so asinine, that it makes wonder what the Christian is actually imagining their god to be. It makes me wonder if they are actually doing any thinking or reflecting on their Faith at all. Check out the photo that I just took of Skyline Baptist Church's front marquee.



A couple of years ago, I asked a Christian work-mate of mine what she thought of Christians who attributed direct quotes to their god. The one I was specifically thinking of at the time was, “Meet me at my house before the big football game – God” or something like that. I told her that when I was a Christian, I would have considered putting words into the mouth of God to be the exclusive work of a prophet, and any so-called false prophets were to be punished with death by stoning. She replied, “Well, it sounds like something God would say. It is not inconsistent with the Bible.”

Still, I cannot help but think this demonstrates a few things about the Christian. First, obviously, I believe that it merely reflects the words of the person who installed the letters in the marquee. This is something that critics, or anybody outside the Christian religion can easily recognize. The believer’s thoughts and actions often become God’s thoughts and actions. But a Christian who places a direct quote onto a billboard and attributes it directly to God should make this projection obvious, even to a thinking Christian. Since the only criteria for a correct citation to God is anything that sounds like something he would say and is not inconsistent with the Bible, and since what sounds like a divine citation is purely up to personal interpretation, then anything goes. Any Christian can put pretty much any inspirational message that they imagine on the marquee and attribute it to God. By attributing quotes to God on marquees and billboards, the obvious projection of the believer’s words as God’s words is no longer implicit. The Christian is taking an explicit message that comes from their own imagination, and explicitly placing it as a quote from the Almighty. It is the blatant projection of the believer’s thoughts onto an invisible and impotent deity. It should be obvious to anybody who sees it from their car as they drive by.

Suppose for a second that when President Obama begins his campaign for reelection, a member of his campaign committee rents a billboard with the following message: “I have created 4 million jobs with the Recovery Act, and I promise to create more” – Barrack Obama. Now even the most morally upright Christian can see the problem with this. It may reflect reality. President Obama may have created this many jobs by signing the right bills into law. I am certain that no matter what, he will promise to create more jobs upon reelection. It is not inconsistent with any of his policies. It might even accurately reflect his thoughts and sound like something he would say on the campaign trail. But none of that matters, because he never actually said what his supporter attributed to him. He never said it. Here we have a quote, directly and explicitly attributed to the President of the United States, done in good faith with the intention of inspiring voters to support him. But none of that matters, because if this scenario did in fact ever occur, I imagine the small army of lawyers at the President’s disposal will threaten enough lawsuits, that the erroneous quote on the billboard will immediately vanish. The citation is simply wrong, and it will be removed because it can be used, not only for inspiration, but for mockery and ridicule by Republicans. They would immediately scream, “Obama never said any such thing – he is just trying to pad his own record!” But since he never put the billboard up in the first place, it might as well be slanderous.

We cannot falsely attribute sayings to any human authority, but for some reason, these Christians feel free to do so with their Ultimate Authority. And for the same reason, it makes God seem an object of ridicule to those of us outside the Christian Faith. From the looks of the marquee, Skyline Baptist Church must view their god as the Big Sentimental Softie in the sky. Such saccharine piety always made me nauseous as a Christian. If the Christian is doing anything that would make their god peer down through the clouds at them and smile in loving approval, then the Christian god is a doddering, old fool. When Christians describe their god to others, they are quick to point out that God is not an old man in the sky with robes and a beard who sits on a heavenly throne in the clouds. God is not like a person in the sky like the great medieval paintings often portray him. Yet these same Christians don’t seem to understand that these sentimental quotes turn their god into exactly that person! God is he who smiles down at his Faithful flock when they obey and do what pleases him. This type of deity must be attractive to those who want their God to be like the loving old grandparents who doted on them when they were children.

But I shouldn’t care. I am not a Christian. Why should I care? Really, I shouldn’t. I guess the fact that I was in that culture for so many years makes it all seem so surreal to me.

Conversions and De-conversions - weird science

During my years attending Calvary Chapel of Albuquerque, I longed to bring my friends and family into a relationship with Jesus Christ. But the humiliation I felt after leading a homeless man to Jesus Christ tempered my desire somewhat, and taught me a bit of much needed humility. My obnoxious and overt evangelizing at work mostly ceased. My revised tactic was to continue playing cassettes of my favorite Bible teachers at work, and playing them just loud enough for everybody to hear. I figured that this would be enough to convict them of their sin, and convince them of their need for a Savior. From there, I simply invited everybody I knew to church, with the hope that Pastor Skip’s charisma would win them over into accepting the conviction that the Holy Spirit was impressing on every Seeker’s heart.

Pastor Skip seemed to have endless stories of his evangelistic victories of winning his lost friends to Faith in Jesus Christ. I continued to pray and hope for such success, but everything I tried seemed to backfire. Sometimes my friends would actually accept my invitations to church, and I would sit next to them during the service and wait for Pastor Skip and the Holy Spirit to do their magic on them. Once an old friend of mine from San Ysidro, whom I will call E---, came with me to Calvary Chapel on a Sunday evening service. Sunday nights were typically reserved for Pastor Skip’s expositional studies, where he would simply plow through a Biblical book, verse by verse. Unluckily for me, on this particular evening, Pastor Skip was teaching through Genesis chapters 5 and 6 – the stories of the Patriarchs and Noah’s flood. Calvary Chapel teaches the legends of thousand-year-old Patriarchs, and a globe-covering Deluge as literal history. Pastor Skip was proud to show off a large model of Noah’s ark that somebody built for him. The model mounted behind him was at least six feet long, and as he began speaking of legend as history, I knew I had picked the wrong night to invite a non-believing friend. How was E---- going to be convicted of her sins from listening to the Noah story?

I don’t think I will ever forget that evening. Rarely had I ever been embarrassed as I was that night. Pastor Skip read to us all about Noah’s great-grandparents from Genesis chapter 5:

…and Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech: And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighy and two years, and begat sons and daughters: and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died. And Lamech lived an hundred eighy and two years, and begat a son:…

E--- could not take it any longer. Listening to a grown man tell a captive audience of several hundred people all about men who lived beyond nine hundred years old, and teaching it with the sober reflection of a history lesson, caused E--- to start laughing. It was not a quiet snicker. It was not a polite chuckle under her breath. E---- opened her mouth wide, reared her head back, and let out a full-throttled guffaw that was loud enough for everyone in the auditorium to hear. I sank. She caught herself, and bit her lip to keep from making a scene, but it was too late. Pastor Skip quickly jerked his head in my general direction, the direction that he heard somebody dare mock the Holy Scriptures. He quickly fired back, “and for those of you who may find these things hard to believe, please visit our bookstore after the service. We have books for sale, science books, that explain how these long lives were possible in the world before the Flood.” Again, E---- let loose with another loud laugh. Pastor Skip then craned his neck, squinted his eyes as he scanned the crowd, then found my offending friend and me and shot us a razor sharp glare. I sank as low as I could in my seat. I was embarrassed as I could be, not because of Pastor Skip’s reaction, or what the crowd might think of us. I honestly don’t remember the reaction from the crowd around me. I was embarrassed because of what E---- must have thought of me. She was a good friend of my younger sister! She and I went back many, many years! She was one of my ex-drinking buddies from my Hazy Years! What kind of nut outfit would she think I had joined?!!? Why didn’t I pick a service where Pastor Skip was teaching through the Gospel of John, or Romans, or… anything! Anything but 969 year-old Methuselah!

She obviously was not going to give her life to Jesus after that debacle, but I wanted her to think that my religious beliefs were reasonable, and that they really made perfect sense. I wanted her to know that we were all sinners and the only way to achieve salvation by God was through his Son Jesus Christ. The Gospel was such a reasonable, sound and simple idea, and I wanted her to experience it. I wanted E---- to meet Jesus and experience the same relationship that I had with Him. But that evening, I was embarrassed because she new that I expected her to believe ancient legends as if they were history. Did I really believe such things? Did I really believe that these legends of Genesis were history? Why did E---- have to come on this night, this night of all nights, to find out that I believed such childish things! Pastor Skip had not yet even launched into teaching us the history and science of the Worldwide Flood, and the laughter of E---- might as well have been laughter at me. This girl, this old friend of mine, was mocking the childish beliefs that I was forced to believe in, and I confess, it embarrassed me. To her, the whole thing was just ridiculous, and I felt like I had been seen with my pants down. I felt like a teenager who was caught by his friends still believing in Santa Claus.

E---- held any further laughter when Skip began describing the flood, but she constantly smirked and rolled her eyes. I drove her home when it was all over. I did not try to win her over. I knew deep down, I knew the whole thing was absurd. I knew that all the modern attempts to historicize obvious myths into some kind of plausible scientific structure was crazy. People do not live to be one thousand years old. There was never an ice canopy high in the atmosphere that covered the earth like a protective shell. Floods never covered the entire planet. There were no Nephelim or fallen angels who came to earth, had sex with women, and corrupted the human population with Demon spawn. There was no giant barge that held all the different ‘kinds’ of animals from the Deluge. In the modern world, these were children’s stories, and I was embarrassed that I had to admit that I believed them as literal history. Somehow there had to be a reasonable answer that would absolve these stories of their ludicrous character. Perhaps the great ‘years’ of the patriarchs were symbolic for something else. Perhaps they meant ‘months’ instead of years! But no… that would never work either since they would be 12 or 13 months old when begetting children. There must be an answer… somewhere.

I dropped her off at E---- off at her apartment. She smiled and shook her head at me “You don’t believe that stuff, do you?”

“Yes, I do. But I also believe Jesus is our Savior.”

“C’mon. Please. You know better than that.”

I could never admit, out loud, that I had doubts. I did not realize when I accepted Jesus as my Savior, in a time of my life when I just wanted to be happy, to live a responsible life, and to be forgiven of my sins, that I must also accept legends as history and absurdities as reality. I knew better! But to doubt the Deluge of Noah was tantamount to doubting the Resurrection of Jesus Himself! The Bible was accepted as a whole. Nothing could be left out, and not a word doubted. I did not realize how much baggage I had to drag around with me when I accepted Jesus. I was told that the only condition to Salvation was to repent and accept the Blood of Jesus Christ. But it turned into a huge bait and switch job, because I also had to believe in the literal, historical existence of every minute detail of the Bible, be it thousand year old patriarchs, world drowning floods, floating ax-heads, giant, man-eating fish or fiery, flying chariots. But since God could supposedly do anything, doubting any of these Bible stories meant doubting the power of God. So I embarrassed myself again and again, by outwardly affirming these legends as facts, but desperately trying to force myself to believe.

I had no trouble believing that Jesus died and was resurrected for my sins. I had no doubt that Jesus performed every miracle attested to Him. Jesus was never an issue. I never questioned that. But just from my library reading as a youngster, I knew too much about the Theory of Evolution and the age of Earth to seriously hold any beliefs in a literal, historical Adam and Eve. Too many hikes in the desert, too much science reading in the library, and too much curiosity had already spoiled my unquestioning Faith.

I did my best to make the unbelievable stories in the Bible somewhat plausible. Where the typical creationist distorted science by imagining things like atmospheric ice canopies to explain the Flood of Noah, I tended to view the stories in a more mystical and less literal manner. I believed, for instance, that The Garden of Eden was in some non-physical plane of existence, and was a pre-physical world which had not the yet been spoiled by the corrupting influence of Sin. My reasoning revolved around my attempting to reconcile things like God’s curses to Adam and Eve with what I knew of science. God cursed Eve with the pain of childbirth, which implied to me that had God not cursed her, she would not have had to endure such labor pain. But I also knew that a woman’s labor pains were due to the child trying to squeeze through the mother’s relatively narrow pelvis; an evolutionary compromise we have to pay in order to stand erect on two legs. So did God originally create humans to walk on four legs like dogs, only to stand on two legs as a result of the curse of Labor Pains? No, that is ridiculous. The only way I could see out was to place the Adam and Eve story on some higher, ethereal plane of existence, and The Garden of Eden would become a simple metaphor for something Bronze Age Semitic peoples would have no chance of understanding as literal. Adam and Eve were created as quasi-angelic creatures in the image of God, and their curse was to be cast into the mundane and corrupted world of mere physical existence.

This made perfect sense to me. Never mind that Adam was created out of the dust of the earth, or that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flowed out of Eden, which ruled out any non-corporeal meaning, I could pull what I could out of the Bible that would support my theory, and ignore the stuff I found troublesome. I figured that all these impossible stories in the Bible could be cast into some kind of plausible, ‘spiritual’ structure like this, just as long as I was a little selective in what Bible verses I used.

As silly as much of my theological rationale seems to me now, as I type this nearly 25 years later, I can sense a desire for some kind of consistency and rigor in my thinking. I was still uneducated in science, methodology or skepticism, but I think I had developed a desire to think that way very early on. I was just untrained and uneducated. And even though I had abandoned the science reading of my youth, the thought of real science and scientific thinking as applied to my Christian Faith was very appealing to me. That is why, one evening while watching the loathsome TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) on television, I was blown away by a real scientist who gave me Reasons to Believe.

Watching TBN, even as a devout Christian, was like watching a freakshow. True, I had been Slain in the Spirit in my youth, but the antics of Benny Hinn, who could regularly hypnotize entire mobs of devout believers, was just too much to be believed. Network owners Paul and Jan Crouch were disgusting displays of synthetic piety, and preached the worst forms of prosperity evangelism, which was similar to what I read from Oral Roberts. Country gospel singing and Pentecostal hellfire preaching abounded, along with programs devoted to Biblical finance, Biblical end-time prophecy, Biblical healthcare, and Biblical exercise. I vowed not to watch secular television, but the pickings on the Christian network was slim. The televangelist scandals of the late 1980s were still fresh in my memory, and I was wary of Jim and Tammy Faye clones on television, so I held my nose and watched what scraps I could from that horrendous network.

But one simple, humble, unadorned program on TBN appealed to me. Hugh Ross was a Christian astrophysicist, and his TBN program Reasons to Believe reminded me of the Dr. George Fischbeck science show I had watched as a child. And like those television scientists of my youth, Dr Hugh Ross appealed to me because I longed to think like he did, with logic, rigor and consistent methodology. He appealed to me because there was nobody in my life like him, and I had never met a real scientist. I loved his calm and unemotional manner of speech, as opposed to the Evangelistic ranting and crying of most TBN prosperity preachers. Just like Dr George Fischbeck, Hugh Ross stood behind a lab table and with simple props, demonstrated science in a way that was perfectly understandable to me. He explained how the Big Bang model of inflationary cosmology worked by drawing a few dots on a balloon and blowing it up. The dots all expanded away from each other so every dot is moving away from every other dot – just like the galaxies we observe, each moving away from each other. How do we know they are moving away from us? Well, there is this thing called redshift….

aahhhh. It must such perfect, beautiful sense. I loved this stuff.

Dr Hugh Ross told me about a Universe with more than 3 spatial dimensions. How could this be possible? He drew stick figures on an index card. “Meet Mr and Mrs Flat. They live in a 2-dimensional universe called Flatland. They cannot leave the index card. They cannot perceive anything outside their 2-dimensional reality. Now if I place my finger on the index card, Mr and Mrs Flat can walk around my finger, wondering what in the world had invaded Flatland. What would they see? A simple circle. My finger is penetrating Flatland, but they would not see my finger. Just a circle as they walk around the plane broken by my finger. Now what would happen if I poked three fingers through the plane of the 2-dimensional index card? Three circles. But all three are one. Three separate circles, yes Mr and Mrs Flat cannot perceive the whole reality that those three simple circles are just a mere shadow of the entirety.”

Wait a minute… 3 circles. But in a world of more spatial dimensions, those 3 are really an underlying unity? Three are One?

Wow – science does prove Christianity to be true!

Dr Ross explained to me what the Anthropic Principle was. That is, scientific observation demonstrates that the Universe appears to be finely tuned for life to exist, thus proving that a creating, loving and personal God exists. After demonstrating how the universe is observed to expand, he explained how the expansion rate was important. If the expansion rate of the universe were to be slightly less than what it is, gravity would have been the dominant force, and the universe would have imploded in on itself soon after the Big Bang. If it were to be slightly greater, gas would not have condensed into stars. Either way, if the expansion rate of the universe were slightly greater or slightly less than what was observed, there would be no life. I bought his book The Fingerprint of God, in which he gave dozens of examples of ‘finely-tuned’ parameters of the universe. The age of the universe, the amount of matter in the universe, the strength of gravitational, electrical and nuclear forces, the relative amounts of mass between protons and electrons, and dozens more variables, had they been slightly more or less than what they were, would have resulted in no life possible in the universe! Surely, the fact that all these physical parameters were tuned so perfectly to allow for life was sure evidence of a loving and providing creator, namely the God of the Bible.

Hugh Ross used the impressive sounding Anthropic Principle to demonstrate that Earth is a privileged planet, perfectly designed by a loving creator. Not any galaxy can hold life, only those with just the right mass, structure and age. Not any star can support life, just those of the right age, temperature, and stability. Jupiter is placed near Earth to act as a gravitational attractor to passing asteroids – instead of impacting Earth and killing us all, there is a greater likelihood that they will hit the strong pull of Jupiter’s gravity. We need just the right Moon. And we need just the right Earth. Everything from the tilt-axis of Earth to the salinity of sea water is exquisitely and perfectly adjusted to support intelligent life.

I ate the stuff up. I could think of nothing more fascinating than this direct and scientific evidence that the God of the Bible deed indeed create us, and love us enough to fine-tune the whole Universe. Just for us.

Carl Sagan was my first real introduction to science, but Hugh Ross was my second. But Carl Sagan’s television show Cosmos was a distant memory to me in 1990. Hugh Ross put passion into my interest in science because he tied it into my relationship with Jesus Christ. He gave me Reasons to Believe. I felt Jesus alive in my heart, but I knew that God was real because I could see that His powerful and loving hand designed our whole world.

As much as I loved the teaching of Hugh Ross and his Reasons to Believe ministry, I was even more bowled over by an itinerant Christian apologist who was a frequent guest speaker at Calvary Chapel. His name was Chuck Missler.

Today, Chuck Missler is probably best known to atheists and skeptics as the promoter of the bizarre and ridiculous theory of Peanut Butter Evolution. But back in 1990, to a young, naïve, and uneducated Christian who was starving for knowledge, Chuck Missler was manna from Heaven. I found him to be massively intelligent, an extremely charismatic and persuasive speaker, and with the authority of a sound Biblical basis. He seemed to know everything about the Bible, and could tie all sorts of scriptural esoterica into profound theological meaning. Missler taught me to believe that the Bible was, as he says, ‘an integrated message system’. Every word, again as he says, ‘every number every place name, every detail’ in the Bible was placed there by the explicit design of the Holy Spirit. Missler gave me a sense of wonder and awe about the mystery and majesty of the Bible.

Missler seemed to know and speak about nearly everything! Most of his talks were exegetical sermons of the type I was used to, but he expounded on minute details of the Bible, demonstrating to me that even the tiniest detail in the book of Leviticus could be an inference to Jesus Christ. He convinced me that the Bible contained hundreds of predictions and prophecies that were subsequently fulfilled in history. He even somehow managed to take the same Bible passage that my friend E---- laughed so hard at, the patriarchal genealogies of Genesis 5, and somehow turn that piece of mythology into a message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ! Oh how I wished E---- were there on that night, then she would not laugh, but would see the true meaning of scripture. You see, by taking the English meanings of the names, Adam = ‘man’, Seth = ‘appointed’, Enos = ‘mortal’, you could construct the sentence:

Man is appointed mortal sorrow, but the blessed God shall come down teaching that His death shall bring the despairing rest.

Absolutely mindblowing. Stunning. Revolutionary. I was convinced that Missler was correct. All these minute details in the seldom read and dusty corners of Scripture were there as keys, tiny treasures that glorified the person of Jesus Christ. Missler told us that we could pull the same trick with other Biblical genealogies. The sons of Jacob were listed many times in the Bible, and every time they are listed, it is in a different order. I rushed out to the Christian bookstore and bought a Strong’s exhaustive concordance of the Bible. Not only could I not figure out how to turn Rueben, Ashur, Issachar, Dan, and the rest into a secret message that glorified Jesus, I also learned that the names in Genesis 5 did not actually form the sentence that Missler claimed they did. Ah well, I thought, perhaps Missler has some kind of root dictionary of Hebrew names that I did not know about. Perhaps he had resources that were even more reliable than the Hebrew lexicon in Strong’s exhaustive concordance.

So in this way, I became not only an apologist for the Bible, but I became an apologist for my favorite Bible teachers. Whenever they told me things that did not stand up under any scrutiny, and there were many, I figured that they must simply know things that I did not. After all, they were professional Bible scholars who did this sort of work for a living. I was a simple short order cook. How could I question their knowledge?

Why is the Hebrew Tabernacle, as described in Exodus, described in such minute detail? Because every detail of the design of that structure points to Jesus. Why are the numbers of the tribes detailed in the opening chapters of Numbers? Because by adding the numbers and positions of the tribes up, then taking an aerial view of the camp would reveal that they camped in the shape of a giant cross, radiating out from the Tabernacle. Why are the numbers of days so detailed in the story of Noah’s Flood? Because then you could know that the events of the Flood occurred on key anniversary dates, for instance the Ark rested on Ararat on the anniversary of the Resurrection of Jesus.

Missler often claimed that there were ancient monuments on different locations of the Earth, that also pointed to the person of Jesus and the reality of the Bible. The Great Pyramid if Giza and Stonehenge were both examples. By taking precise measurements of the dimensions of these ancient structures, we could determine all kinds of peculiar mathematical properties. For instance, dividing the perimeter of the base of the pyramid by half its height gave pi, the transcendental ratio of the circle’s circumference to its ratio. ASTOUNDING! If one measured half the length of diagonals of the base of the Pyramid, then multiplied that by 1000000, it gave the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun. AMAZING! He stunned us with hundreds of similar examples that proved to us that the ancient people who built these structures were given supernatural guidance. These structures were also able to predict the future if their geometries were read and interpreted in peculiar ways. Missler was even able to give Scriptural support for including these pagan monuments into his sermons. He even included, as a possible conjecture, a monument on the surface of the planet Mars. The infamous Face on Mars was too symmetrical and uniform to be of natural origin. Somebody built it. The question is who? When? Why?

Such church sermons were nothing like what I heard in my youth. I was astounded by the implications of such sermons. My mind reeled. My imagination was gripped. I was awestruck. I was terrified.

Missler revealed the Bible to be a giant puzzle book of codes and gematria. All Hebrew and Greek letters had numerical values associated with them, and using this information, he could demonstrate all sorts of peculiar things. Two verses in the Bible summarized the spiritual conditions at the creation of the universe: Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1. The opening verse of Genesis, when put through a certain mathematical function, revealed itself to be the magical number pi. Putting the opening verse of John through the same function revealed itself to be e, the transcendental base of natural logarithms. My mind reeled. What an astounding book this Bible was! What an amazing God who inspired it!

Chuck Missler could do what I have never seen any other person do – he could stand behind a church pulpit and speak about history, quantum computing, astrophysics, archeology, and any number of other subjects that I had never before heard spoken of in church. He could speak on these subjects in front of a captivated audience of hundreds for upwards of three hours, and then afterwards take random questions! It was part worship service, part university lecture. It was truly an exciting time for me. These Bible teachers gave me more than simple homilies. They gave me the keys to the Cosmos. For better or worse, they opened my mind and made me feel that I was learning privileged knowledge that was a key to understanding reality. I felt like I was getting the inside story to the true design, nature and purpose of all creation. Much like apocalyptic writers must have felt when they wrote of being carried by arch-angels into the Third Heaven, I felt like I was learning the very mind of God! It gave me the sense everything was part of a giant, grand design, and nothing ever occurred by chance – and by understanding the Bible and relying on my faith in Jesus, I had an inside scoop into what was really going on in the world. I was certainly privileged. Praise the Lord!

Where Missler amazed me with his brilliance, Skip Heitzig also continued to impress me. He could prove that Jesus actually rose from the dead and was the very Creator of the Universe. After all, the disciples were timid, frightened and ignorant when they were in the presence of Jesus, but suddenly turned into bold warriors for the Gospel after his death. How would that have been possible if Jesus did not actually rise from the dead? How could they have all died horrible martyr’s deaths at the hands of non-believers if they thought that the Resurrection was a lie? Jesus claimed to be God, which left me only three options in dealing with that claim, either he was lying, he was insane, or he was in fact correct and he was God!! No sane person would ever claim Jesus was a liar or a lunatic, so what other choice did we have? He had to be Lord! How could any fool not see this clear evidence and not follow this obvious logical conclusion? We were truly without excuse. Jesus Christ is LORD!

So for better or worse, I spent my years in Calvary Chapel learning from these people whom I esteemed so highly. I craved to learn more. I knew that there was more to life than the mundane world I knew in Albuquerque. I knew there a higher spiritual existence above my corporeal existence of restaurant work. I did not yet know about college, or the value of education. I had to teach myself about life, and people like Hugh Ross and Chuck Missler were my only outlets. At the time, I did not know any better. I did not know how to evaluate evidence, or how to scrutinize arguments. I did not know what logical fallacies were, or how to be a critical thinker. I was just unbelievably curious, crazy in love with Jesus, and the only source of knowledge that I found trustworthy was the Bible, and the astounding expository skills of my favorite Bible Teachers. I read their books, and devoured their teaching cassettes. I still have a box with hundreds of cassettes buried in a closet somewhere.

The more I read, the more I listened and the more I learned, the more spellbound I was by fraud. I was blinded by their charisma and dazzled by their bullshit.

<-- previous chapter

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Religious Skeptics demand proof

... and Skyline Baptist Church right here in El Paso has obliged:



Take that Skeptic!!

I saw this on the marquee driving home from work this evening and I had to fire off a shot with the camera. For the life of me, I don't know why I find this marquee so hilarious, but I do. I hope you find this interruption in the previously scheduled de-conversion story as funny as I did.

More in the Conversions and De-conversions series coming soon. I have been very busy in my home life lately, but I hope to get back to it soon. I am up to about the year 1989 or age 25 in my story, so I still have a long way to go. I find that the story is more difficult to write as the memories become more recent and the religious events become more convoluted. But writing the series has been good for me so far. It allows me to sort through all my history, and all my feelings, and teach myself a few things about how I got where I am today. I am really enjoying writing it. It is my hope that somebody out there may find some meaning and relation in my story, and that it will help them somewhat on their own personal journey. Be patient Dear Reader - loads more coming soon.

Conversions and De-conversions - Ye shall know them by their fruits

Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.
- Galatians 5:20-23

Ye shall know them by their fruits.
- Matthew 7:16

The dream of every Evangelical Christian is to lead the lost heathen to a relationship with Jesus and the gift of hope for an everlasting paradise. I was no exception. My former drinking buddies at work, who were surely baffled by my mysterious and sudden pious behavior, were my new mission field. I spent most every day on the prep line in the restaurant I worked in, talking about Jesus to them. When I was not talking about Jesus to them, I was playing recorded Pastor Skip sermons on the cassette player. If I was not doing that, I considered myself as ‘living a witness’, that is, behaving so that they would surely know that I was a new creature in Christ. I wanted them to find my behavior and personality as Godly and attractive, so that they too would want to come to know Jesus. I was called to be the Salt of the Earth, so just as salt places a thirst on the tongue and gives food its savor, I was to live in such a way that they would want to imitate. I tried to live with the Fruits of the Spirit in full view of everybody. Sorry, I was not allowed to try – that would have been forcing the fruits of the Spirit with my own sinful and weak flesh, and that was not allowed. The Spirit was not under my command. Rather, I prayed to Jesus fill me with His Holy Spirit, and fill me with dunamis, power, to shine forth with the Fruits of love, joy and peace. My friends could not see me get angry. They could not see me get impatient. They could not see me drink, smoke or cuss like I used to. They had to see a new creature in Christ, and a miraculously transformed life.

The problems that I faced with this lifestyle started almost immediately. How does one live with the love of the Holy Spirit, that is, love which is greater than the love of my heathen friends? How could I attain that selfless, divine, agape love that I always heard about from Pastor Skip? How could I have joy that was greater than theirs, or patience, or goodness? After all, my workmates and friends were not criminals and reprobates. They were mostly college students and single parents. They treated each other, from what I could tell, with as much love and compassion as I could reasonably expect from any civilized human. They were not the caricatures of villains or sinners like I read about in Chick tracts. They were not out murdering, slandering and backbiting. They were just… normal people. But the fact remained that I had to be better than them because I was filled with the Holy Spirit. If I could not live my witness as a New Creature of Jesus Christ, then they would not be able to tell the difference between the Sinner and the Saint. So I had to pray to Jesus give me the power to make my hyper-moral life stand above the background noise of worldly morality. I was bought with the Blood of Jesus after all.

The cassette player was always on, entertaining us in the food prep room. We usually swapped turns with cassettes. A former drinking buddy of mine had an old AC/DC cassette playing:

I’ve got big balls
I’ve got big balls
They’re such big balls
And they’re dirty big balls
And he’s got big balls
And she’s got big balls
But we’ve got the biggest balls of them all!

I looked at my friend with the same expression I used to see on Brother Ed’s face when he conveyed disgust at my rock music. “Can you turn that stuff down? I cannot believe I used to listen to that kind of music!”

“What happened to you? You used to be cool! Why don’t you pull that stick out of your ass!”

And with that little exchange, I learned that moral purity was not the same as being a sanctimonious jerk. So just what was I supposed to do? I did not for a second think that I was morally superior to anybody simply because I no longer cussed, but how else was I to be distinguished from the unwashed heathen? And how was I to do it without trying to do it? What did it mean to live for Jesus and express myself by the Fruits of the Spirit?

Needless to say, I took my new Christian beliefs very, very seriously. I was somehow supposed to be morally superior, to exhibit Spiritual Fruits, yet do it in such a way that it was not me who was striving, but the Spirit working through me. What it boiled down to was prayer. When a prayer like “Jesus give me strength, work through me with the power of the Holy Spirit - I ask that you mold me more into Your image” was repeated over and over, constantly throughout the day, every day of the week, it becomes a mantra. It was the same problem that I faced when trying to find the Will of God for my life. How many sermons, taped messages and pamphlets did I run across with titles like, “How to Discover God’s Will for Your Life”? It boiled down to Bible Study and prayer. So I prayed, “Please God, show me Your special purpose for me”, over and over, countless times, hoping somehow to discover God’s divine message. Little did I know at the time that prayer does work, but the power is in the act of prayer itself. The act of repetitious prayers and chants is what brings about the change. The power was in me the whole time. Sometimes it worked. Mostly it failed.

Because of my odd working hours, it was not unusual for me to stay up all night and sleep during the day. The Calvary Connection, a recording of a recent Skip Heitzig sermon, was broadcast on the radio every morning at 2AM. I remember that I was preparing to do laundry but I needed quarters for the coin operated machines. If I could hurry my walk of three blocks to the nearest all-night diner and get change, I could make it back in time to catch Pastor Skip on the radio. So I quickly walked to the diner and got my change. On the way back, I cut a corner through the parking lot of a Howard Johnsons hotel. There was no traffic at that hour of the evening. The night was dark and quiet until a van raced from behind and swerved in front of me, cutting off my path. The driver jumped out of the van and ran towards me, yelling at me not to move. I stood frozen, more out of the sudden shock than a need to obey his orders. Just half a second before, it was a peaceful walk. The next thing I knew I was being tackled on the pavement of the parking lot.

“I got you, fucker! Where are the others?”
“What?”
“Where are the others!” He was sitting on me and grappling my legs into some kind of lock.
“I am here alone. There are no others”
He punched me in my lower rib area. “Where are the others, you piece of shit?” I saw you with those other people. I saw you messing with the cars! Where are they?”

Then I understood. He was either plain clothes hotel security or else the night hotel desk attendant. He thought I was a vandal out causing trouble with some kids. The situation did not look good. I was out alone, walking through a hotel parking lot at 2AM. I had very long hair, a beard, and was admittedly more than a little shady looking. There were probably some troublesome kids on the other side of the parking lot, and he thought I was one of them. That’s it. Simple enough. He must have me confused with one of them. Despite how bad it looked for me, I figured I could get out of it. I knew I was innocent. I inwardly prayed. I stayed calm. God was placing me in this situation for a reason. This unhinged renta-cop was my new witness field.

He was a short, muscular man, maybe in his mid-40s. He got behind me, bent my arm into a chicken wing, and led me into the hotel lobby. There was nobody around. I do not even remember hotel staff being present, just him. With my arm twisted behind my back, he led me into a small room behind the back office, forced me in and threw me to the floor.

“What were you doing out there, mother fucker!?” I calmly tried to explain what I was doing. I lived in the apartments next door. I needed to do laundry. I went to the diner opposite from the hotel for some change. I was headed back to my apartment. You tackled me. You can call the waitress at the diner to confirm the story if you want.

“LIAR! I ought to kick your fucking teeth in!” He reared his leg back to kick me, and his pointed-toe cowboy boot stopping just inches from my nose. I did not budge. I prayed intensely inside. I did not move, I did not resist, and I was not even afraid. I knew Jesus was on my side protecting me. I just sat on the floor and watched that book swing to strike my face. He did stop himself, probably because he imagined the lawsuits that would come his way if he did injure me. But I am fully confident that I was prepared to take a full blow to my face with that wild kick.

“FUCK!!” He yelled in frustration. He told me that he was calling the police and that I was in a lot of trouble. He left me in the room and locked the door behind him.

I remained on the floor in that locked office room until the police came. I prayed intensely. “Dear Jesus, give me strength to turn the other cheek. Give me the courage to forgive. Give me the power of the Holy Spirit, give me the power to show them your Christian Love!”

The police finally came. The guard told his story to them, then they unlocked the door and let me speak. One police officer questioned me, and the other surveyed the area. I was overly polite. I was extremely courteous and cooperative. I answered all his questions fully and honestly, without a shred of hostility in my tone or my voice. They questioned the guard again, compared notes and then finally reached their verdict. Both policemen and the guard stood in front of me, and the lead officer said to me,

“I have to let you go. We have no evidence that you did anything wrong. But I will tell you my honest opinion. I think you are up to no good. I think you did vandalize some cars out in the parking lot. It is late, you are out here all alone in the streets, and besides if you were really innocent you would be screaming bloody murder and demanding to press charges. You are too cooperative. I don’t trust you. Understand, that is just my opinion, and I cannot prove anything. But I am telling you so you know to watch yourself next time you go for a stroll in the middle of the night.”

All three men were silent. I was being excused. But I felt that God was opening a door of opportunity that I could not pass up. I jumped at it.

“Thank you officer, but I need to let you know something. I am a born again Christian, and Jesus has given me the power to love you all, and I believe that I should not seek vengeance. That is why I did not strike out. I did it for the sake of Jesus Christ. God Bless you all.”

All three of them looked away from me as I gave my short speech – which I took to be a sure sign that they were convicted of their internal sins! The Holy Ghost had surely worked through me that glorious evening. I uttered not one angry word. I did not seek revenge or threaten lawsuits. I did not insist on my innocence. Instead, I was a witness for my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Someday, these three men may look back on that young man that they were certain was a criminal, and who instead showed them the divine love of Christ. I walked the short distance back to my apartment room, singing worship songs the whole way. My God is an awesome God!

I considered this event to be my most significant act of piety and faith, and the greatest and most selfless demonstration of my Spiritual Fruits that I would ever exhibit as a Christian. Simple encounters and incidents like this confirmed to me that prayer worked. I was never foolish enough to pray to God for what I considered trivial things. Prayer was a direct hotline to God, and I should never use it frivolously. I don’t think I ever prayed to satisfy selfish desires. I never prayed for extra money, or a better job, or good health. My life was given to me by God to be a mission field and an opportunity for Him, and I thanked God for the life that He had given me. I had seen the worst of life, and now that I had given my life to Jesus, I was seeing the best of it. Thank you Jesus!

I did my best to be a good witness for Jesus Christ at work. I sometimes put Bible quotes attributed to ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ on the kitchen bulletin board. I always introduced myself by saying ‘Praise the Lord’ instead of merely using my name. I witnessed constantly, trying to convince others of the loving and forgiving grace of Jesus. I invited many people to attend Calvary Chapel with me, and even had some success at that. I was spent most of the day looking for any opportunity that I could to witness to a friend in the restaurant. I would try to subtly guide any trivial conversation into a conversation that contained eternal consequences. The terrible gravity of my purpose in life made me preoccupied with evangelism. Guilt and evangelistic fervor drove me, and I must have been a terrible nuisance to my friends. I moved every few months from one wretched apartment to another, so I was always alternating between walking, riding my bike, or taking the bus to work. Usually I rode my bike. Every day as I prepared for work I prayed that Jesus would open some witnessing opportunity for me, and that the Holy Sprit would soften the hearts of those who would hear His message. The stress that I felt was sometimes terrible. I was young and single, with a relatively simple job and few responsibilities, yet I would have grinding headaches that would pierce my temples. The thought of my friends suffering eternal damnation had become an unbearable burden. The unfathomable joy that I was supposed to feel was overwhelmed with the guilt I felt for not effectively witnessing my Faith. As I peddled to work on my bike, I continued to pray, asking Jesus to give me strength and to help put wisdom into my mouth as I spoke to others about His loving grace. Which makes the day I stopped myself mid-prayer seem so striking to me now. I was fully hypnotized by the need to evangelize, and sold out to Jesus. Then one day, peddling to work, as I was praying,

“Dear Jesus, give me strength. Give me strength. Show me what to say. Give me wisdom. Send your Holy Spirit…”

I stopped my bike. I sat up and I told myself, out loud,

“You are just repeating the same thing over and over. You are not talking to God. You are just psyching yourself up.”

I suddenly realized that I was just chanting a mantra. It was no different than the athlete who cheers his team on before the big game, or when our old sales crew had sung songs to motivate us to sell door-to-door vacuum cleaners. I was pressuring Faith and Strength into my body just by repeating a chant and forcing belief. I suddenly had the thought cross my mind that there was nothing supernatural in any of this. All the power was generated in my will. It was all from me. That simple, short and blasphemous thought was shocking enough to me that I remember that very moment to this day, some 22 years later.

My mind was struggling with the divergent and conflicting ideas about where my moral and spiritual strength came from. I was fully convinced that Jesus was my Savior, the Bible was the inerrant Word of God, and held the rest of the Evangelical party line. I was convinced because I had witnessed for myself how Jesus had turned my life around. As the song goes, “I was blind, but now I see”, and when you are held under the power of such beliefs, it really does feel as if your former, faithless beliefs were like unto being blind – even dead. I believed that my true life had only started on the evening I walked forward to the church stage at Calvary Chapel, and had voluntarily given my life to Jesus by my own freewill. I knew firsthand how miserable I was without Jesus, and how joyful I was with Him in my life. How could any of that change in my life possibly happen without His miraculous power? But the other side of the dichotomy came when I fully surveyed my feelings. I could secretly feel that my prayers to Jesus were becoming indistinguishable from just talking to myself. The joy that I felt was mostly a result of Pastor Skip telling me that I had to feel joy, and my new Christian friends telling me how joyous they always felt. If I dared search deep enough, I often felt just as miserable as I felt before I met Jesus. My thoughts were centered on Evangelizing to my lost and dying friends and family, and the guilt I felt if I dared think of my own needs over those of the Heathen. How dare I watch secular television or go to the movies when there were lost people who needed to meet Jesus? When I think back to those years, I do not actually remember much joy. I remember guilt and stress.

I longed to evangelize to the lost, and wished I could be granted the privilege of actually leading somebody to Salvation through Jesus. I loved hearing stories from Pastor Skip in which he led somebody in prayer to meet Jesus at the park, in the airport, at the beach, in a restaurant – it seemed he had a salvation story for every occasion! How I longed for experience like that! What better way for me to demonstrate my Spiritual Fruits, and demonstrate to myself and everybody else the miracle of salvation and a regenerated life? What a glorious feeling it would be if I could lead somebody to Jesus! If I could feel the joy of leading somebody to Jesus, what could possibly go wrong?

With a lead-in like that, you know what’s coming, right?

Restaurant work is often difficult, fast-paced and frantic. The place I worked at was extremely busy during the lunch hours, and catered to businessmen and women on tight schedules. They had to order anything off the extensive menu, and get it quick with a smile. As calm and pleasant as a restaurant dining room is, always remember that it is often barely controlled chaos behind the kitchen doors. The kitchen manager always scheduled the most valuable cooks during the peak hours, and their duties were crucial. Off hours were more calm, but the lunch rush could be exhausting. Everybody in the kitchen had their assigned positions, and if one person was missing, the whole kitchen staff would suffer. I was often scheduled to work on the pantry station during the afternoon peak hours. My role was crucial, and without me there the kitchen would quickly be buried in untended salad tickets.

I waited at the bus stop for my ride across Albuquerque to the restaurant. I remember waiting at the bus stop for quite a very long time before the bus came. I don’t remember why I arrived early to the bus stop on that particular day, but if I were still a Christian I would have said that the Spirit called me there early that day. I had a divine appointment and purpose to fulfill. I looked around and saw an obviously homeless man sitting by the side of a building near the bus stop. I went over to talk to him. I can still see his face. He was perhaps mid-40s, with long, graying scraggly hair under a stocking cap. He was tall, with very thick hornrimmed glasses. I sat near him and we had a conversation. As I always did, I attempted to turn our conversation towards spiritual matters, and on this day I was successful. As the conversation turned my way, he started to get flustered – not with me, but at something personal within himself, perhaps some painful experience from his past. He told me that he was Jewish, and asked why he should accept Jesus as his Messiah. I knew absolutely nothing about Judaism, except that Jesus was a Jew, so I figured that we were already halfway home. I looked at the time. The bus was running on schedule, in fact, I could see it coming up the road to pick me up and take me to work.

I had to make a fast decision. On the one hand, everybody at work knew that I was a Christian, and I viewed myself as a representative for the Faith and for Jesus Christ. If I missed work during the frantic lunch rush, I would never hear the end of it, not just from the kitchen manager, but also from my friends. They might think that I was a selfish and irresponsible Christian for not making it to work on time. I doubted that I would get fired since my work record was excellent, but that possibility did exist. On the other hand, there was a homeless man here with me, who was obviously hurting. He had a story to tell, and I was there to listen. But more importantly, I saw that he was willing to talk about matters of eternal gravity and was halfway to accepting Jesus as his Savior. He just needed a friend to push him over the edge. He was a transient with no home, and I was afraid that if I got on the bus I would never see him again. There were no coincidences in God’s Plan, and I believed that both of us were there near the bus stop on this particular day by His divine appointment. It was a stressful moment of decision, and I saw no way out of a bad situation.

Should I disappoint my friends and put my Christian reputation and witness at risk, or should I leave this man who was willing to talk about Jesus to continue to wander the streets without an opportunity to hear the Gospel of Jesus? I had no choice. I knew what I had to do. I watched the bus drive past the stop as I offered him something to eat at a nearby diner.

I did not call the restaurant from a phone booth to let them know I would not make it in. If I did, they might have been able to call another cook in for relief. But I did not call. To put it bluntly, I did not call work because I was a coward. I could not think of a suitable excuse for not coming to work that would satisfy the kitchen manager. “I cannot make it to work because I have to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with a homeless man” did not strike me as an excuse anybody was likely to accept. Lying was anathema to my Christian beliefs – I could not be ashamed that I was spreading the Gospel by lying and telling my boss that I had come down with a sudden, nasty cold. Excuse or no excuse, there was no way I was going to avoid getting in a lot of trouble.

We sat in the diner for a few hours and he spoke to me about his life and experiences. He ate soup with bread and told me why he was so disappointed with religion. I told him Jesus was not a religion but a relationship. He asked me if that was what the button I had clipped on my ball cap meant. “Know Jesus Know Peace. No Jesus No Peace”. The lunch crowd in the diner finally dispersed and I could speak more openly and freely. I told him about how wonderful and joyous my life with Jesus was. I told him how he had changed my life from a life as a reprobate sinner, to one of godly hope for eternal life. I told him how rich life was with Jesus, the True Messiah! I brought him to tears. The homeless man cried and stuttered and choked on his snot the same way I did when I gave my life to Jesus. I asked him if he wanted to meet Jesus. He said yes. Please pray this prayer with me: “Dear Jesus, I confess I am a sinner before you, and I want you to forgive me of my sins. I accept you as my Personal….”

With that triumphant victory, I told him I had to get to work. I prayed with him. I sat with him at the bus stop until the next bus came for me. I boarded the bus, looked from the window at him sitting on the bench, and the bus pulled away. I never saw him again. I reeled him in and bagged him, so my duties were over. I get a star on my heavenly crown. See you on the streets of gold, buddy.

I did not feel the overwhelming joy that I expected to feel after leading him to Jesus. I did not feel relief from guilt after successfully evangelizing. Frankly, I felt sick. I don’t know if it was because I was bracing for the consequences of showing up to work several hours late, or if it was because I felt like a parasite after leading an obviously hurting human being to Jesus, then once I converted him, suddenly releasing him to flail away on his own. I scored my touchdown, but felt sick about celebrating.

I walked into the kitchen and the cooks were busy preparing for the evening clientele. They glared at me. I tried my best to sneak onto the line unnoticed and start working with them. I kept quiet but felt foolish and embarrassed.

The kitchen manager stormed up to me. “Nice of you to finally come to work! Where were you?”
“Sorry, I could not make it.”
“What do you mean you ‘could not make it’? Where where you!?”
“I am sorry. It is terribly personal. I cannot really tell you. But I promise you that it will never happen again.” As foolish and cowardly as that sounded, I knew that it was more acceptable than, “I was busy converting a stranger to my religion”. I felt as speechless and inept as I did when I was ten years old, when I sat in a broom closet terrified of explaining to Mrs Cristola that I was crying because I had blasphemed the Holy Ghost. How could I possibly explain these Spiritual concerns to unbelieving heathens?

From that day on, I viewed all Evangelism with particular suspicion. Something in my brain just clicked. I don’t think I ever again evangelized with such fervor, and I was always wary of those around me who did. I remember joining my friends as they evangelized around apartment clubhouses, and we lured the apartment kids with pizza. We would not give them pizza until they listened to our 5-minute sermon. I could see then what a disgusting bait and switch job we were pulling on children. I remember joining my friends as we surrounded strip clubs in ‘circles of prayer’ as some others went inside to evangelize. I remember the pride my friends felt when they dared the owner to call the cops to chase them away – and I kept my cowardly mouth shut. I remember attending a Greg Laurie ‘Harvest Crusade' at the UNM basketball arena. The place was packed to the rafters and I could only find room to sit on an aisle stair. In the middle of Greg Laurie’s preaching, I was told by an usher who worked for Greg Laurie to get off the stair, since there would soon be a flood of people on the stairs responding to the upcoming altar call. I remember wondering how the usher knew that so many people would be responding to an altar call, unless the whole thing was somehow orchestrated in advance. I obediently got up and stood behind the back row, and sure enough, on cue, the floor of the stadium was covered with converts. I was beginning to view evangelism as similar to a stud in a single bar, driven by raging hormones and looking for a one-night stand. Just like the single male stud scouting a young girl, the Evangelist and the Sinner have a ritual complete with body language, a courtship, intimacy, orgasm and eventual abandonment. I spent time with that homeless man, I gave him my Gospel message, I was kind to him, bought him food, then when the right moment came I laid the emotions on thick, made him cry, and prayed a prayer of conversion with him. Then I abandoned him. It was all part of the script, and I recognized it immediately. Similarly, the ‘Harvest Crusade’ usher knew that Greg Laurie would haul in a stadium full of converts, because he always drew in a stadium full of converts. It was part of the script.

It seemed that no matter what I did, I could not figure out how to show others my Christian Faith by my Spiritual Fruits. My attempts to demonstrate my Christian love, hope and peace all seemed to backfire in my face or be plainly insincere. The fact that I could not sincerely demonstrate my divine Gifts of the Spirit, despite constant prayer, despite constantly seeking Jesus and fervently desiring to Evangelize, was a huge step that eventually led to my complete abandonment of my Christian Faith. But there were many more steps to come.

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Conversions and De-conversions - He Is Sailing

After I ‘gave my life to the Lord’, I felt like I my life had a clean slate. I felt light and pure, and I glowed with a joyfulness that I had not known in years. One of the first things that I did after my religious conversion was to look for a suitable church. I was attracted to Calvary Chapel, but I did not want to commit to the first church I visited in six years. I quickly discovered that the clubhouse in my apartment hosted a prayer meeting every week, so I decided to sit in. I arrived a little late, and walked in to about 10 young men and women chanting in tongues very loudly. ‘Loud’ meaning full throttle from the diaphragm. It was not ecstatic as worshippers in Grandpa Wagner’s church though, and when I walked in, a young man abruptly stopped his chanting and warmly welcomed me, then just as abruptly started belting out the glossolalia again. I had seen plenty of Tongue Speaking over the years, but this level of intensity was different from anything I had experienced. There was no interpretation with the Tongues, and no worship involved. It was simply these ten people, pacing back and forth in the clubhouse, and very loudly chanting in an Angelic Language. They told me that they were blessing the clubhouse and casting out demons, and I could just sit and wait while they continued. So I sat and waited, and watched.

OK, this is your new belief. You are back in the religious world. You know this is the kind of stuff to expect from now on. Better learn to accept it.

After they stopped yelling and pacing, they gathered for a Bible Study. Since I was the newcomer, the study was quickly geared to evangelize to me. At one point, they even read John 14:6, ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no man cometh to the Father but by me’, and everybody suddenly stopped speaking and looked at me waiting for me to make a decision for Jesus. It was a very tense moment. The secret desire of every Evangelical Christian is to lead sinners to Jesus, despite their awkward reluctance to include them in a worship service. “Don’t worry everybody. I’m a Christian”. There were audible gasps of relief.

The only person there in the clubhouse who actually lived in the apartment complex with me was a hulk of a man nicknamed ‘Atlas’ because of his size. After the Bible Study he took a couple sniffs of my clothes and told me that if I was to be a Christian I had to stop smoking. “You are the Temple of the Holy Spirit. You don’t want to pollute God’s Temple”. That logic made a strange kind of sense to me at the time, so I promised him that I would do my best to quit. “You cannot do it on your own. You need the strength of the Holy Spirit to give you power! You can do all things through Jesus! Without Jesus, you are powerless!”

From then on, I took a commitment to pray to Jesus for strength in my new life of Faith. I vowed never again to forsake Jesus, and to always seek God in prayer. I vowed not to simply play religion. I went back to my apartment room and flushed all my remaining cigarettes down the toilet, continually praying for strength the whole time. In my newfound conviction, I felt I had to finally be serious for Jesus, to finally get real about living my life for him. That meant I had to purge all worldly influence out of my life, and dedicate my life solely and exclusively to Him. I looked at my huge stereo system, and the several hundred music LPs that I had collected since high school. I remembered all the debates about secular music with Brother Ed back in Cape Baptist Christian School, and repented of how rebellious I had been.

So that evening, I sacrificed my one and only true passion and joy in my simple and empty life – I gave up my secular music. It must have taken a few dozen trips to the dumpster to unload the heavy stacks of music LPs that I had collected since high school. I remember looking down in the dumpster at several hundred LPs of all different genres, wondering if I should have given them to somebody who could enjoy them instead of giving them a trip to the landfill. NO! I do not give away garbage. Garbage goes where it belongs! And with that certainty of conviction, I marched back upstairs to my apartment to grab another armload of LPs. I had to sacrifice what I could to Jesus, to show Him that I was truly Faithful to Him, and that I sincerely meant to commit my life to His cause and accept His purpose.

Out of the hundreds of LPs that I threw away that evening, there was one that I simply could not part with, and was inwardly able to rationalize keeping. I must mention that LP because it is directly related to this story of my de-conversion. The message of the music on that LP contains a reflection of my Spiritual thinking during those years. The songs were mostly vague, quasi-religious prayers and hymns that were achingly beautiful, and by straining and stretching the meaning of the lyrics, I could re-interpret most of the songs into becoming worship music to Jesus. Sort of. One of my favorite songs off the LP was called He is Sailing, which is a song of hope and expectation for a coming Messiah figure. True it is just a song, but as much as I loved it as a Sinner, I found new hope and meaning in that song as a Christian. I knew the song was not explicitly Christian, and I knew that the singer and lyricist was definitely not a Christian, but the music and message was so beautiful to me, that I simply could not part with it. That song represented both my newborn conviction as a Christian, and my link back to the secular world with my secret hope for universal salvation. Hell, the song even includes glossolalia.




He is Sailing.

Out of the mist into tropical splendor
With garlands of flowers
In majestical fusion we see tonight
On to this sacred reunion of pleasure
They row as a rhythm
Ten thousands of millions to touch the Light

King is sailing they say
King is sailing this Day of days
King is coming we sing
King is coming we know

All the souls He to touch. All the millions of souls He to touch…

Heaven set sail in His ship full of light
He transcends all our love
To caress all our fears in a moment divine
Weakest and strongest will dance in delight
All Illuminous. Our Savior.
They bringing Him forth. We will sing tonight

Our true Kingdom Come

Damn. Just listening to that song again now as I type this, and thinking back many years ago to emotional, yearning love for Jesus brings tears to my eyes. It is the bitter memories of discovering the disappointment of religious Faith, and the failed expectations of loving a Divine Savior. How I longed for Universal Salvation and Universal forgiveness! But as much as I clung to that hope of salvation through that meaningful song which I often played in Christian devotion, I knew my beliefs were of a strictly exclusive nature. I knew that Jesus was a vengeful god, and would strike out against those Sinners who dared rebel against Him in their unbelief. I knew that Jesus demanded humans to walk the narrow path of belief and Faith, and that the highway to Hell was paved with Sin disguised as good intentions. With the knowledge that I was one of the lucky elect of God, there was no way to not feel that I was better than the hordes of unwashed heathen doomed to everlasting torment. It was an ominous feeling knowing that my eternal fate was in the hands of a god who willed us into paradise or torment based on nothing but our deepest thoughts and beliefs. That thought terrified me. I had no outward sign that assured me of my Salvation. Unlike the certain sign of Salvation that Speaking in Tongues gave, and that Grandpa Wagner taught me as a child, Pastor Skip taught me that I could not spend my time looking for outward signs and wonders. I had nothing to rely on but my own failing Faith.

The eternal love expressed in the words to that song described a Divine Love that I had never felt in my life, and a Love that I desperately craved to feel. I do think that, in a strange way, deep down in my psyche, that song also reflected my hidden and unspoken hope that Jesus was in fact not the only Way. That we would all, eventually, find our own salvation, through whatever religious tradition we cared to follow. Not that I would ever admit to such heresy. But the Mind works in mysterious ways. That song carried me through many mental trials during the following years. Now, over twenty years later and after completely shedding religious beliefs from my life, He Is Sailing still carries my hope of universal salvation. Salvation is a mythic symbol of human restoration, and salvation carries whatever vague meaning the myth may hold.

That evening as I dumped armfuls of worldly music and my filthy past into the dumpster, I felt that I had fully repented. My religious conversion on the week previous was just the first step of a long haul, and I prayed to Jesus to give me supernatural power to make me a new creature. That evening I quit cigarettes. I had half-heartedly tried several times before to quit, but that night I was able to commit permanently, without the need for tapering off or support groups. I also quit alcohol. I drank not so much as a drop of beer after that night, without the need for AA. I viewed the nearly complete rejection of my former secular life as nothing short of miraculous! I thought that nothing or nobody but Jesus, the Son of God Himself, was able to transform my life as abruptly as it did. I did not think it possible that I had the power within myself to change my life. As miraculous as I felt my transformation to have been, I still did not have a healthy self-esteem. My Self did not matter. I must decrease as Jesus must increase, and I gave it all up for Him.

After a couple of months looking for a small church to join, I decided that such excitable Pentecostal congregations did not suit my taste any longer. I decided that I would stay with Calvary Chapel in Albuquerque, despite my initial reservations about the size of the congregation. I was raised to think that as a Sinful human I was worthless in the eyes of God, and Calvary Chapel only reinforced that belief. I was born in Sin, corrupt in Sin from the moment of conception, and by default immediately destined for the fires of Hell. No matter what good I tried to do in this life, I was not a good person, in fact no good thing could come from me, and I could do absolutely nothing of any value without the power of the Holy Spirit. My good works were just filthy rags in the eyes of God, in fact Pastor Skip often emphasized that the rags were covered in the filth of menstrual blood. I was taught that our culture was egocentric, and humans in their corrupt perversity were only living to fill themselves up with temporary pleasures and ungodly lusts. I believed that life without Jesus was empty, pointless and vain, but life with Jesus brought true joy and a peace that passes all human understanding. The previous few years of my life, in which I drowned my sorrows in alcohol only confirmed that conviction! Jesus was the only way to achieve true happiness and meaning in life. Without him, we were whitened sepulchers with darkened hearts. Without Jesus, our damned selves stumbled and droned about the world like the walking dead.

I felt worthless before I attended Calvary Chapel. I believed that I was worthless after I started attending Calvary Chapel. The difference was that I was happier knowing that I was worthless, because I believed that God viewed me as perfect because I accepted the sacrifice that His perfect Son made for me. It was a strange dichotomy. I was perfect in God’s eyes, because Jesus Christ was what made me perfect. But without Him, I was worthless. When I talked to unbelievers who accused me of being sanctimonious, I could always just turn and tell them that I was really no better than they in God’s eyes. But when I told people that I was Saved, I could just tell them that the Blood of Jesus made me perfect and Sinless in God’s eyes. The Christian religion, as conceived by Calvary Chapel, is full of slippery dichotomies like that. If a discussion or argument was getting too heated, I could always flip the card, and still be convinced that I was correct in my double speak.

My conversion to Evangalical Christianity was initially joyful, and a wondrous change to my miserable life. I loved Jesus. It was only after several weeks that I learned that I had to fear this Jesus just as much. Jesus was great, powerful, loving – and terrible, jealous and vengeful. It was a dichotomy that I had to learn to live with, but I don’t know if I ever fully and successfully accepted the dreadful implications of worshipping an almighty Deity who demanded sinless perfection from His worshippers. I often wondered to myself if I was truly a Christian, and if I truly had enough Faith to merit salvation. After all, I was told, many people who think they are Christians will be surprised when they are find themselves cast into the Lake of Fire. Did I believe enough in the atoning efficacy of Jesus’ death to meet God’s satisfaction? How could I know for sure? I thought that I manifested my beliefs through my good actions and that the Holy Spirit was evident by my Fruits of love, joy, peace, etc. I knew that my salvation was supposed to be given to me by Jesus through my Faith alone, and that any thought of earning my own salvation through my own good works was heresy. But the only way I could tell that I believed enough was through my own works, and if I stumbled by becoming unduly lustful, angry or impatient, I could not help but wonder if my lack of Faith was evidence of my lack of salvation. So I would strive, knowing that I was not allowed to strive, to do good works, to demonstrate to myself that I did have enough Faith in Jesus to merit His salvation. In this way, even though I dared not admit it, my salvation through Faith was implicitly a salvation through Works, and I knew of no way to avoid it. So I did my best to pray my way out of the dilemma, and hope that my vengeful god would accept me by my Faith anyhow. I became a Christian because my life was miserable, and I wanted to be happy and fulfilled. I remained a Christian because I longed for salvation and became terrified of damnation. Jesus may have been able to transcend all my love, but He could not caress all my fears, even though I had to pretend that He did. I had to ignore troubling dichotomies. So I played He Is Sailing on my record player, and thanked my vengeful and jealous Jesus yet again for His boundless mercy and love.

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