Conversions and De-conversions - Gone was the old grey stone

My first semester astrophysics professor lectured in front of 25 of my fellow students.

“What wavelength of solar radiation reaches Earth’s surface with the least amount of attenuation?  What wavelength is the least scattered or absorbed by the atmosphere?”

“About 550 nanometers,” answered one of the students.

“That is right!  550 nanometers corresponds to the green portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The light that we perceive as green is the light that is most efficiently transmitted to Earth’s surface.  That is why leaves appear green.  And the human eye also has its peak sensitivity at 550 nanometers!  Our eyes are more sensitive to green than any other color.  Coincidence?  Not at all.  This is evidence of …”

I had heard this before.  Chuck Missler used to stand in front of a crowd of hundreds in Calvary Chapel and give endless peculiar examples like this as evidence of obvious design by our loving Creator.  How is it that possible that our eyes could possess peak sensitivity at the optimal wavelength of solar irradiation?  How could the human eye possibly know where the sun would shine brightest?  Chuck Missler would say, “This is evidence of God’s handiwork”.

“This is evidence of Evolution by Natural Selection,” said my professor.  “The mechanism is amazing.”

I have mentioned several times in this story that I have always accepted Evolution as the best and most accurate explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.  I never told anybody in Calvary Chapel about my belief in the Theory of Evolution via Natural Selection.  Evolution, as I understood it, made perfect sense to me.  Evolution was intuitive to me, as the logic of it was gleaned from all the hikes and exploring of my youth, and witnessing firsthand the geology and climate of the vast desert.  It made more sense to me than the literal belief in a first man named Adam, and him naming all of God’s creatures.  True, I did believe the Genesis story because I had to as part of my Christian belief, but I always assumed that there was some non-literal or allegorical explanation behind the Biblical account, and I left it at that.  I did not explore the problem further, not because I feared the story would be debunked, but because it just seemed like an unsolvable problem, and I did not want to waste time wrestling with Christian issues that were peripheral to the central Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I also worried that becoming sidetracked by angels that danced on pinheads would become unnecessarily divisive within my Christian community.

Yet my belief in Evolution, as much as I accepted it, was immature before I enrolled in college.  Enrolling in a science and engineering university forced me to think about these scientific issues in a way that intruded uncomfortably on my religious beliefs.  I could not simply ignore Evolution like I had in the past.  Being confined in a science and engineering university forced me to confront it in a way that was sometimes a little too uncomfortable.  The implications of the Theory of Evolution via natural selection are earth-shattering to any person who believes that humans are special creations of God, and distinct and separate from the animal kingdom.  Many Christians who accept Evolution, like I did, have to sidestep or even ignore these implications in order, I now believe, to cling to their beloved Faith.  I just accepted Evolution without fully understanding it, and did not dissect it fully enough to discover the problems that it would give to my Faith.

Christians have every reason to either dismiss Evolution as a fraud, claim it is without scientific support, or tentatively and grudgingly accept it only to brush it and its uncomfortable ramifications under the rug.  When my professor fiendishly told us students that the human eye is most sensitive at the same wavelength as the peak solar irradiance, I could just as easily have claimed that it was not due to Evolution, but was instead evidence of the exquisite design of our loving creator.  God made our eyes sensitive in the green portion of the solar spectrum because God made the Earth’s atmosphere transparent to that part of the solar spectrum.  How else could we explain the interlocking serendipity of the otherwise unrelated human eye and a sphere of plasma 93 million miles away?

Despite my belief in the Theory of Evolution, and despite living in a university environment that stressed methodology over certainty, my brain still protested with echoes of Evangelical Christian propaganda.  To think that Evolution could produce us, in our complexity, out of nothing but a stew of chemicals, and with nothing but blind chance, was seemingly impossible.  Pastor Skip, who just repeated to us clichés that he had heard, said that it was like assembling a 747 jet airliner with a tornado rampaging through a junkyard.  The eye, I was told, was too complex to assemble by chance and out of multiple inter-dependent parts.  I still have an old sermon on cassette by Henry Morris, father of Flood Geology and author of The Genesis Flood, in which he claims that something as complex as the eye could not form by random mutations.  Each of perhaps hundreds of mutations would have to be independently directed to the benefit of eyesight.  The mutations could not form gradually from these random mutations over millions of years, so I was told by Henry Morris.  What good is half an eye? 

Out on one of my multiple geological field trips in the desert, rock hammer in hand, I asked one of my friends about some of the problems that I had understanding Evolution.  More precisely, I asked him about problems that Evangelical Christianity told me I should have with Evolution. 

“Like what?” he asked.  I gave him the problem of the existence of the eye that Henry Morris told me was unsolvable through the blind chance of Evolution.  After my friend solved the problem of the eye after about one minute of explanation, and after he scanned the harsh desert that we hiked through and reminded me about the natural, environmental pressures that drive natural selection, I never again thought of Henry Morris, young earth creationism, or flood geology as viable or believable scientific theories about our natural world.

Pastors Skip and Chuck, indeed nearly everybody I knew in Calvary Chapel was convinced that Evolution was not only wrong, but also a willful deception.  A lie.  Evolution was an unproven theory, they said, that people who hated God clung to in their desperation to deny His existence.  ‘Evolutionism’ was viewed as an alternate religion to Christianity.  Most of my friends back in Calvary Chapel did not think that heathens were deluded by the faulty evidence for Evolution, rather they believed that these heathens used Evolution as a smokescreen to outwardly deny what they inwardly knew to be true – that Jesus was Lord, and would be their ultimate judge.  Heathen Evolutionists were deluding themselves because of their hatred toward God.

This was emphasized when a special guest visited the New Mexico Tech campus for a free lecture.  Phillip Johnson, widely regarded as the father of the Intelligent Design movement, visited our campus and spoke to a packed auditorium.   I have to give him credit for his courage.  He spoke to an auditorium full of students, professors and scientists about the myopia of their methodological naturalism.  Surely, we must supplement our instruction of Evolution with at least the possibility of a Designer.  Since Evolution alone cannot possibly explain the complexity of the biological cell, or the self-aware mind in the human brain, we need to consider that there is some Purposeful Mind at work behind the biology.  I had never heard of Phillip Johnson before, but I had seen his book Darwin on Trail in the church bookstore, and I knew that he was an Evangelical Christian.  Although he purposefully never mentioned God, Jesus or the Bible in his public lecture, he otherwise spoke just as Chuck Missler would speak to a Sunday morning congregation.  I knew damn well that ‘Designer’ was just a euphemism purposefully chosen for a secular audience.

After the lecture, Johnson took questions.  One of the biology professors came absolutely unglued.  She stood and pointed at him, doing her best to control her anger.  “How dare you come here and accuse us of intentionally hiding data!  I do this for a living!  I devote my life to this!”  With that notable exception, most of the professors stayed quiet until they walked into the foyer.  From there, I heard plenty of snickers from the Geology department.  “I can’t believe that guy.  He thinks we are in a conspiracy to hide damning evidence against Evolution.”

One by one, the stories from the Bible that I had been taught, since childhood, to take as literal truth, were crumbling into mere fables.  Adam and Eve?  I had always taken that as some sort of metaphor, but pondering Evolution proved it to be nothing but myth.  Noah’s Ark?  Geology and physics demonstrated this story to be impossible if taken literally.  I especially remember the insight I felt thinking about the origin of the rainbow.  Rainbows are formed due to the natural refraction of light through the natural prism of water vapor.  Did the refractive properties and the laws of optics not exist before God formed a rainbow for Noah as a sign of His promise?  Absurd.  The deconstruction of my literal belief continued.  There was no ice canopy that covered Earth to give it a universally ideal climate.  A comet did not shatter the ice canopy, did not create the Deluge, and did not cause the first rain and thus the first rainbow.  This was all ad-hoc speculation that had no scientific basis.

On and on it went during my years in University.  Diverse languages did not originate at the Tower of Babel.  People did not live in excess of 900 years.  Evolution via Natural Selection was only a controversy within Christianity.  The controversy did not exist outside the walls of the Church.  Men did not escape death by being escorted to Heaven in a flying chariot.  For that matter, Heaven was not in the sky or anywhere ‘up there’.

The Red Sea did not part at the stroke of Moses’ staff, and the Israelites did not escape the Egyptians on dry ground.  There were no supernatural plagues to strike the Egyptians.  I supposed that the fantastic numbers of Israelites were exaggerated a bit, and that there were natural causes to all the ‘miracles’ of the Exodus.  However I figured that God was the moving force behind all these events.  The Egyptian chariots may have merely gotten stuck in the marshy mud in their pursuit of their Israelite slaves, but God was the one responsible for placing the mud there in the first place. 

Nearly all of the miraculous elements of the Bible were debunked in my mind.  But somehow, I still believed.  I just downgraded the miraculous to something more like the natural world that we observed.  Unbelievers claim that they never see the miraculous hand of God in the modern world, scientific, naturalistic world.  But, I figured, they did not understand that the hand of God was actually everywhere at work in the world, we just had trouble recognizing it because it was not the fireball from heaven that we were expecting.  The mundane world only operates through the Will of God, and every event occurs only through His providence.  In that sense, everything is a miracle.  It is only in hindsight that we look back, and we can link the events together that brought us into this special place.  How was I fortunate enough, I of all people, to find myself in a University?  Well, I could look back at the various events that happened previously in my life, not all of them pleasant, which brought me to the enviable position that I was currently in.  How can that be explained away?  How can all those people and events come into my life, to place me in this position today, except by the divine Grace of God?

My criticism of the miraculous in the Bible stopped at Jesus.  This is where the Bible remained untouched.  Jesus was God on Earth.  He had ultimate faith in His Father, more Faith than any mere human could muster, so He was able to perform His miracles, as evidenced by the eyewitnesses who wrote the Gospels.  Jesus was, so to speak, too hot for me to touch.  How could we have a redeemer of mankind who was not able to also perform miracles?  I was able to demystify almost the entire Bible as stories or legends or products of their time, but not the Gospels.  That was hitting too close to home.  Instead, my growing non-literal belief in Scripture assured me that I was not actually losing my Faith.  Far from it.  I was just growing more mature as a believer.  I was becoming educated and my beliefs more, I believed, sophisticated.  I no longer needed the strict literalism required for childish belief.

Somehow all disciplines, whether scientific, historical, or religious, like my Christian belief, converged and harmonized into some ultimate Truth.  My professors were not lying when they said they had evidence for Evolution.  The Theory of Evolution was the best model that they knew of to explain the evidence that they collected.  Where did this leave Pastor Skip back in Calvary Chapel?  The conspiracy theories of Chuck Missler or the flood geology of Henry Morris?  The pastors and teachers of my youth in Cape Baptist Christian School? Pastor Jack of New Hope Church?  Even my boyhood religious instruction from the fire-breathing Grandpa Wagner?  None of them were lying either.  They were all presenting truth as best as they understood it, but all in different ways.  They all loved Jesus, and they all accepted the Gospel in ways that they understood.  Jesus met them where they were at their own unique perspectives.

Most of my friends at New Mexico Tech were international students.  During my years in university, I had more friends from Asia and Europe than I did American friends, and I loved learning about their differences in food, music and culture.  But in order to do this, I had to become inclusive in this new environment of vast cultural and religious ideas.  I had to accept scientific evidence, and somehow incorporate it into my religious beliefs.  I no longer preached or witnessed to my friends, and I no longer felt any pressure or guilt for not witnessing.  I can only think of one exception to this.  I remember one evening in the first year of university career, while discussing religion with my girlfriend B----, I decided to use the C.S. Lewis Lord Liar Lunatic argument that I had learned so well from Pastor Skip.  I was not trying to convert her, since she always claimed to be a Christian, but I just wanted to get her reaction to an apologetic argument that I knew her mainline church had never exposed her to.  I recited to B---- most of the words of Jesus from John chapter 10.  From memory:

…My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.  And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand.  My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father’s hand.  I and My Father are one.

 “Does a normal human say things like this?” I asked B----.  “Are these the words of a merely good man, or a sane human?”  B---- gave me a look that I was used to seeing after giving apologetic arguments.  She probably wondered if mine were the words of a normal or sane human.

I confess this inclusiveness was sometimes a little uncomfortable for me. I occasionally attended a United Methodist church across from campus.  I knew nothing of this particular Christian denomination, but I knew it was some form of Christianity, even though I knew it was a form of Christianity that the likes of Calvary Chapel despised.  I did, however go because the options were slim.  New Mexico Tech is in the tiny town of Socorro, NM and there were few churches to choose from.  There was no Calvary Chapel, but I figured that was just as well.  I did not want to go there anyway, or to the town’s only Baptist church.  I had my fill of literalism and the guilt that came with it.  I was not about to go to a Catholic church.  This pretty much left the United Methodist as the only option left to me.  But I could not attend regularly.  It was most difficult for me because of the female pastor at this United Methodist Church.  I could downgrade the miraculous to legend.  I could be inclusive as far as I felt the Bible would allow me.  But accepting a female pastor was ultimately too difficult.  Couldn’t these supposed Christians see that allowing a female to pastor a church was in direct contradiction to the Bible, for instance 1 Corinthians 14:34-35?

Despite these reservations, I had to admit that I had left Christianity as I knew it.  I was still a Christian who had to accept the physical world that I was learning so much about.  I could not accept that people who did not believe exactly as I did were lying about their convictions, or that anybody was being deceitful.  I became a generic, liberal Christian.  And again, I believe that I found myself in a place that many Christians find themselves stuck in when they are forced to leave some kind of religious fundamentalism.  I did not criticize my beliefs to the point where it cut too deep.  Of course I was still a Christian.  Jesus was my still Savior and I believed the Bible to be the Word of God.  But I admitted that there was much that I did not know, but somehow, someway I knew it was still all true.  And I left it at that.

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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 – A godless childhood

The first thing I remember about my childhood in San Ysidro, New Mexico was the unusual people who lived there. True, I met many oddballs, hippies, vagrants and all-around misfits during my parent’s 18 months on the road. We traveled across the western United States, packed into a Volkswagen microbus, from one bizarre hippie commune to another. Sometimes we stayed for a couple of days, others we lingered for months. We lived at one particular state park in northern California for 3 weeks, along with a dozen or so tentbound societal outcasts. Lots of driving, lots of exploring, free love, pot and music. I was out of school, probably illegally, so my mom compensated by teaching me to read, write and understand basic math. I remember many times, sitting in the van, drawing wild animals that I had seen out the window, or indulging in my new obsession with dinosaurs. The huge area that we drove through was filled with geological marvels and fossil museums, and I learned early about those fantastic monsters that once filled the land. I still have crude drawings, buried somewhere in my closet, of ferocious red-eyed tyrannosaurs attacking long-necked brontosaurs. I remember mom teaching me the Theory of Evolution, as she understood it. She told me, for instance, that giraffes evolved from antelopes many thousands of years ago. Generations of antelopes stretched their necks to reach the tender leaves from treetops, each successive generation growing a slightly longer neck, with the final result being our modern giraffe. She also told me that while dinosaurs were long extinct, their modern day ancestors lived on as lizards, alligators and other reptiles. And while mom got the specifics of evolutionary theory wrong, the basic idea that animals somehow changed from one creature to another over spans of millions of years was taught to me at a very early age. Mom’s crude understanding, visiting fossil museums and traveling through desert terrain were all I had to explain the animals and fossils that I saw, and where the dinosaurs went. I do not remember at that early age any conception of our special creation from a deity – only a scientific explanation. It all made perfect sense to me. Here is a dirty secret – even during the years of my most fervent religious convictions, I was always convinced by the theory of evolution. Too many hikes in the desert observing nature, I suppose.

Eventually a life with no income and three children wore my parents down, so we settled on some property owned by my mother’s parents. San Ysidro was a small farming community about 40 miles from my grandparents birthplace, and probably not much bigger. For the next four years, we lived in a tiny adobe house, in the most primitive of conditions. As I already mentioned, the tiny town of Mexican farmers was at that time being overrun with very unusual people. My parents were one of a number of hippies and outcasts who arrived in San Ysidro, and northern New Mexico in general, trying to escape modernity.

I met two children who occupied a half eroded adobe house with their grandfather. I have a vivid memory of them shaving their grandfather’s thick toenails with a pocketknife, while he lay back on a couch talking to my parents. Like so many transients that I met in San Ysidro, they only stayed for a short time before moving on. We met a young cowboy with an older wife and his inherited eight children. I remember they once shared with us all they could on our first Christmas Eve in San Ysidro – some boiled potatoes, Jello, and bear meat that was tougher than shoe leather. They also moved out of town very soon after we met them. I have often wondered about the children I met in San Ysidro, where they now live, and if they could write similar articles about transient life in New Mexico. We often saw drunk Indians from the two neighboring pueblos, Jemez and Zia, and they were commonly seen stumbling or passed out on the road, meeting outside behind the town’s several bars to drink with friends, or even wandering onto our property or even our house! Alcoholism was a terrible problem with the Natives of New Mexico.

Mom enrolled me in the local public school, but my advanced reading and writing skills allowed me to quickly skip a grade. I moved straight from 1st to 3rd grade thanks to my mother’s education. Today, she considers granting the school permission to move me up a grade to be one of her worst parenting decisions. For the next 8 years or so, I was the youngest and smallest kid in my class, and I would later pay for it dearly.

Dad quickly found work as a lumberjack in the mountains. I remember him coming home from work, filthy with sawdust and oil, and sharpening his enormous chainsaws. He also drank more. His abuse and violence continued against mom and me. He frequently got in fights at the bar, and since he hated stupid Indians he would often go to the bar just to drink and look for trouble with them. In those days in northern New Mexico, we never, and I mean never, saw a police officer. San Ysidro was, like Cabezon before it, a relic from the Wild West. I believe the nearest police station was in Bernalillo 25 miles away, and they never ventured into our part of the county. Dad could get away with pretty much anything if he wished, and vigilante justice ruled. I remember one perverse day when dad took me to the bar in the neighboring town of Jemez Springs, got me to puke on two shots of tequila, had me shoot pool with some of his logging buddies, then on the drive home gave me the one and only expression he ever gave of his hopes and dreams for my future. I have heard that most dads are proud of their sons for showing some kind of aptitude and a potential for a successful adult life. After taking me to drink, my dad told me that I shot pool and drank like a man, and he could not wait for me to grow up so we could go out drinking together and beat up Indians. It would be another 30 years before he directed another expression of pride towards his son.

Eventually, mom had to leave dad. I believe they divorced around 1972. He went to live in Jemez Springs with his new girlfriend, and mom was left with no job, no skills and three children to care for in an isolated New Mexico town that offered no opportunity. If she did not live in an adobe house owned by her parents, I don’t know what would have happened. I don’t blame her for being desperate. She got a job at the local trading post/feed store, about a mile down the road. She still did not know how to drive a car, and things were looking kind of grim for us.

In all this time, my life was godless. There was never any talk of religion, God, Jesus, miracles – nothing. I had no conception of any of it.

That would quickly change. More transients moved into San Ysidro. Most were young hippies who longed to drop out from society, but we finally met some who were from Southern California. They were heavily influenced by Chuck Smith’s Christian ministry, and converted to his charismatic brand of Evangelical Christianity. They spoke a bizarre new lingo like ‘Jesus Freaks’, ‘One Way’, ‘Jesus saves’ and ‘Jesus is coming again’. I don’t remember the first time I met these people, or was introduced to their religion, but like so many other transients we met, they seemed to come into town, stay a few days or weeks, then move on.

Another family moved into town, this time from Jamestown, New York. I never knew why they traveled across the United States to settle in little San Ysidro, New Mexico, but like a traveling band of Mormons, they braved the wilderness until they found their Promised Land. The Wagner Family (not their real name) was three generations of Pentecostal Christians who suddenly moved into our tiny town, where there was only one small Catholic church, intent on building a church to their liking. Mom, soon after meeting this family, converted. This young woman, who had rejected her family’s religion and heritage of Catholicism, quickly became a Pentecostal Christian. She became a part of the family. Like I said, she was desperate.

The Wagner family patriarch was a man whom we all called ‘Grandpa Wagner’. Dad loathed him, and called his wife ‘Old Toothless’. He was an old-fashioned hellfire preacher whom I am certain would get along just fine with the likes of Fred Phelps. They moved to San Ysidro with their four grown children and spouses, numerous grandchildren, and even a few members of their Jamestown church. We quickly became friends with all these people. It was in this cult-like religious atmosphere that we lived for the next few years, and it is in this environment that I was first exposed to Christianity.

Mom was desperate, and perhaps she accepted her new family and their religion because of that desperation. Perhaps she did not know at the time, when she married Grandpa Wagner’s oldest son, that she was desperate. Perhaps she really was in love. Perhaps she only thought she was in love. Who knows? All I know is that Michael Wagner (again a pseudonym) was single, had no children, and had the marketable skills necessary to care for three very poor children. Mom was desperate, and she had to do what she had to do. She married into the family of an old traveling preacher, and converted to their religion. In return, she was cared for, and we were fed.

And I learned to Love Jesus.

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Conversions and De-conversions – Dad

As far back as my mother can trace, her ancestry is exclusively from the high-desert farmlands of New Mexico. She is of unmistakable Hispanic heritage. Dad is a typical European mutt. He once made it a mission to trace his ancestry as far back in time as he possibly could – a story that I will come to again later. He found that he was of English, Scottish, Danish and Dutch stock – essentially the northwestern rim of Europe. Dad’s European heritage was certainly a mix of Lutheran and Anglican, but I will never know of what extent that heritage was, or why my dad’s family became impassive towards it. His parents and grandparents never made their religious beliefs known to me, and grandmom only spoke in the vaguest of spiritual generalities. As far as I know, they were thoroughly apathetic towards religious beliefs of any kind. In all my life, I have never seen anybody in dad’s family in a church. That is, until dad converted. But I am again getting ahead of myself.

Grandpa died before I was born, but grandmom is still alive and living in Los Angeles. She remarried a very kind man who I considered my grandfather, just because I never knew my real one, and camping and fishing with my grandparents are some of my most treasured childhood memories. Grandmom was born in 1920, the third child of a Dutch/Scottish couple who drove to Los Angeles from Iowa sometime around 1915. ‘Drove’ seems like such a pedestrian term in our world of interstate highways, but before my great-grandmother died in 1993, she used to tell me stories of being ambushed by wild Indians in Oklahoma during their cross-country trek. I am certain these stories were embellished, but on their arrival to the growing city of Los Angeles, they made a small fortune selling real estate around the growing metropolis. One prized photo in the family album shows my great-grandfather’s company trucks lining an empty road and loaded down with lumber, ready to build. They caught the housing boom in Los Angeles just in time to retire early. They spent the rest of their lives traveling and indulging in one hunting and fishing safari after another.

Somehow, with missing details that I never asked my parents for, the tall, handsome, muscular European man met the tiny, Hispanic woman. The mismatched couple wed and eventually had three children, of which I was the oldest. Dad had a troubled childhood. As big as my dad was, he had an older brother who was even bigger, and apparently had a nasty mean streak. When dad was young, his dad and older brother regularly beat him. I don’t really know what caused the beatings. Dad told me some stories about his dad’s temper exploding after he got in some kind of school trouble, but I suspect these were only lame excuses to justify more beatings. My dad’s father, who died years before I was born, was always somewhat sickly. My grandmom once said that he was born just for the purpose to die. But my uncle, my dad’s older brother, has always struck me as a mean and bitter man. I don’t think he would have needed much of a reason to bully a favorite victim. The beatings must have left severe emotional wounds on my dad’s soul – since the last time I saw him three years ago, he was still telling stories of decades-old abuse. I have always known about the trouble he had with his father and older brother, but he shocked me recently by telling me of his mother, who once punished him by repeatedly shoving his head under water. It is so hard for me to imagine my sweet grandmother, who lives in the fondest memories of my childhood, engaged in such abuse. I don’t know how much in these stories are true, and how much is my dad’s unintended embellishment. Dad has only bothered to tell me a single side of every pitiable story in his difficult life.

As strained as his immediate family relations were, he idolized his adventurous grandparents. My grandmom’s parents spent their real estate earnings on numerous hunting and fishing expeditions. Grandmom’s house was crammed with wildlife trophies, stuffed and mounted deer heads, giant fish and bear rugs. Dad and his cousins sometimes traveled with them on weekend outings, and spent as much time as they could away from the city and exploring the deserts of southern California, hunting game and training carrier pigeons. Dad grew to love the outdoor lifestyle that his grandparents instilled in him, and he became less and less comfortable with the crowded and complicated city environment. Los Angeles was becoming unbearable for him.

Dad worked as a gardener, tending the grounds of Los Angeles’ wealthy. Mom was employed as a telephone operator. Mom was never taught to drive - or taught much anything else for that matter. If she did not make the bus, dad had to drive her to work. I remember once sitting in the car while dad tried to give mom driving lessons. He got angry and frustrated, punched the car interior, and drove home hurling curses and insults the whole way. Knowing my mom as I do now, it is amazing for me to look back at what I remember of her in the late 1960’s. For a woman who rebelled against the religious traditions of her parents, she was unbelievably prone to influence and outside pressures. I remember her once hiding me under the bedroom window while she peeked out at a salesman ringing the doorbell. “Be quiet! That is a robber outside trying to get in!” I did not know at the time that she just too timid to deny a sales pitch.

Dad treated me the way he was treated growing up. He treated me the only way he knew how. I hesitate to write of the physical abuse that dad inflicted on mom or myself, because it does not fit the central theme of these blog articles. But those actions undoubtedly shaped me into the person that I am today. He did it. It happened. I might sprinkle an incident here or there in forthcoming blog entries, but it is not something that I want to spend much time writing about. Strangely, the treatment I got from dad does not seem particularly abnormal to me, but I suppose that is because my childhood is the only childhood I ever knew, and making comparisons with a supposed ideal childhood is arbitrary and impossible. I do not have scars, not physical ones anyway, I did not endure torture, and my dad’s outbursts were usually swift and alcohol induced. I don’t even like the term abuse, since it trivializes those poor children who have endured much worse than me. But in talking to friends over the years, they have expressed the concern that dad would certainly be doing some jail time had he acted the way he did in our 21st century, childcentric, bully-free zone. At the risk of validating Christian apologists who suggest that atheism is the result of a dysfunctional relationship with a father, I will say that I never really knew my father. I still don’t know him. Unlike the relationship I still have with mom, and despite years of trying, I have never been close to dad. He has certainly changed over the years, as we all have, and he will feature prominently in my story in future entries, but I can honestly say that he still remains a mystery to me. His abuse was more psychological than physical. A punch in my face only hurts just so long as I am choking down blood from my nose, but the emotional pain lasts for years. Even decades later, after I had grown and he had matured, even after we both tried our best to learn to love each other, he still intimidated the hell out of me.

In 1969, I was attending Kindergarten in Gardena, California. The school was two blocks from the house and in those days mom let me walk, alone, to school. One of the first memories I have of school is my teacher, Mrs. Michener, telling us youngsters to be quiet so she could listen to the news on the radio. Apparently something important was happening with astronauts who were travelling to the Moon, and Mrs. Michener later told us all about daring astronauts and the marvels of space travel. My introduction to science had thus begun.

For many years, I suspected dad was a Vietnam War draft dodger. Recently, mom assured me that this was not the case. I have always wondered why, in late 1969, my parents sold all their belongings, including the house, packed me, my toddler younger brother, and baby little sister, into a 1963 Volkswagon Microbus, and left Los Angeles. The transition was so sudden it was enough to induce whiplash. One day, we were living comfortably in a nice brick home just outside of Los Angeles, the next, we were on the road, with no income, no destination, no plan, no idea of what would happen next. Mom assures me that dad was not a draft dodger. He just found the city increasingly stifling, and he needed the freedom of the hills that he had learned from the grandparents he so loved. Reckless? Irresponsible? Who can say, but I must say that it was also the climate and changing culture of the time. Dad was letting his hair and beard grow. Mom shed her dress and started wearing pants. Rebellious and experimental music blared from everywhere and expressed the feelings of all young people - Janis Joplin, Canned Heat, Iron Butterfly, and dad’s personal favorite, Bob Dylan. I still remember ‘Somebody to Love’ by Jefferson Airplane, probably the first song chorus I ever learned to sing, playing from the bus radio as we drove north and left our grandparents and all remaining family traditions and ties forever behind.

Little could I have suspected, but at that very moment, just 30 miles to the south of our house in Gardena, down south of Long Beach in neighboring Coast Mesa, a middle-aged Pentacostal preacher named Chuck Smith was shocking the evangelical world by inviting drug addicted hippies into his small church and converting them to Christianity. The Protestant Church, recently home to stiff 1950’s post-war formalism, was suddenly flooded with long-haired Jesus Freaks baptizing in the Pacific Ocean, performing signs and wonders, and creating a hybrid musical form called Christian Rock. This had no immediate effect on me, since at this time in my life, my religiously indifferent family had never introduced me to the concepts of God, Jesus or other Christian paraphernalia. However, these simple but shocking acts, performed in a church not far south of our Gardena home, produced ripples that were to affect our lives for many years to come.

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I will continue this story after the Holidays. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everybody!

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