Article: The Gospel According to Dixon #12: Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Hellfire

[Dixon]

by Dixon Wragg
WaccoBB.net

When I was fifteen, my mom gathered us kids around the table for a momentous announcement. At that point we had been Mormons for five years (Mom and the kids, that is—Dad wasn’t a churchgoer).

Mom had recently been visited repeatedly by fundamentalist Christian “Missionaries to the Mormons” and they had succeeded in wooing her away from Mormonism and back into fundamentalism, the religion of her youth. So her announcement to us kids was that she’d been shown some doctrinal errors in Mormonism and from now on she’d be taking us, not to our accustomed Mormon church, but to Calvary Bible Church instead.

This church was a nondenominational fundamentalist Christian church—nondenominational because it was felt that all the major Christian denominations were too “modernistic”. Dancing and movie-going, among many other things, were forbidden at the socially and politically conservative Calvary Bible Church.

It was jarring to go through such a change that I wouldn’t even be seeing my friends at the Mormon church anymore. I felt like I’d been cast adrift without anchor or rudder. I needed some new way of understanding the world, but at the same time, was reluctant to just follow my mom into this new church. I was fifteen years old, by golly, and I was gonna research the alternatives before deciding what religion to accept. I don’t remember it even occurring to me at the time to consider atheism as an option. Certainly free-thinking was vehemently discouraged in mid-60s southwestern Michigan, even more than today.

So I went to the library and got a book that devoted one chapter each to explaining the world’s major religions. But reading that book didn’t dispel my confusion. Meanwhile, social and psychological forces were conspiring to draw me into Calvary Bible Church. Mom was taking us kids there thrice weekly—worship services on Sunday mornings and evenings, and Wednesday night prayer meeting. I was making friends there, and was sexually attracted to some of the girls, so lust was drawing me towards Jesus, as it has done to so many before and after me. (Without lust, conservative churches would be far less popular.) And I was getting more and more uncomfortable with not having a belief system as a basis for coping with life.

Pastor Campbell and others were trying to get me “saved”, which means confessing one’s dirty rotten unworthy sinfulness to God and asking Jesus to “come into your heart” (ouch!), after which you were guaranteed to spend eternity in Heaven praising God. This doesn’t really sound like a very pleasant way to spend a week, much less eternity, until you realize that the only other option is to burn forever in the lake of fire with the other unsaved people (i.e., almost everybody). So Heaven seemed like the lesser of two evils.

In retrospect, that’s a diabolically clever use of the behavioral principles of reward and punishment. If you’re trying to get allegiance and money from people by controlling them with a carrot and a stick that don’t actually exist, you have to make the promised carrot so heavenly and the threatened stick so hellishly frightening that people will be motivated to do as you say just in case the promises and threats are true. No less an intellect than Blaise Pascal was taken in (look up Pascal’s Wager), so how could a fifteen year old Michigan boy resist?

But I just couldn’t quite buy those claims. Even though I was just a kid, with little concept of critical thinking, it seemed clear that the claims were unsupported by any real evidence, and in fact were quite bizarre.

I recall the fateful night I allowed myself to be perver—uh, I mean converted to Christian fundamentalism. I was talking with Pastor Campbell and Jack Knapp, the church’s Youth Pastor. They’d made it clear that their beliefs were based on literal, not metaphorical interpretation of the Bible (King James translation only!) so that even the dumbest knuckle-dragger could know what’s right or wrong without having to suffer irritants such as uncertainty or thinking. Got a question about what to do or not to do? No problem—just look in “God’s word” and, perhaps with a little clarification from your friendly neighborhood preacher-man (and it was always a man in those days), you’d have the unarguably right answer. It didn’t even have to make sense; you just had to believe. That’s called “faith”. It’s a no-brainer!

But having been cajoled into more or less accepting that the Bible was written by God and was therefore absolutely inerrant (hey, remember, I was just a naïve kid), I was still concerned about what distortions and mistakes may have crept in through the process of translating it from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. The preachers responded that King James and his team of translators had prayed for and received God’s guidance, so every jot and tittle of the King James translation was perfectly, divinely authoritative.

I distinctly remember my thought process that night because it stands as the clearest example ever of my kidding myself. A little voice in my head was saying something like “That’s ridiculous! There’s no good reason to accept the absolute perfection of the King James translation; it’s just wishful thinking.” If only I had listened to that wise voice! Instead, I gave in to social pressure and my emotional need for structure and certainty (however phony). I pushed my inner voice of wisdom down into the shadows, shutting it up so I could follow my feelings instead of my reasoning mind. I was at a transitional juncture where I could have freed myself entirely from religious superstition. But instead I accepted Jesus as my savior that night, ushering in several more years of being mired in an antirational, misogynistic, imperialistic, homophobic, prudish, repressive, shame-based, authoritarian belief system that guilt-tripped, threatened, stunted, and defrauded me.

Thank heathen I left theism behind decades ago! I’ve never regretted that, and I recommend it to one and all. Rejoice--there is life after God! And I learned well the hard-earned lesson about how we can fool ourselves into accepting the silliest and most destructive beliefs when we let emotion or social pressure overrule reason.

About Dixon: I'm a hopeful monster, committed to laughter, love, and the Golden Rule. I see reason, applied with empathy, as the most important key to making a better world. I'm a lazy slob and a weirdo. I love cats, kids, quilts, fossils, tornadoes, comic books, unusual music, and too much else to mention. I’m a former conservative Christian, then New Ager, now a rationalist, skeptic and atheist. Lately I’m a Workshopping Editor at the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form (That’s right!), and my humor is getting published in the Washington Post and Fantasy and Science Fiction. I’m job-hunting too, mostly in the Human Services realm. Passions: Too many -- Reading, writing, critical thinking, public speaking, human rights, sex and sensuality, arts and sciences, nature. Oh, and ladies, I’m single ;^D

[Valley Oak]

Outstanding piece, Dixon!

Thank you.

[Shandi]

Edward, Thanks for bringing Dixon's 3 yr. old post back to life. It's one worth repeating!!!

Outstanding piece, Dixon!

Thank you.

[Shandi]

I see this "addiction" to religion as part of the larger problem in the world, which is an unwillingness to be responsible or "response-able" for our actions. As a previous Catholic, I learned that even if I lived a sinful life, that could all be forgiven through confession in my dying hour. That's a pretty good guarantee of a potential reward for living irresponsibly and causing harm to others through our actions.

If we do something that results in harm to ourselves or another, it's very common to look for blame outside of ourselves. It may come from fear of consequences, and starts very early on when we do something and put the blame on a sibling or friend. When I was raising my 2 sons (without religion) I taught them that if they told the truth about their actions, they would not be punished. I also told them that I had a secret way of knowing if they were telling the truth, by looking at their eyes. (That was way before the science of "micro-expression" was mainstream.)

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was teaching them to be personally accountable for their choices. I also told them that I trusted them to make wise choices, which instilled self-confidence.

If we don't have self-confidence or are fearful of consequences for our actions, we're more likely to try to blame something or someone outside of ourselves. This brings up another current topic with the BILLION RISING dance. People (mostly women) who lack self confidence or are fearful of consequences may stay in an abusive relationship. I think that BILLION RISING is more about personal empowerment, than stopping the perpetrators of violence. It supports victims in saying "ENOUGH!" I just hope that these newly empowered people don't fall into the arms of religion, after leaving the arms of their abuser.

by Dixon Wragg
WaccoBB.net

When I was fifteen, my mom gathered us kids around the table for a momentous announcement. At that point we had been Mormons for five years (Mom and the kids, that is—Dad wasn’t a churchgoer). ...