My spiritual balance has been way out of whack for way too long. I have just made a commitment to myself I am going to avoid the news as much as possible for the next few years, and cut back on my attendance in the Politics and Current Events forums here.
Some people call what I am about to do my Testimony. Whatever.
There are other people who will think what I am about to say is a boatload of horseshit, and that's fine. I totally understand as I have given them good reason to think so.
But stick it out with me if you wish to hear me out. This will necessarily be a long story, but I hope an interesting enough one to keep you engaged.
I am not going to go into the gruesome details, but I was abused in every way possible in my childhood. In some ways which you may never have heard of.
Suffice it to say I spent a significant portion of my childhood in hospital beds.
By the time I was 15 years old, I had come to believe everyone on Earth was put here to fuck with me personally. I thought everyone was a machine, including my brothers whose faces I punched every day and who punched my face every day. We had been reduced to wild animals.
I later learned in my life that thinking problem I had is called paranoid schizophrenia.
I also came to very firmly believe there could not possibly be a God, as He would not have let all this shit happen to me. I became a very angry militant atheist. The really pissed off kind.
So I went into politics as that is a natural fit for paranoid schizophrenics and atheists. I joined an organization founded by the eminent Bill Buckley called Young Americans for Freedom. I met Reagan before he was president, and many other household names.
There I was. 15, 16, 17 years old, making speeches to legislators in their hallowed chambers and halls. I spoke out against the Equal Right Amendment, pissing off a lot of lesbians. (I kid! I kid!)
I spoke in favor of a Right To Work bill. You could not get a job in my state unless you joined a union and that annoyed the hell out me. So when it became obvious to me the Senate committee was bought and owned by the labor unions as indicated by their fawning over unionists and vicious attacks against us Right To Workers, I stood up and made eye contact with the Vice President of the AFL-CIO and gave him the fist.
500 mobsters in three piece suits paid by my dues to be there booed at me. I'll never forget that sound echoing off the walls. Then two thugs followed me out of the room, trying to intimidate me. So I took them on a hike, up and around the Capitol dome as they huffed and puffed and wheezed. My mother was terrified for me. I was laughing my ass off.
We got threatening phone calls for months afterward. How sad is it the mob felt the need to intimidate a 17 year old when they had already won the war?
Anyway.
My younger brother decided the best way to escape our situation was to enter the service. I followed soon after, and then my older brother joined up right after that.
We had a pact with each other despite our mutual hatred of each other. We had a much younger brother and we all vowed that if our parents did even a fraction of what they did to us to him, we would kill them
I explain to people all the time that a lot of veterans come to the service already pre-traumatized, and are trying to get away from their own personal horrors.
But it was too late for my older brother. He was an intravenous drug addict by then, got in a lot of fights in the service, and was dishonorably discharged. He died a few years later as one of the early victims of AIDS.
My other veteran brother now lives on a mountaintop in New Hampshire as he was forced out of the workplace for being a danger to others. He is heavily medicated by the VA and lives contentedly raising chicken and marijuana plants. He does not partake of the pot as that would mess with his medications. He grows it to give to his elderly neighbors for their various old people ailments.
This is a guy I used to beat this shit out of. Now we are as close as two brothers can be. We are surivors.
Some of you will be happy to know he is a huge Trump fan. Before his wife dragged him to the VA to get help, he was more than ready to start shooting homos and Mexicans if Trump lost the 2016 election.
Thank God Trump won, I guess?
My family was dirt poor. A few years ago, I searched for my childhood home. When I found it, I was traumatized all over again at its tiny size. I could not believe that many of us had lived there, and all the horrors came rushing back.
Despite my parents' flaws, they made sure all us boys attended private Catholic schools. I have no idea how they pulled that off. But I well remember it meant eating a lot of hot dogs, drinking nothing but powdered milk, and so forth. You get the picture.
It also meant the financial strain of our education only increased the stress level which rolled downhill onto us.
Nonetheless, every bit of my success in life is due to that education.
Another thing my dad did is he lectured me for hours, days, months, years about the Irish-never-quit thing. Pounded that shit right into me.
That turned out to serve me incredibly well in the service, let me tell you. When I saw other guys whining and crying and failing in boot camp, I was amazed. Boot camp was a cake walk to me!
Damn right never quit. No matter what shitstorm you find yourself in.
So God bless my parents, I guess?
As a result of my Catholic education at the hands of some seriously sadistic nuns, I left home with a strong moral code despite being a rabid atheist.
Here's a thing.
The nuns teach you about mortal sins and venial sins. If you violate one of the Ten Commandments, that's a mortal sin and you are going to hell. If you violate one of the thousands of venial sins, the confessor priest checks his spreadsheet and tells you how many Hail Mary's and Our Fathers you have to say to wipe your slate clean.
So like I said. I left home with a powerful moral code.
Which I immediately set about violating at every opportunity. It was a rebellion against the straightjacket I had been in my whole life.
Here's another thing.
If you violate one of the Ten Commandments, you're going to hell. So what difference does it matter if you do it one hundred times, right?
Atheist Logic, baby!
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Here's another thing which was behind my rejection of my moral code.
Because of all the abuse, my filters were all fucked up. They were clogged.
Our parents took us to mass every Sunday. And they read a piece of the Old Testament, then a piece of the New Testament. If you go seven days a week for a year, like some of the old biddies do, you've heard the whole bible.
But as mere Sunday worshippers, we only heard 52 pieces of it. You were supposed to make up the difference in catechism, which we did for a while.
Anyway. My filters.
The only stuff which made it through my filters were the parts where God was smiting and nuking people for being sinners.
i did not hear a word of love or forgiveness. I know for a fact that stuff was read to us. I've read the Bible since my conversion, and it was an entirely different book. My filters were unclogged. But at the time, I didn't hear a word of any of the New Testament.
Weird, right?
God was a real bastard from my point of view. He sets us up to fail and then sends us to hell. That was my view.
God can kiss my ass, I decided.
Here's another thing.
How can you hate Someone you don't believe exists? That snake swallowed its own tail for decades of my life.
At some point, you start desperately hoping there really is no God since you are such a fuckup. He is sending you to hell for sure!
Forever.
A little side track for a second.
After my older brother died from AIDS, my parents took responsibility and repented. They even went so far as to open two halfway houses and took in convicts and such. The named their charity Agape, which is a Greek word for unconditional love.
It took me quite a few years beyond that, though, to finally forgive them.
Let me tell you. Being a forgiving person is the very highest state of being a human can achieve.
It's a real bitch getting there. A real motherfucking bitch.
For a long time, I was obsessed with murdering my parents.
A real motherfucking bitch getting there, folks. And it was only due to my conversion, which I promise I am getting to in the next few thousand words.
After the reconciliation decades later, I asked my very Catholic dad what he thought hell was. He was so Catholic, he quite the corporate world and went to work for a Catholic mission. Who better to ask, right?
Don't say a priest. I'll explain later.
I'm expecting my dad to talk about lakes of fire and demons with pitchforks and all that shit you see in those terrifying religious paintings.
No.
He says hell is, "Eternal separation from God."
Whoa.
Whoa...
I still get chills. Because I have been in hell for most of my life. And it wasn't the abuse which put me there, though I could be forgiven for thinking so.
I put myself in hell. I told God to kiss my ass and turned my back on Him.
Here's another thing.
When you are crazy pissed off and an atheist, you acquire what is known as a Confirmation Bias. It's a kind of logical fallacy.
Let me tell you, when you serve in the military for over 20 years like I did, you are provided limitless evidence to feed that bias.
You are sent to places where you see all the worst things human beings do to each other. Yep, for sure there's no God.
I wasn't satisfied with all this evidence, though. I needed more.
Wherever I went on this planet, I would seek out the local holy men and interrogate them. I would engage them in angry debate and challenge their beliefs.
When I look back now at the nerve I had doing that, I feel deeply ashamed.
If I grilled a priest, and I did many, I had one question which my filters had been unable to process. I would ask the priest du jour, "What does Jesus died for our sins mean?"
I honestly did not get it.
There is no doubt every one of them answered the question straightforwardly. But there's a bit in the Old Testament about Egypt's Pharoah's heart being hardened which made it literally impossible for him to heed Moses and, by extension, God. So God had to really fuck the Pharoah up the ass until he got the point.
That was me. Mr. Hardened Heart. I literally could not understand those priests, I was so far gone down the atheist rabbit hole.
Eternal separation from God. My inability to understand priests is why I went to my dad to find out if I was going to hell and finding out I had been there for a while already.
I won't go into all the gruesome details of my lifestyle while I was in the void. I'll just jump ahead to my conversion process now. There are three phases to my spiritual evolution which means you have about 38 thousand more words to read.
Take a break. I'll wait here.
