walking with jesus
i was living in norfolk, virginia when my mother started to get really serious about religion. we were attending a church of god, where my mother eventually became secretary for the church. she would bring home books, explaining a vast, calculated satanic conspiracy to take over the us government, through the council on foreign relations, trilateral commission other secular organizations. at one point, she told me that the band kiss stood for knights in satan's service.
she was going through some rough times with her then husband, my stepfather. he was being unfaithful to her and i think religion was her "escape".
one day he decided that the marriage just wasn't going to work. he instructed us to leave virginia immediately, so we did. we moved back to california.
i think the shock of the divorce took her focus away from jesus and put it on some sort of worldly reality - the reality of being a divorced, single mother with few qualifications for a job and a child to raise, alone.
fast forward a few years. i was in my mid teens, my mother had divorced my real father for the second time and i was living with him. we lived in a $200 rented house in an area of southern california surrounded by wealthy orange and avocado growers. the house was basically a shack. it was the high desert of southern california in a town called valley center. it's very close to fallbrook. tom metzger lived just one town over, in fallbrook, at the time.
while my mother and father were still married she started attending a southern baptist church. this time my mother didn't go too far into it, thank god.
after 2 years of marriage, she'd decided she'd had enough and left my father. i kept attending this church, mostly because it was a way for me to see my friends. we could all go to church and, of course it would be legit - i mean after all, we were going to worship in the house of the lord, right?
i also starting smoking weed at this point and would sometimes go to wednesday night bible study stoned. it was very odd. my friends and i would get baked and roll into bible study, wondering if we'd get caught. thankfully, it didn't happen, although my dad smoked weed and probably wouldn't have cared less. he was a vietnam vet who loved andy warhol, amon duul, ronald reagan and the john birch society. that's another story though.
at some point during all of this, the church started teaching us how to "witness" to people. they'd fill our heads up with some bible verses and make us remember them for the minute we had to bust one out, give us a bible to make us look official, then put us into this old chevy suburban and drive us to the beach and dump us off. we'd have to walk around and talk to people about jesus. it was basically training for us to become missionaries as the southern baptist church has lots of missions overseas.
basically the script goes something like this - roll up to someone, ask them if they've accepted jesus as their "lord and savior", then when the say "no" you have to bust out scripture explaining what hell is like and talk about "gnashing of teeth" and the "lake of fire" and all that other bullshit to get the fear going, because as a christian country this stuff has been ingrained in our heads since birth. we've all heard about hell and there's always that "what if. " you're basically trying to hit a nerve. you cannot stop the assault, even when they say no. you are trying to save their soul, after all. in any case, i was no good at this. it always felt hokey to me, unnatural. you are essentially a pushy salesperson, pushing a product that you don't really believe in, because you know so little about the product you are pushing.
all through this time i had diligently read the bible. every night i'd read some, with the goal being to read the entire bible as this in my mind was a sure shot to get to heaven. i got up to the book of numbers and then started skipping ahead. who cares about ruth anyway? i read psalms and then went straight to the gospel. mathew, mark, luke and john. i've read the gospel maybe 5 times and revelations probably the same amount. after reading the gospel over and over i started to notice some things. one of the books is completely unlike the others. the events and the way jesus is portrayed are different. this has been confirmed in, of all places, my mother's old study bible. the book of john was written sometime between 90 and 135 ad. the others were written in the 60s. i'm guessing that john, "the disciple whom jesus loved", was at least 20 when jesus plucked him from obscurity, so if this gospel was written in 90 ad he'd have to be 110 years old. and if it was written in 135 ad, he'd have to have been at least 155. the other funny one is the book of luke. he wasn't even a disciple of christ. he was paul's physician. his accounts of jesus are second-hand.
the seeds of dissent were being sewn, by nothing other than the book's own contradictions. i started to ask questions at bible study, real questions, obviously irritating the new youth pastor. he definitely saw my queries as some sort of devilish test. i think at some point he must have given up on my soul. i never really liked the guy. there was only one thing we shared in common, we both loved this old bob hope movie set in the caribbean. it was some sort of haunted house story. funny stuff.
anyway, i'd been asking more and more questions and at some point i came up with this one question. if the only way to the father is through the son, then what about the people who've never heard of jesus. this was an issue for me as i can trace my lineage back to the trail of tears march and back beyond that and i was wondering about my ancestors. he thought for a second, got out his bible and opened it. i can't remember the book or the verse, but i remember basically what it said - he who cannot see the glory of god cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. so i asked what this meant, exactly. did it mean that people were supposed to realize that they had to accept jesus by looking at a tree, or a cloud or something? he told me that yes, they were just supposed to know about jesus without ever hearing about him.
i was pleasant enough with his answer, but i had made up my mind. i was no longer a christian. i can't keep believing in something that no longer made sense to me.
one of the main things that the baptist's teach you is about "accepting the lord jesus christ into your heart." they are *really* big on this. for real. this says "jesus, open the gates and let me in." i did this early on in my church-going days. later, i'd asked my pastor if it was possible to go to hell once you've accepted jesus into your heart and he said no, it's not possible. so anytime i get hassled by a christian trying to sell me eternal life i just tell them "hey, buddy, i'm already saved."
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when the white man came to the new world and tried to teach the native americans about their "god in heaven" the natives would reply "why would you worship a god so far away? our god is right here, with us always."
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