My Journey Out of Belief: The Early Years

From the earliest memory I can recall, my parents were not very religious. My father was Lutheran and my mother was Methodist. Yet, every Sunday found us sleeping in and putting the chores off for a few hours. God and the Bible were not brought up at all and each meal was just served and devoured without thanking the Almighty for the bounty.

However, my father was always exploring religion. There were several things that were taught in his childhood faith that just didn’t jive with him. He had never totally turned his back on God, just on the faith of his childhood. He was a seeker. A recently completed church in town was hosting a study into End Time Prophecy, a particular area of fascination for my father. So, he attended all the sessions and listened to what they had to say. It was after attending these that my parents decided that this church was where they belonged. So, they were baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1979 and my journey into faith began.

When it was time for me to enter third grade, my parents elected to send me to the SDA ran school about 30 miles east of where we lived. So, on top of morning family devotionals (studying of scripture and the lesson for the coming Sabbath School), I sat through morning Bible study in school. For those of you not familiar with SDA beliefs, I’ll give you a basic primer.

At the time, there were 27 Fundamental Beliefs of the Adventist Church, they added a 28th a few years ago. I won’t list them all here, you can see these for yourself here. But, some of the major things were:

This is just a brief overview of the beliefs that really had an impact on my early years. The fact that they believe that the Bible will be a banned book leads to one of the things that really had an effect on me. The practice of memorization of entire portions of the Bible. To this day, I can call up scriptures from memory and quote them mostly verbatim. If I can’t, it only takes me seconds to locate the desired text with a physical Bible. Shortly after my family joined the Church, it began to use the New International Version as the common text in all facets of the Church. As it is a paraphrase translation, I don’t think it is used much anymore. It was used due to the ease of reading and forgoing the archaic language used in the King James Version.

I attribute this little thing to my love of collecting different translations of the Bible. I get poked fun at for having an entire bookshelf full of Bibles that I don’t even believe in. At an early age, I was already exploring everything I could about the Bible. I read the entire thing in a year, thanks to “The Bible in a Year” reading program. I completed this the same year I was baptized into the church, which was when I was 8 years old, welcome to 1980. That was not the last time I read it cover to cover, but probably the last time I did so without understanding all that I was reading.

It was December of 1982 that my father became ill and was later diagnosed with Viral Cardiomyopathy. A virus attacked his heart causing serious damage to one of the chambers that would lead to his death four years later. Because of this, before I entered 7th Grade, we packed up and moved to Nebraska, near Lincoln and the Veteran’s Administration Hospital that was there.

It was decided that I would re-enter the public school system and that my brother would continue to attend the church ran school. This was a bit of a culture shock to me. For four years, I had been the only student in my class out of a student population that was no more than fifteen students scattered from 1st to 8th grade. Now I was one of around 60 kids in my grade, alone. This was also the height of the Satanic Panic and I was, of course, drawn to the evils of Dungeons and Dragons. I love the game, the idea of playing a warrior or a wizard battling my way through a fantasy world. My young imagination was fed well. Of course, I had to hide my gaming activities from my parents. My mother discovered my character sheets and tore them up and threw away my first set of dice. The lecture I received didn’t stop me, I continued to play the game on the sly, mainly because I didn’t tell her that it was the neighbor across the street that introduced it to me. She thought I picked it up at school. I just couldn’t believe that a fun game of harmless fantasy was evil. And I was right. Later, she bought my younger brother his first set of books and dice.

On March 11, 1986, my father passed away in Richmond, VA, while awaiting a heart transplant. The most painful thing for me was that I had been ill the last day he was in Lincoln and was denied the opportunity to see him one last time. Instead, he smiled at me through the window of his room in the ICU. I was informed of his death by the school principal and that was the first time I ever used profanity in front of an adult. I went home that day with the younger of my sisters and bawled my eyes out before settling into a restless slumber.

Some will say that this is the moment I began to lose my faith in God. It wasn’t. Yes, I was angry with God. I couldn’t believe that a loving God would take a growing boy’s father away from him mere months before the hell of being a teenager began. I was angry that God did not hear the prayers of my mother, my brother, our church family, our believing family, and myself that my father would be blessed with a new heart or healed by some miracle and have a few more years on this earth with us. I was angry that God would punish my family by taking away the only person who held it together. Yes, damn right I was angry with God. Anyone would be. Anger is a normal part of the grieving process.(See my article, You Are Angry with God.)

But, my faith didn’t die that year or the next, even when my mother was so depressed that she didn’t make my brother and I go to church anymore. We went to church now and then, but my faith in God was not weak. I still prayed daily, read my Bible, studied materials from the church. Then I met a girl. She wasn’t a member of our Church, she went to the church next to the home in the small town we moved into the year after my dad died. So, I began to attend church with her and her family. I even went to Wednesday night Catechism class, took part in the youth group of that church, and began to have joy in Christ again. I still went to church on Saturday, but that tapered off because I wanted a weekend day to myself or to spend with my girlfriend outside of the church.

After we moved, my mother bought my first computer for me, a Commodore 64 and a few months later, she also purchased a modem for it. Along with my own phone line, that was my first exploration into the information age on my own. I joined many electronic bulletin board systems and acquired a number that I could go onto the primitive World Wide Web via the university in Lincoln. I discovered a whole new world. A world where Christianity wasn’t the only religion that existed. A world where I could find anything I wanted to know about. These were early days, so more of the info out there wasn’t “fake news,” rather it was people discussing everything under the sun. Most of us that were on it were nerds and geeks, we were the only ones with modems aside from corporations and schools.

I discovered alternative religions and the religions of the “heathens.” Oh, I had read about these in encyclopedias but never dreamed they were still being practiced in modern times. I delved into the writings of Anton LeVey, Alister Crowley, Scott Cuningham, and many more. I didn’t lose my faith in God at this time, it just changed. I no longer believed in the Judaeo Christian God, but accepted the Goddess and her consort. Some will chart this up as the moment I stopped believing in the true God of the Universe, but I don’t think so. It was the same kind of feeling I had when I was a Christian. My spells and rituals had meaning. I believed they affected the outcome of things. I still studied the Bible, seeing where the Goddess harmonized with the Christian God.

But, that, my friends I will save for the next installment. There, we’ll take a look at the beginnings of my exploratory years, where I explored many flavors of Christianity and other faiths.

Image Credits: SDA Archives