The Long Nightmare

December 3, 2007

Hi there. Wild Man out of Las Vegas, NV, here! That's right, Sin City itself, the Neon Jungle, Sodom on the Sand, and so on. Yes, people actually do live here; yes I'm one of them, and no, I don't work in a casino. Nor am I a gambling addict, a hustler, scamster, huckster, or whoremonger. And remember kids, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas... but if you live here, so do you.

Before I continue, I want to lay out a few things upfront:

- I'm torn. I'm deeply, terribly torn. I can't call myself a Christian with a straight-face, but I can't call myself an ex-Christian either.

- Most of you will not believe what I am about to say, because even within the Pentecostal church, me and my crew were considered bat-shit crazy. You might emphatically state that I and the others are in need of medication, possibly institutionalization... and you couldn't be blamed for thinking such. Nor could the typical active participant in the Assemblies of God denomination, believe it or not. Yes, it's that bad.

- Today was one of the worst days of my entire life. I am reeling from the shock. I don't know if tomorrow will be any better, so go easy on me please.

- Excuse the extreme length. There is a lot to say. This sounds egotistical up front, but I believe I can say that my story is somewhat 'exceptional.' Yeah, you could say that....

- I'm not making anything up. I'm not a troll. I'm not trying to pull any kind of artful psychological scam here. As ludicrous and incredible as it will all sound (even by Pentecostal/Charismatic standards; yes, it's that bad) this is my story. My actual honest-to-goodness experiences. And to a great (but not full) extent, y'all might be some of the few people alive capable of understanding, even if virtually none of you will believe the craziest part of it.

So without further adieu, here it goes:

You can call me Wild Man. I just turned 29. I was born and raised in Los Angeles County, CA; I've lived in Vegas for 2.5 years now. No, I did not move to Vegas to get away from God. Not everyone moves here for 'sinful' reasons, you know. Before I launch into my story, the bottom line is this: I wish it wasn't true. I wish I could come to know the tranquility of apathetic agnosticism and just stop giving a shit once and for all. But as will become alarmingly clear, there has been more holding me back than most of you might be able to imagine. I've read a few of these testimonies and part of me has been wishing that it could have played out like that for me. I can't at all rightly say it was easier for the rest of you than it would be for me, but I can say that so far it seems that the grip is much stronger on me. My story would have played out very similarly to the typical story in here, beginning back in the year 2000 or so. That is, were it not for what I am about to share. Bear with me.

I must have been born under a bad sign. My due date was Halloween of 1978, but I missed it by a few days. Basically, it became clear shortly after I was born that I was sub-normal. Retarded, even. I was formally diagnosed with autism at some point prior to or during the age of 7. I don't think I said my first words until I was 4. I wasn't fully potty-trained until I was 7. I remember going to a special school for 'tards until the 1st or 2nd grade when I was placed into special education at a normal elementary school.

By the 4th grade I was mainstreamed into a normal classroom. After a rocky start I started doing well, and then I started doing exceptionally. Pretty soon it turned out that I was actually some kind of genius. There started being talk of my becoming a scientist via a Top 10 research university. The possibilities seemed endless. However, there were early signs that the future was to be darker than anyone would have anticipated, including myself.

As far as early childhood went, I remember being a happy kid full of goodwill, who had a profound and naive faith in the essential goodness of all people, and in existence itself. Well, about fifty schoolyard beatings later, and after being fucked with in general by my peers, I began to become very bitter and angry. The special school I went to was located on the back 40 acres of a normal elementary school and we shared recess space with the normal kids. Whose fucking idea was that, anyways? Some high-ranking bureaucrats should have lost their jobs over that brilliant plan. By the time I was 7 or 8 I was drawing pictures of hated enemies - actual persons or generalized representations - being dismembered, impaled, and tortured. They started to keep a close eye on me, as if I wasn't already under the microscope. But they began to worry.

Fighting became an everyday thing. First, this 'retard' learned to fight back against the bullies. Then I eventually dabbled in bullying myself, taking pleasure in cruelty and brutality. I started to run with the wrong crowd; kids whose fathers were in and out of prison and who had serious high-level criminal connections. The kinds of kids who follow in their fathers' footsteps. Well, when I started junior high, I went from Golden Boy to Royal Class Fuck-Up. Two years later nobody expected me to be able to hold down a job at Jiffy Lube when the time came for me to leave school. I was socially promoted into the 9th grade, but was placed in a segregated program for severe cases. Convicted felons, teenagers diagnosed with schizophrenia, sex offenders, suicidal types, heavy drug users, and even retarded kids were all placed into one cage. As you can imagine, it would seem as if the victims were thrown in with the victimizers. Fortunately I was on the borderline between the two: tough enough to be respected by the sociopaths but not vicious enough to fully become one of them.

I remember thriving on violence, even just the thought of it. I was fond of smashing inanimate objects with my fist. Once, while still in the 8th grade, I punched in a payphone and broke it. I probably broke knuckles and fingers a few different times and didn't fully realize it.

Shortly after I entered high school, life suddenly got much worse than it already was. I had a severe psychological breakdown, and was diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia. It was soon revealed to me that I had inherited the 'Family Curse.' My grandpa had had it (more on that later), his mother had had it, and many others. It had skipped my dad's entire generation and somehow fallen onto me, at the extraordinarily young age of 13.

Well, it was a roller coaster ride for the next few years. I saw the movie 'Fire in the Sky', an allegedly true story about alien abduction, and for the next several years I lived in as much daily fear of alien abduction as the typical Christian zealot does of pissing off their God. I became obsessed with death metal bands such as Cannibal Corpse, and became preoccupied with themes of gore, rape, murder, butchery, and so on. My dad was a police officer, a high-ranking one with a great deal of pull, and he would threaten to take me to the morgue and show me the real thing. "We'll see how fucking quick you change your tune" he bellowed. I would act horrified and remorseful so as to stave off a beating (he virtually never struck me, by the way), but I secretly wanted him to follow through. I could go into the nitty-gritty details of what schizophrenia was like, not that I remember much, but the alien abduction thing is the most salient example that I can recall. I don't remember having visual hallucinations, or hearing voices that were more than intrusive thoughts. Mainly just delusions, paranoia, lack of affect, and so on.

I remember that the innocent, sweet-natured kid had never fully died. Just buried under many layers of profound negativity and madness.

By the spring of 1994 when I was 15, I had gone too far. They were going to commit me. For an indefinite period; possibly for years. But then I skated on a technicality and my induction was going to be postponed for a while. It's complicated, and I don't feel like going into the whole story; I've got enough to tell. Two weeks after the date I was supposed to be put inside, a close friend in that segregated high school class insisted that I go to her church youth group with her. She wasn't a Christian and neither was the majority of everyone there. It was a peculiar phenomenon that most youth pastors might only dream of: an outreach-oriented youth group well into the triple digits, at a small church whose attendence was smaller than its youth group, and where most the kids were the baddest of the bad. Gangbangers, heavy drug users, white power skinhead types, occultist (maybe?) goth/metalhead types, gutter punks... you name it, they were all there. The night I showed up I was heavily sedated on anti-psychotic drugs and must have been walking like the Frankenstein monster. My appearance in terms of hair, attire, was non-descript, but even still, a hundred or so of them were milling around outside smoking cigarettes and talking trash, and when I walked up they went kind of silent. Then I kept walking, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea. Either I looked pretty freakin' scary, or my reputation (as a psychopath who had a bunch of bodies buried under his house or something) preceded me.

I got saved that night. I figured I had nothing left to lose. One of the youth leaders who later became a mentor to me, who had never seen me before that night, said "when you walked up to talk to [the youth pastor], you walked like Frankenstein and your eyes were cold and dead, like a shark's. But after you prayed with him, you walked back the way you came, and there was a spark in your eyes and a spring in your step." I don't really know why I went up. It was kind of a fluke. But somehow I ended up talking to the guy and he asked me if I wanted to become a Christian, and I said "yeah."

I think the main influence behind that was a teacher's aide at my segregated high school program. She was a milk-and-cookies Christian type, very bland, in her mid twenties though she could've been 40. Once I found out, I fucked with her incessantly. It was one case where a Christian was getting heaps of abuse from a non-Christian out in the world. I would blather on about death metal-type blood and gore, satanism, how I wanted to be a mass murderer someday, how I might kill her while I was at it, how I was going to go and burn her church down, and so on and so forth. Maybe I was half-sincere, or more than that possibly, but the point was to freak her out and make her utterly despise me in spite of what her wimpy religion told her to do.

But I just couldn't get her to hate me. She'd snap sometimes, understandably so, but I just couldn't get her to hate me. In fact, she was the most compassionate person in the room the day that I had my worst mental meltdown ever. Shit, she even broke down crying. I would have thought that she should have sat back and taken immense personal satisfaction at watching me disintegrate, though of course she would have played it cool so as not to let on. It made a profound impression on me. If anyone ever lived up to the 'witness with your life, not with words' thing, it was her.

Well, anyways, very suddenly I was a Christian, though I really had no idea what that meant. If they had explained it that night, I would have been too sedated to catch it. I called home and announced it to my parents. "I'm saved! I just got saved!!" I shouted with uncharacteristic glee; "I'm a Christian now!!" I was astonished when they failed to match my glee. They were instead disconcerted and shocked. When I got home, the shit hit the fan. My dad threatened to prevent me from going there. He said he would use all his power as a policeman to check that church out to make sure it wasn't some kind of scam, and that if he thought for one moment that it was, he would forbid me from ever going again. My mom was beside herself. I didn't get it. I didn't understand the hostility. Somehow I was full of pure, unadulterated joy for the first time since I was a small child, and they were treating me as if I had just joined a gang.

The truth would come out a little while later. That's when I found out the truth about my grandfather, from whom I had inherited the family curse. He got saved when his youngest kids (my dad and his sister) were 8 or 9 or so, into the Church of the Nazarene. Shortly thereafter he lapsed into schizophrenia. This church took advantage of him and he gave them all the family's money. The kids were literally starving because of that. Literally... like African kids on some television commercial where 'sensitive viewers' are warned at the outset. The family sunk into dire poverty... about as dire as you could get in 1950s central California. The old man getting committed was actually a boon because then there was nobody to stop my grandmother from going out and getting food stamps and applying for welfare so that the kids would have shoes... and not fucking starve.

I guess my pops was looking out for me. He didn't want some creepy church to do the same thing to me. Not that I had any money or anything, let alone a family to feed. But still.

Well, it took some time but eventually the old cop was put at ease. The folks seemed genuine, they seemed to genuinely care about me, and I was actually improving. He chalked it up to the positive social support. We (the church and I) chalked it up to God. Whatever the case, I was getting better at a remarkable rate and there wasn't much reason at all to believe that it was because of the meds. Even the psychiatrist was at a loss. He just figured I was a statistical anomaly and that the pharmaceutical company would be happy to have it skew their normal curve, no matter how minutely.

At any rate, my parents didn't raise me and my brother with any kind of religion. My mom was some kind of lapsed Catholic, but it really never came up. I don't think her parents really gave a shit at that point, either. My dad was something like an apatheist. Some kind of god was out there, maybe, but whatever. I remember when I was 9 they tried to get me to go to some vacation bible school at some benignly liberal Methodist church, and I adamantly refused. Maybe they thought it would make me less rotten, maybe my mom wanted me out of her hair for the summer... I don't know. That was virtually the only time they tried to push religion on me.

Despite my conversion, I had no idea what Christianity entailed. To me, Jesus was some longhaired hippie dude in a white robe and sandals from 2,000 years ago who had magic powers, and somehow his whole schtick got turned into the world's biggest and most pervasive religion by people who came after him. I had been saved in April of 1994. It wasn't until July, two weeks before my water baptism, that the doctrines began to sink in. I hadn't realized what I had gotten myself into. I remember at a Bible study on Mark, deliberating intensely about all that I had just been taught. "Should I continue, or should I leave now? This is some pretty heavy stuff." Well, I took my leap of faith and I decided to believe it. Suddenly I felt an onrush of peace, as if God was patting me on the back. So that was it right there, my actual conversion. I was in.

The only notable thing that happened before turning 17 was that shortly after I turned 16 I was at a revival service at a youth retreat, and I went up for prayer, to get healed. "This young man does not belong in an institution!" the preacher shouted out. I almost collapsed from the weight of all the hands. Suddenly, it felt like a bunch of things (no words to describe it) flew out of my head and away from me. I felt 100 pounds lighter when it was all over. "It's gone! It's gone!!" I shouted, "I'm healed! I'm healed!!" My youth pastor told me that he saw several 'ghosts' fly out of my head, out the window, and into the snow. *Ssssssssss* Just like that. Whatever the hell he saw, the man would never lie to me. Afterwards, as far as anyone could tell, there were no overt signs that anything was still going on. Still, I continued taking my meds until I was 21 and then I quit taking them (I was scared shitless of my parents finding out); haven't been on them since. Despite what you're about to read, I'm pretty sure I never relapsed. Even in spite of everything. So there's that.

But then there's this.

Two years later when I was 17, my mom found religion. I can best describe it as some benign 20th century 'pastiche' religion from Japan that cherry-picked all the warm and fuzzy parts of the great Western and Eastern religions, except that the founder (who died some time in the 1980s) was allegedly the Second Coming, the Jewish messiah, the next Buddha, the 12th Imam, etc. etc. et al., all rolled into one. Needless to say, I wasn't cool with it at all. At least if she was just some indifferent lapsed Catholic, there may have been some space for me to present something new and radical (the Gospel). Of course, I had failed at that miserably thus far. When she converted to this religion, called Sukyo Mahikari, it was like the deal was sealed: she was lost. I was also alarmed that she started trying to indocrinate my little brother, who was all of 9 or 10 years old at the time.

That's when things began to get real strange around the house. I mentioned in the beginning that my story was somehow extraordinary, even for this forum. Well, as y'all were reading the above acount up until this point, y'all were probably rolling your eyes. Well, maybe some of you won't be rolling your eyes quite so much at what comes next.

It all started when she ceremoniously dedicated an altar inside her house. Some kind of portal was opened that night, and very bad things entered the house and took up residence.

I had heard demon-talk before and figured it was bullshit. A few months before the night of the ceremony, some kids from a Vineyard church (notoriously kooky, even within Christian circles, though each Vineyard is different, to be fair) started showing up to the youth group, and along with their floppy-fish tongue-flapping 'revival' antics came a whole lot of talk about spiritual warfare. I wrote it off as the fantasies of overactive imaginations. Even the youth pastor stepped in and said as much, to prevent such notions from spreading. Sure, the devil and his demons were out there somewhere, actively trying to fuck with us, but surely their activities were much more subtle and subdued.

My image of the devil was that of a smoothtalking aristocratic cad who resided in an ivory tower: some cultured English gentleman with Ox-Cam credentials, with pipe and smoking jacket sitting in an overstuffed chair in his study, who tried to convince you to the contrary of the Gospel with subtle arguments that were presented with utmost consideration for the listener, unlike the condescending vitriol and arrogant elitism of atheist polemicists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Despite my previous fascination with satanic blood-and-gore extreme heavy metal, the notion of a gothic horror movie Dungeons & Dragons Satan, complete with legions of undead flesh-eating zombie demon reptiles, who was out to rape the pope up the ass with his 15-inch steel cock, heated to a cherry red and bristling with barbed spikes... *deep breath* was just silly to me. Sure, the devil was nothing to sneeze at, but surely these kids had seen too many horror movies? Surely they weren't too far removed from kids who took their Slayer albums way too seriously?

Okay, so what? Many of you also fell for the 'spiritual warfare' thing. Well, I didn't seek it out. It sought me out.

I don't want to build some chronological narrative of all that has happened to me. But for nearly ten years, the following things (and more) happened to me several nights a week. Some years were way worse than others, but there was never any peace. I had every reason to believe that these were demons. I had been variously:

- Raped in the ass.

- Thrown around the room, bounced off the walls and ceiling, dropped from ten feet onto my bed.

- Beaten, choked, scratched, clawed, grappled.

- Tangled up in my bedsheets and dragged or tossed around.

- The list goes on and on and on and on.

It wasn't sleep paralysis. I actually was trying to find scientific explanations for it, and I was unable to. I of course wasn't going to tell any psychiatrist: I didn't want to be institutionalized or put back on heavy meds. (They were steadily decreasing the dosage because of how much I'd been improving. I was pretty much out of the woods by the time this shit started happening.) I tried to tell myself it was an overactive imagination, but that didn't make it stop. I even used techniques they teach to schizophrenics to stop hallucinations in their tracks, and that didn't do shit.

The freaky thing was, my experiences were 'empirical' to me. On one particularly bad night, a demon fell from the ceiling and began to wrestle me. I wrestled with the thing for 45 minutes. Its skin was hot but it had no pulse or breath. It was like a corpse with a full body fever. As it was choking me out, I dug my fingernails into its arm. I pierced its skin and dug around in the musculature of its forearm, even touching bone. I was about to take a bite out of its arm, but thought better of it. Even in the thick of such Heironymus Bosch-style horror, I was playing the field researcher. When it finally left, my room was full of green fog. I sat up in my bed (I'd not snapped out of any kind of trance or waking dream; sometimes I would, sometimes I wouldn't, with those kinds of things) and played with the green fog, and tripped as it swirled around my fingers. I got up and walked across the entire house to get a glass of milk. When I came back, the green fog was still there.

That's just one example among many several where it was just too 'real' to rationalize. If I was hallucinating, they must have been consulting George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic because it was one hell of an internal mind-freak. Of course, the jury's still out, otherwise I might not be here.

Well, I don't think I was having some kind of relapse. Concurrent symptoms were zero, and nobody suspected a thing: I was certainly being closely monitored by the mental health authorities and would be for years to come, that's for sure. I know I didn't bring it on myself. I had dismissed such things as silliness... until it started happening to me, pretty much when that altar was dedicated. The one thing that cemented this was about three or four years ago when my brother came forward and told me that the same exact shit had been happening to him for all those years, and that it all started when my mom brought that altar into the house, just like it had for me. We spent hours relating our experiences, and everything matched.

I had converted my brother to Christ a couple of years after the altar came in. One night he came into my room and said that he didn't want to die... basically, annihilation, where your existence is snuffed out. I told him the Gospel and he accepted it. Boy, my parents weren't happy at all. They didn't go ape-shit like they did when I myself converted, but they tried to intervene and dampen it as much as they could, and my mom redoubled her efforts at trying to get my brother into her thing. Well, he knew it was her thing that brought all that shit into our house, even before he knew the slightest thing about the Gospel, so he was not interested at all.

At any rate, we did not find out about each others' mutual nightmare until eight or nine years after it began... when the altar was brought in.

Correlation, coincidences, add it up add it up...

...you want to know what kept me in the church? That. Church started getting really lame by the time I was 18 or 19, and as I went from being an 18 year old with an 8th grade education to being a 23 year old with a college education... and then a 26 year old with a Master's degree (now I'm halfway through my PhD, with plans to be an ivory tower dweller). Well, the closer I've been getting to that ivory tower (whose threshold I now stand at), the less sense it's been making. It's very hard to be a truly educated person and stay in the fundamentalist church. The cognitive dissonance is immense. It's enough to make your skull crack apart. Even before I had any fancy grad degrees, I was ready to say "fuck it" back in the year 2000.

What kept me from doing it? I was literally about to "de-convert" in one single moment. But then the tactile memory of digging into that demon's arm as I wrestled futilely with it, and the sight of that ball of light that came through and kicked its ass out of my room when I screamed "Jesus!!! Jesus!!!!", and the green fog that I sat up in my bed twirling my fingers through, made me decide to stay in the fold. And when I did, I felt the same divine back-patting that I did back in July of 1994 when I decided to stick around in spite of the hard-to-swallow doctrines that I saw in the Gospel of Mark.

You should know that I am sharing only a tiny percent of my "spiritual experiences" here, due to space. It could fill a book. Let's just say that in addition to all that frightful spiritual activity, there's been a long string of visions, prophecies, dreams that weren't just dreams, divine insights and discernments that ended up panning out, and all kinds of couldn't-possibly-be-coincidences. Somehow, I thought, God allowed me to see all that stuff. He had something planned with me and the other bastards unlucky enough to be swept up in all this. Or something.

Well, it's the tail-end of 2007 now. How did I get to this point, where I'm tapping away an account on this very forum?

Three things:

1. Bitter disappointment as I waited for a woman. I waited and waited and waited. At age 18 I convinced myself that God would bring me a Christian wife by the time I was 24. 24 came and went. Then I turned 28. And I was still a fucking virgin. And I had never had an actual girlfriend inside or outside the church. In church, available women were either A) non-existent (which was the case the vast majority of the time; every church I found myself in tended to be a fucking sausage fest); bitchy and unattainable; C) way too many issues (I dated my former senior pastor's daughter once, and it was one of the worst mistakes I ever made); D) vapid, uninteresting, and otherwise a bad fit for someone with a 150-something IQ who's bound for the ivory tower. Apparently, I'd become one of those high-falutin' intellectuals that I so resented back when I was 19 years old with an 8th grade education, unwavering faith in Jesus, and an underclass future. Although I must say that to this day I dislike any pretence of elitism, hence my disdain for the rhetorical style of Dawkins and Harris, despite their words often resonating with me. Hell, I even sniff it in here and it bugs me, even if it's understandable. But I digress.

I had passed up so many marvelous opportunities with incredible women outside of the church... all because they were non-Christian.

Now I have a real girlfriend. She's an agnostic, just like most good Europeans are. She's from Europe - Italy, at that - where Bible Belt-style fundamentalist Christianity is as rare as Ba'hai is here. (Though the Catholic church is another matter, though you know how weird those Italians are about such things.) She's at least as pure and true as any girl that I've ever seen set foot in a church, and I love her. For the first time ever, I'm in love, and it's not unrequited. I had to go outside the confines of the church to get the one thing my heart desired above all else... the one thing I hoped God would give me, the one thing everyone was telling me I wasn't yet good enough for, that God hadn't deemed it the right time yet, that He had someone out there somewhere but I wasn't ready yet, and so on and so forth.

I'm a sociologist. That's my field. And I know a systematic libido-squelching sausage fest when I see one! Don't try and tell me otherwise!!

I'm so afraid that God's going to reveal Himself on any day and declare that I have to dump the first girl I've ever truly been in love with. Also, I know that if I go back, I'd probably lose her if I tried to keep her. I doubt she'd tolerate the "no sex before marriage" bit, or the idea of competing over the souls and intellects of any children we might have, or me figuring her and any unsaved children of ours and just about everyone else we love are basically fucked.

She has told me "don't ever think that I stand between you and God" and "why can't you find a middle way? Why does it have to be one (fundie) or the other (agnosticism)?" Well, I have yet to tell her all that I'm telling y'all in here. Shit, how can you tell someone about shit like that? I'm already certain the majority of you will tell me to seek psychiatric help immediately.

2. Same thing as with most of you here: it just doesn't add up. You don't need me to rehash it all; y'all already know. Well, just today, on the "Fear of Hell" thread in the FAQ, I came across that link somebody posted about Universalism. And, all of a sudden, the whole "hell doctrine" fell off of me like a lead weight. And for a moment I thought "here it is! The answer!" But then I stopped to think again: if this is God's church, how could universalism have become such a minority tradition with no real sway in world Christendom?

There were other times where I sought out sugar-coated versions of hell. I read C.S. Lewis' "the Great Divorce" and took it to heart. I read up in other controverseys about hell, many of which are touched on in the Universalist argument.

Okay, so if there's no hell... then what's the point? Jesus came, saved everyone... whoopty-doo. Liberal Christianity thought that the churches would get filled back up with baby boomers if they softened everything up, and their churches began to empty at an even faster rate. Church is boring, and all its rules - even if they're softened and humanized and cherry picked and given a warm happy smiley face - are a real cramp. Why bother going with the program if there's no consequences for doing your own thing instead? "The fear is what keeps us here." Frankly, I disdain liberal christianity, just as much as I did when I was an out-and-out unquestioning fundie. It strikes me as diluted and weak, as ineffectual and utterly superfluous, even now. Even Sam Harris seems to have more respect for fundies than for liberal Christians.

And then there's the actual history of things. Once I worked as an assistant for a visiting professor from Heidelberg, which is the oldest university in Germany. I once asked him if there were any buildings dating back to the 14th century, when it was built. No, because the whole place got burnt to the ground during the 30 Year War. That was one piece of info that made me stop and go "shiiiiiiiiiit...."

3. If the world is supposed to be saved, then why is the church doing such a shitty job? Why aren't amazing things happening in the streets on a massive basis, like in the Book of Acts? Europe is now less Christian than China is, fundamentalism is largely confined to certain Red States in this country, I'm not altogether sure what's going on in the 3rd World but it doesn't seem to be making regular headlines at any major news agencies, and so on. It seems like the biggest Quixotic endeavour of all time.

There was one more thing. I used to live in fear that God was going to tell me that I couldn't go into academia (my dream job) and that instead I was to be a good and faithful insurance salesmen. Or a miserable bum living on the street. Or a missionary to the Sudan. Not to dog on insurance salesmen or bums or anything. Then one day my fears were confirmed; I confessed this to a pastor friend and he said "actually, [Wild Man], God told me just that, that you're not meant to be an academic, and I've been waiting for the chance to tell you." Aw, shit!! From then on, I quit praying, because I didn't want God to tell me what I really didn't want to hear.

So there you have it.

I talked for hours the other night with a friend about this. I told her everything, even the scary demon shit. Surprisingly, she believes me, because she's encountered scary ghosts in houses she's lived at, even though she's otherwise agnostic. It's hard to disbelieve in shit when it's right up in your face, though you can try to rationalize the shit out of it afterwards. She says she sees that it is tormenting me. It is. It's like a long nightmare that never ends. I wish I could have peace of mind and live a normal sane life, like y'all are, without all this shit in it. Even when I was all up into the Spiritual Warfare thing, trying my damndest to bite back, and with 100% faith, it was not what I wanted. I didn't want to go on to be some kind of professional exorcist or something... that's one spiritual gift that isn't any kind of gift, to be frank. It's one of those things, I guess, where "somebody has to do it", and that somebody is one unlucky motherfucker.

I don't know whether I'm insane or whether I'm supposed to be like Jonah. Jonah, that poor bastard, was ordered to do exactly what he didn't want to do. He only wanted to live an ordinary peaceful life as a good Hebrew kid. And despite what he wanted, he gets tossed off the ship and swallowed by a whale, and the whale barfs him back up onto the beach so that he can footslog it the rest of the way to Nineveh to face the music.

I had a dream last night that scared the shit out of me. It was one of those 'dream that isn't just a dream' type deals. Maybe God was delivering a clear message, or maybe my scared brain was playing the part of the divine trying to tell me something. Well, I Googled "ex Christian" as I'd seen the term somewhere before, and here I am.

I feel like I have to go home and help my brother, because he's still stuck in that house. He's been trying to move out and his efforts continue to be frustrated. I'm also scared that they - if 'they' are what they seem to be - might harm my girlfriend. I'm no longer a virgin, and they always said sex was a spiritual union, so whatever hold these things have on me... and I'm no longer under God's protection because I haven't prayed word one since July of this year, and she certainly isn't... if all this is true... shit.

Since I moved to Las Vegas, visitations have become far, far, far, far more rare, but they still happen very sporadically. The less Christian and the more skeptical I've become (the downward slide began a year or so after I moved here, back in mid 2006 or so) the less frequent the attacks have been, but they still happen now and then. I know my family's house remains the hell that I left it. The shit hits the fan every time I go back, despite my sincerely wishing that it won't. It's hard to disbelieve in things that keep on happening, despite you sincerely wishing that they wouldn't.

But like I said, the jury's still out.

Maybe me and everyone else who has lived through this, who's had the same apparent spiritual gifts, and who has fought the same alleged spiritual fights, are all fucking delusional and crazy and in need of heavy medication to make it stop. Maybe the best favor science could ever do us would be to invent time travel and then send us all back to the 14th century. Or maybe there is a vast spiritual world out there but Christians have got it all wrong, and that somehow the study of the paranormal could be scientized and legitimized even though methodology would be kind of tricky (dontcha think?). Or maybe, just maybe, we elect few who were clued into just how dreadfully vast and real the entire Christian cosmology (particularly the demonology side of it) really is (lucky us, eh?), have been right all along? I don't know. The jury is out.

What would you do if you had experienced all the same shit I allegedly have?

How would it be for you if you were where I am at right now?

What the hell is going on here!?

And if you find this to be upsetting, how the fuck do you think I feel!?

I look forward to your replies. Maybe one of you has an answer that will hit a home run for me. Or maybe this won't help at all. But here I am.

Again, I'm not a troll or some kind of Christian trickster trying to pull some elaborate, twisted hoax. I'm not making any of this up for shits and giggles. Everything I've laid out is the truth as I understand it. Please understand as best you can, but by all means, tell me what you believe to be true.

Give it to me straight.

December 3, 2007

I get paid by the hour!

December 3, 2007

I don't mean this in a cruel way at all, but Christianity makes our minds work overtime trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. (Cognitive dissonance.) In short, it makes us all nuts to an extent. I see it here on this site all the time and of course I cannot say my mind was not/is not still affected by Christianity. The thoughts and concerns you mention become nothingness after a while and the wrestling just stops. Not that you become brain dead. We don't have to prove or answer to anyone but ourselves and we are wrestled by our minds as we try to make sense of nonsense. It takes a strong person to live with us while we are going through our deconversion. It is very painful and disorienting. Try to stop thinking for a while. I mean that. Just stop every time your mind begins racing and counter an irrational thought with a rational one. That should keep you busy for a while. Ranting here is relatively safe. Not everyone can take the time to wade through the stuff you have on your mind. But it is a good beginning for you to get it out of your system. This site has been a lifesaver for me. Stay in school if you are able. Lighten it up a little when you can! Cheers.

December 3, 2007

Hello wild Man and welcome to the forums.

I think if you get few reply's it is more because you seem to be in a very fragile state and this isn't really the type of story for an aggressive "prove it was demons" that would normally come about here. Anyone reading your story can plainly see you are suffering and are in torment. .

I by all means don't wish to minimize the hell and terror you've encountered and I know that it's as real to you as anyone you know. I honestly don't know enough about the illness to give any advice but from the sounds of it, it sounds like your greatest fears are manifesting as attacking you, (or had attacked you). The fact that your mother chose a different path you saw this as welcoming Satan. The clutches of dogma especially in the AOG (which is the cult I came from also) is so fear orientated and causes emotional frenzy's. I believe our environments help shape some of our illnesses if you will.

I was diagnosed with sever panic disorder. Fears of death, doom and destruction were always at the forefront of my mind at one time. Fear controlled me, since letting go of dogma and looking for the truth many of these fears as left and as it stands I now control my fear it doesn't control me.

The AOG is one of the more dangerous cults. They love to talk about demons, spiritual warfare, death, destruction and a host of other terrorizing mindsets. Maybe somewhere deep in your subconscious it was something you've always been a fan of, by reading your mindset before hand I find this to be the case. It's a mindset you're naturally drawn to.

I believe the demons were real for you, but I don't believe demons to exist. I think it was brought on by extreme emotional trauma of your mother (from your perspective) dabbling in 'dark arts'. The AOG of rooted in extremism and emotional hysteria, both with Fear and with love of god (Slain in the spirit, tongues, the holy giggles and so forth) These are all extreme emotional states brought on by group think, it's a classic mob mentality. The people are swayed extremely easy once they get them in the right state of mind. No doubt these things are real for the people that experience them but it is emotionalism never the less. Same things happen in Voodoo verbatim, they call it trances instead of slain in the spirit but it is the same.

You are struggling it seems between what you feel and what you think. The two are polar opposite of night and day, it's enough to drive anyone batshit. My fear and panic were the same thing. You are being controlled by fear and emotion instead of you controlling it. Everything you are feeling is going 100% against what reason and logic says. Which make you feel like you're going mad. The what if's and might be's are eating you alive.

Also, the self abuse that comes with the mindset with the AOG is shown throughout your post. You want to live your life and be happy but you are allowing others and maybe even yourself to dictate your life thru emotionalism. Thru some false sense that god doesn't want it for you. And your sense of feeling worthless (like you're taught to think) is coming up that you don't deserve to be happy. Hence you're self destructive by having the mindset that you aren't able to and you shatter your own dreams but attribute this to god doing it. Self-loathing and self-abuse is another huge theme in the AOG. They believe everyone to be worthless, evil, vile beings and it is only the grace of god they are loved and saved. It isn't until you are outside of the mindset that you see it for what it is.

My mother cut papers for the church. I'm not talking about cut outs, I'm talking about hand stripping newspaper. The church (cult) believed this to be of god for some fucked up reason and kept bringing her papers to cut. I wont go into the whole thing here now but as much as my sister and I tried to get her away from the cult, she felt we were agents of Satan trying to get her off her path of what 'god wanted'. Floor to ceiling filled with papers wasting her life cutting them. We begged, pleaded, fought, got pissed off, threatened and all the other last resort attempts to get her to stop. She had to hit rock bottom before we were able to finely get her the help she needed. Today she is nothing like that person and is back to the mother I know and love. These people once they have you emotionally will force you to do anything at their whim. You're an emotional cripple right now I'm sad to say. I'm sorry if this seems like an outrageous statement but there it is. You don't have enough self-confidence and faith in yourself to make even the lightest choices in life. You have been conditioned to rely solely upon others and 'prayer'. Of course any prayer that goes against the majority is "not of god" and your listing to " false voices " maybe even "Satan himself is tricking you'. More manipulation tactics to keep you at bay and in line with the group think.

You're right in the advice, I would seek help. If your hearing voices no one else hears you are not Jonah or Abraham or Moses. Your a strong individual who has been mindfucked into his mental illness thru extreme emotional manipulation. You were told you were healed even though all the signs exist that you weren't. Believing that you are doesn't make that fact. No one wants to hear they need help, but if you seriously want a happy healthy life, you are the only one responsible for doing so. You are in control of your own fear and your own well being. It sounds like your a very bright guy, it seems like you were extremely taken advantage of and manipulated by evil emotional control freaks. I'm very sorry to read your heartbreaking story.

As far as where you stand with the new love of your life and god. Unfortunately none of us will have a magic answer for you. This is going to have to be a road you travel yourself. You will have to depend on rationality and reason to find god. I was ticked by my emotions as well, crippled in fact at one time with fear. Of course I will always be high-strung but at least I can say I'm better now that I got help. The first step is knowing you need it and getting it. A thousand people can tell you something, until you see it yourself you will keep going down the self-destructive path your on. You use self-destruction as some warped sense of punishment from god. You just give the self destruction another name (the will of god) instead of coming outright and saying what it is. (Such as the girl, the job and so forth).

I really hope you find peace of mind and happiness and sorry I don't have any better words of wisdom to offer you.

December 3, 2007

"a systematic libido-squelching sausage fest"

Dude, that's a great one!

In all seriousness I did read your entire post and agree with (Japedo - I think), paraphrasing his thoughts that after the "dust settles" you will find the serenity you deserve from the trip. It gets easier, not every day, but it slowly does.

xtianity is the ultimate mind-fuck. And some churches/church leaders are better at it than others (read some use lube and some don't). If it wasn't such a "ride" how else could they keep as many people f-ed up for as long as they have.

Peace to you and your Girl

BTW - If you do ever get around to "publishing" more of your story, I'd be interested in reading.

BE cool,

Frank

December 3, 2007

In all seriousness I did read your entire post and agree with (Japedo - I think), paraphrasing his thoughts that after the "dust settles"

FYI, Japedo is a woman. Just figured you'd like to know.

December 3, 2007

I thought your story was really interesting. I spent my whole life up until age 19 in the AoG. Your story with demons and such is one of the more extreme I've heard, but I have definitely heard people talk about having experiences like that. The AoG is...insane. I had a lot of problems with hearing voices when I was a teenager in the AoG. A voice that I assumed to be "God" regularly gave me commands...normal people wouldn't understand this, but I think you will. The voice would tell me shit like "Scream" "stop running, start running" "pray until 3am" and TONS of other stuff I don't even want to go into. It was hell. The voice would not stop, and I lived with a sense of constant guilt.

The AoG puts SOOO much emphasis on "listening to the voice of God" it's enough to screw anybody up. And I was very, very screwed up. Depression and anxiety run in my family, so I've always dealt with that, as young as 4th grade. Combine that with hearing voices and by the time I was in my first year of college, I was suicidal quite a bit.

What made everything better for me was:

1) Zoloft (an anti-depressant). It leveled out my emotions so I could be in control of myself.

2) losing my faith in God. For me, it took a year for my faith to completely dissolve, including a period when I "went back" for a short time.

For me, the psychotic episodes went away when I lost my faith. I no longer hear voices. I haven't been a Christian for 6 months. Every once in a while I feel irrationally guilty over something small, but that doesn't happen very often. In, my signature, you'll see a link to a book i wrote. There's a chapter called "Confessions of a former pew-jumper" that might help you in some way, if for no other reason than to know you're not alone.

You're asking good questions. I won't tell you how to answer them, because it's better if you come up with your own answers.

I see you read Dawkins and Harris! Yeah, they can be pretty cocky sometimes, but they have some great arguments for not believing.

Since you want it straight: Yes, I think it would be helpful to see a therapist of some sort. I've been seeing a counselor for 2 1/2 years and it helps me a lot. It helps me to have someone to bounce ideas off of and talk about stuff that's bothering me.

if you want, message me sometime. I like talking with people who have been through the mind-fucking that is the Assemblies of God.

December 3, 2007

In all seriousness I did read your entire post and agree with (Japedo - I think), paraphrasing his thoughts that after the "dust settles"

FYI, Japedo is a woman. Just figured you'd like to know.

DOH!

I would have known that If I'd done a cranial-rectal evacuation procedure before putting my keyboard/foot in my mouth.

Jackass - me.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll check that from now on.

Frank

December 3, 2007

Wild Man, since you're asking for straight feedback...

Two things stand out for me:

1. the "visons" started about the time when you reduced the meds

2. they are worse at your parents' house than at your own house.

I am no professional and can speak only out of my own experience. I wonder if perhaps you have a mental illness that is compounded by emotional stress that stems from being in the parental home. I am on meds for depression. I, too, have moved from the site of much emotional stress and abuse. When I travel through the geographical area where it happened (it is a fairly large area) it is as though the black thunder clouds of depression come rolling in over the hills to engulf me. So I know that location can have a direct impact.

Another point strikes me. You do not provide empirical evidence of the reality of the things you see and feel outside your own and your brother's experiences. It seems you experience these things only when you are in compromised mental situations such as half asleep. It does not seem that you are able to command them to appear at your own volition. To be able to make them appear upon demand would need to be part of an empirical investigation, in my opinion. I have no more than some undergrad and some elective MA courses in sociology so you would know far more about this than I do, but I think this is how the scientific method works. Also, the test would have to be repeatable by other specialists with the proper training.

However, what you and your brother experience seems to fit an established and tested phenomenon that Japedo described. From a sociological perspective, your mother's religion may have introduced a level of pathological fear into the home that is a palpable part of the atmosphere of your parents' home. Since you and your brother have the same genes, your responses to this fear may well be identical. The body is designed to cope with certain levels of fear for emergency situations. Being exposed to high levels of fear for extended periods of time, such as indefinitely, can wreak havoc with the body's defense mechanisms. Medication may be the only way to help the body cope. Better to use legal prescribed medication than resort to some other strategies humans have devised.

Regarding the girl you love, my guess is you will be better able to make mature life decisions about things like this if your mental condition is stable, not only during waking hours but also at night. Struggling with demons is not a good way to spend your nights. Maybe they exist and maybe they don't--I wouldn't know. However, they tend not to bother us if we have sound minds, get our sleep, and are otherwise in good health. A person with your struggles who is also studying at your level is a pretty strong and intelligent person. You already know that. What you want is feedback on what is going on. Well, that is what I think is going on.

My recommendation would be to find the most stressfree lifestyle you can, that is also intellectually challenging and emotionally embracing, and work with your doctors for optimal mental health. And by all means get your brother out of that hell hole, too. Okay, maybe he is old enough to get himself out if he understands what really is the root of the problem. And I could be wrong. This is based on my experience that being in a place that is strongly associated with severely abusive situations or people can trigger all kinds of inner reactions. Also, sometimes I am not aware that I am in a potentially (emotionally) dangerous situation but I become aware of symptoms in myself that are never present except in emotionally dangerous situations. When I take those symptoms seriously and treat the situation as dangerous, I tend to be okay. I am sharing this in case there is something in there that is helpful for others. If not, toss it out.

December 4, 2007

For me, the psychotic episodes went away when I lost my faith. I no longer hear voices. I haven't been a Christian for 6 months. Every once in a while I feel irrationally guilty over something small, but that doesn't happen very often.

Same with me. I had a constant voice torturing me everyday too. When I completely dumped faith it went away. Still have the irrational guilts/worries at times, but then they aren't always God-related.

So, Wild Man, while there probably aren't many of us who have gone through shit to the degree you have there are some of us who can relate at least to a minor extent. You aren't alone. You've been damaged and religion didn't help although it promises to do so. Jesus didn't help when he promises healing over and over again.

I don't know if dumping religion will bring peace to your life, but I believe it's a step in the right direction...

December 4, 2007

I grew up AOG. Lot's of stories. I just got registered tonight after a few tries.

I will send an intro- deconversion story as soon as I can. (it might be long.) It is late and I have a little one to wake up too.

can't wait to get to know you guys. I needed a board like this!!!

December 4, 2007

Thanks for all the replies thus far, y'all.

I've got a lot to say in reply, but I haven't the time right now. I'm going to be up all night working on stuff. Also, I've been enduring a great amount of emotional distress lately, so I should probably wait a few days before delving back into it. I will be back though, so don't forget about me.

December 4, 2007

Thanks for all the replies thus far, y'all.

I've got a lot to say in reply, but I haven't the time right now. I'm going to be up all night working on stuff. Also, I've been enduring a great amount of emotional distress lately, so I should probably wait a few days before delving back into it. I will be back though, so don't forget about me.

I won't forget about you. I look forward to what you have to say. Good luck on your work tonight.

December 5, 2007

Being grounded in reality is the correct first step. I advise some counseling and not what you may get at a church.

December 6, 2007

Man, I can only say, you're not alone!!!

I deconverted from Christianity 2 and a half years ago and I still sometimes have frightening "visions" of devils and stuff. What is the worst about it is that I feel I have two "beings" in me - a "spiritual" one that is still living very much in the thick of Christianity, and a "rational" one that is just dead-convinced that the spiritual part is just me being sick in the head.

It used to be quite scary. I mean, I'd just end up locking myself up in my room and wanting to scream. At some point I was trying to explain it to my (atheist) boyfriend who has never had such experiences - and he gave some advice which seems to work... He told me not to try to resist the visions. It might sound really crazy but it's all in your head and the more you try to get rid of them the worse they're going to be. At least it was like that for me. You probably *CAN'T* eliminate them but *CAN* learn to control them and they can actually become quite pleasant. If you then remember it's nothing to do with "what's out there" then you can actually have fun without thinking you're a lunatic! Think of it as some sort of an advantage... I mean, most people can't even lucid dream, let alone dream while awake!

I'm still in the process of working this out myself - but so far, in my life it has made a HUGE difference. Maybe it would help you too...?

Good luck.

PVC

December 7, 2007

It wasn't sleep paralysis. I actually was trying to find scientific explanations for it, and I was unable to. I of course wasn't going to tell any psychiatrist: I didn't want to be institutionalized or put back on heavy meds. (They were steadily decreasing the dosage because of how much I'd been improving. I was pretty much out of the woods by the time this shit started happening.) I tried to tell myself it was an overactive imagination, but that didn't make it stop. I even used techniques they teach to schizophrenics to stop hallucinations in their tracks, and that didn't do shit.

I suffered from sleep paralysis for years. I never had wrestling matches with demons, but I had a bedroom full of them. Sometimes they would be on my pillow, sometimes down the hall, or sometimes I would see dark robed figures hovering above my bed. Along with this, I had physical symptoms too. Loud buzzing in my ears and feelings of "electrical ripples" starting at my toes and going out the top of my head. Sometimes I felt like I left my body and went to another room in the house, only to find myself back in bed. And usually right before or after an episode, I would see geometrical figures before my eyes. All very weird and terrifying, and at the time I was certain that I was plagued by demons. I have done a lot of reading about sleep paralysis, and have happily found out that I am "normal."

But I think being religious at the time only made things worse because I would worry about having an episode every night before I went to bed, worrying that a demon might "get me." I don't know whether becoming an unbeliever helped me or whether I just grew out of the problem. I haven't had a sleep paralysis episode in years now. How did you determine that your problem wasn't sleep paralysis? I'm not saying that I think that it was, but I'm just curious, being a former sufferer myself.

And before I forget, welcome to Ex-Christians!

December 7, 2007

Hi there. Wild Man out of Las Vegas, NV, here! That's right, Sin City itself, the Neon Jungle, Sodom on the Sand, and so on. Yes, people actually do live here; yes I'm one of them, and no, I don't work in a casino. Nor am I a gambling addict, a hustler, scamster, huckster, or whoremonger. And remember kids, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas... but if you live here, so do you.

Before I continue, I want to lay out a few things upfront:

- I'm torn. I'm deeply, terribly torn. I can't call myself a Christian with a straight-face, but I can't call myself an ex-Christian either.

- Most of you will not believe what I am about to say, because even within the Pentecostal church, me and my crew were considered bat-shit crazy. You might emphatically state that I and the others are in need of medication, possibly institutionalization... and you couldn't be blamed for thinking such. Nor could the typical active participant in the Assemblies of God denomination, believe it or not. Yes, it's that bad.

- Today was one of the worst days of my entire life. I am reeling from the shock. I don't know if tomorrow will be any better, so go easy on me please.

- Excuse the extreme length. There is a lot to say. This sounds egotistical up front, but I believe I can say that my story is somewhat 'exceptional.' Yeah, you could say that....

- I'm not making anything up. I'm not a troll. I'm not trying to pull any kind of artful psychological scam here. As ludicrous and incredible as it will all sound (even by Pentecostal/Charismatic standards; yes, it's that bad) this is my story. My actual honest-to-goodness experiences. And to a great (but not full) extent, y'all might be some of the few people alive capable of understanding, even if virtually none of you will believe the craziest part of it.

So without further adieu, here it goes:

You can call me Wild Man. I just turned 29. I was born and raised in Los Angeles County, CA; I've lived in Vegas for 2.5 years now. No, I did not move to Vegas to get away from God. Not everyone moves here for 'sinful' reasons, you know. Before I launch into my story, the bottom line is this: I wish it wasn't true. I wish I could come to know the tranquility of apathetic agnosticism and just stop giving a shit once and for all. But as will become alarmingly clear, there has been more holding me back than most of you might be able to imagine. I've read a few of these testimonies and part of me has been wishing that it could have played out like that for me. I can't at all rightly say it was easier for the rest of you than it would be for me, but I can say that so far it seems that the grip is much stronger on me. My story would have played out very similarly to the typical story in here, beginning back in the year 2000 or so. That is, were it not for what I am about to share. Bear with me.

I must have been born under a bad sign. My due date was Halloween of 1978, but I missed it by a few days. Basically, it became clear shortly after I was born that I was sub-normal. Retarded, even. I was formally diagnosed with autism at some point prior to or during the age of 7. I don't think I said my first words until I was 4. I wasn't fully potty-trained until I was 7. I remember going to a special school for 'tards until the 1st or 2nd grade when I was placed into special education at a normal elementary school.

By the 4th grade I was mainstreamed into a normal classroom. After a rocky start I started doing well, and then I started doing exceptionally. Pretty soon it turned out that I was actually some kind of genius. There started being talk of my becoming a scientist via a Top 10 research university. The possibilities seemed endless. However, there were early signs that the future was to be darker than anyone would have anticipated, including myself.

As far as early childhood went, I remember being a happy kid full of goodwill, who had a profound and naive faith in the essential goodness of all people, and in existence itself. Well, about fifty schoolyard beatings later, and after being fucked with in general by my peers, I began to become very bitter and angry. The special school I went to was located on the back 40 acres of a normal elementary school and we shared recess space with the normal kids. Whose fucking idea was that, anyways? Some high-ranking bureaucrats should have lost their jobs over that brilliant plan. By the time I was 7 or 8 I was drawing pictures of hated enemies - actual persons or generalized representations - being dismembered, impaled, and tortured. They started to keep a close eye on me, as if I wasn't already under the microscope. But they began to worry.

Fighting became an everyday thing. First, this 'retard' learned to fight back against the bullies. Then I eventually dabbled in bullying myself, taking pleasure in cruelty and brutality. I started to run with the wrong crowd; kids whose fathers were in and out of prison and who had serious high-level criminal connections. The kinds of kids who follow in their fathers' footsteps. Well, when I started junior high, I went from Golden Boy to Royal Class Fuck-Up. Two years later nobody expected me to be able to hold down a job at Jiffy Lube when the time came for me to leave school. I was socially promoted into the 9th grade, but was placed in a segregated program for severe cases. Convicted felons, teenagers diagnosed with schizophrenia, sex offenders, suicidal types, heavy drug users, and even retarded kids were all placed into one cage. As you can imagine, it would seem as if the victims were thrown in with the victimizers. Fortunately I was on the borderline between the two: tough enough to be respected by the sociopaths but not vicious enough to fully become one of them.

I remember thriving on violence, even just the thought of it. I was fond of smashing inanimate objects with my fist. Once, while still in the 8th grade, I punched in a payphone and broke it. I probably broke knuckles and fingers a few different times and didn't fully realize it.

Shortly after I entered high school, life suddenly got much worse than it already was. I had a severe psychological breakdown, and was diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia. It was soon revealed to me that I had inherited the 'Family Curse.' My grandpa had had it (more on that later), his mother had had it, and many others. It had skipped my dad's entire generation and somehow fallen onto me, at the extraordinarily young age of 13.

Well, it was a roller coaster ride for the next few years. I saw the movie 'Fire in the Sky', an allegedly true story about alien abduction, and for the next several years I lived in as much daily fear of alien abduction as the typical Christian zealot does of pissing off their God. I became obsessed with death metal bands such as Cannibal Corpse, and became preoccupied with themes of gore, rape, murder, butchery, and so on. My dad was a police officer, a high-ranking one with a great deal of pull, and he would threaten to take me to the morgue and show me the real thing. "We'll see how fucking quick you change your tune" he bellowed. I would act horrified and remorseful so as to stave off a beating (he virtually never struck me, by the way), but I secretly wanted him to follow through. I could go into the nitty-gritty details of what schizophrenia was like, not that I remember much, but the alien abduction thing is the most salient example that I can recall. I don't remember having visual hallucinations, or hearing voices that were more than intrusive thoughts. Mainly just delusions, paranoia, lack of affect, and so on.

I remember that the innocent, sweet-natured kid had never fully died. Just buried under many layers of profound negativity and madness.

By the spring of 1994 when I was 15, I had gone too far. They were going to commit me. For an indefinite period; possibly for years. But then I skated on a technicality and my induction was going to be postponed for a while. It's complicated, and I don't feel like going into the whole story; I've got enough to tell. Two weeks after the date I was supposed to be put inside, a close friend in that segregated high school class insisted that I go to her church youth group with her. She wasn't a Christian and neither was the majority of everyone there. It was a peculiar phenomenon that most youth pastors might only dream of: an outreach-oriented youth group well into the triple digits, at a small church whose attendence was smaller than its youth group, and where most the kids were the baddest of the bad. Gangbangers, heavy drug users, white power skinhead types, occultist (maybe?) goth/metalhead types, gutter punks... you name it, they were all there. The night I showed up I was heavily sedated on anti-psychotic drugs and must have been walking like the Frankenstein monster. My appearance in terms of hair, attire, was non-descript, but even still, a hundred or so of them were milling around outside smoking cigarettes and talking trash, and when I walked up they went kind of silent. Then I kept walking, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea. Either I looked pretty freakin' scary, or my reputation (as a psychopath who had a bunch of bodies buried under his house or something) preceded me.

I got saved that night. I figured I had nothing left to lose. One of the youth leaders who later became a mentor to me, who had never seen me before that night, said "when you walked up to talk to [the youth pastor], you walked like Frankenstein and your eyes were cold and dead, like a shark's. But after you prayed with him, you walked back the way you came, and there was a spark in your eyes and a spring in your step." I don't really know why I went up. It was kind of a fluke. But somehow I ended up talking to the guy and he asked me if I wanted to become a Christian, and I said "yeah."

I think the main influence behind that was a teacher's aide at my segregated high school program. She was a milk-and-cookies Christian type, very bland, in her mid twenties though she could've been 40. Once I found out, I fucked with her incessantly. It was one case where a Christian was getting heaps of abuse from a non-Christian out in the world. I would blather on about death metal-type blood and gore, satanism, how I wanted to be a mass murderer someday, how I might kill her while I was at it, how I was going to go and burn her church down, and so on and so forth. Maybe I was half-sincere, or more than that possibly, but the point was to freak her out and make her utterly despise me in spite of what her wimpy religion told her to do.

But I just couldn't get her to hate me. She'd snap sometimes, understandably so, but I just couldn't get her to hate me. In fact, she was the most compassionate person in the room the day that I had my worst mental meltdown ever. Shit, she even broke down crying. I would have thought that she should have sat back and taken immense personal satisfaction at watching me disintegrate, though of course she would have played it cool so as not to let on. It made a profound impression on me. If anyone ever lived up to the 'witness with your life, not with words' thing, it was her.

Well, anyways, very suddenly I was a Christian, though I really had no idea what that meant. If they had explained it that night, I would have been too sedated to catch it. I called home and announced it to my parents. "I'm saved! I just got saved!!" I shouted with uncharacteristic glee; "I'm a Christian now!!" I was astonished when they failed to match my glee. They were instead disconcerted and shocked. When I got home, the shit hit the fan. My dad threatened to prevent me from going there. He said he would use all his power as a policeman to check that church out to make sure it wasn't some kind of scam, and that if he thought for one moment that it was, he would forbid me from ever going again. My mom was beside herself. I didn't get it. I didn't understand the hostility. Somehow I was full of pure, unadulterated joy for the first time since I was a small child, and they were treating me as if I had just joined a gang.

The truth would come out a little while later. That's when I found out the truth about my grandfather, from whom I had inherited the family curse. He got saved when his youngest kids (my dad and his sister) were 8 or 9 or so, into the Church of the Nazarene. Shortly thereafter he lapsed into schizophrenia. This church took advantage of him and he gave them all the family's money. The kids were literally starving because of that. Literally... like African kids on some television commercial where 'sensitive viewers' are warned at the outset. The family sunk into dire poverty... about as dire as you could get in 1950s central California. The old man getting committed was actually a boon because then there was nobody to stop my grandmother from going out and getting food stamps and applying for welfare so that the kids would have shoes... and not fucking starve.

I guess my pops was looking out for me. He didn't want some creepy church to do the same thing to me. Not that I had any money or anything, let alone a family to feed. But still.

Well, it took some time but eventually the old cop was put at ease. The folks seemed genuine, they seemed to genuinely care about me, and I was actually improving. He chalked it up to the positive social support. We (the church and I) chalked it up to God. Whatever the case, I was getting better at a remarkable rate and there wasn't much reason at all to believe that it was because of the meds. Even the psychiatrist was at a loss. He just figured I was a statistical anomaly and that the pharmaceutical company would be happy to have it skew their normal curve, no matter how minutely.

At any rate, my parents didn't raise me and my brother with any kind of religion. My mom was some kind of lapsed Catholic, but it really never came up. I don't think her parents really gave a shit at that point, either. My dad was something like an apatheist. Some kind of god was out there, maybe, but whatever. I remember when I was 9 they tried to get me to go to some vacation bible school at some benignly liberal Methodist church, and I adamantly refused. Maybe they thought it would make me less rotten, maybe my mom wanted me out of her hair for the summer... I don't know. That was virtually the only time they tried to push religion on me.

Despite my conversion, I had no idea what Christianity entailed. To me, Jesus was some longhaired hippie dude in a white robe and sandals from 2,000 years ago who had magic powers, and somehow his whole schtick got turned into the world's biggest and most pervasive religion by people who came after him. I had been saved in April of 1994. It wasn't until July, two weeks before my water baptism, that the doctrines began to sink in. I hadn't realized what I had gotten myself into. I remember at a Bible study on Mark, deliberating intensely about all that I had just been taught. "Should I continue, or should I leave now? This is some pretty heavy stuff." Well, I took my leap of faith and I decided to believe it. Suddenly I felt an onrush of peace, as if God was patting me on the back. So that was it right there, my actual conversion. I was in.

The only notable thing that happened before turning 17 was that shortly after I turned 16 I was at a revival service at a youth retreat, and I went up for prayer, to get healed. "This young man does not belong in an institution!" the preacher shouted out. I almost collapsed from the weight of all the hands. Suddenly, it felt like a bunch of things (no words to describe it) flew out of my head and away from me. I felt 100 pounds lighter when it was all over. "It's gone! It's gone!!" I shouted, "I'm healed! I'm healed!!" My youth pastor told me that he saw several 'ghosts' fly out of my head, out the window, and into the snow. *Ssssssssss* Just like that. Whatever the hell he saw, the man would never lie to me. Afterwards, as far as anyone could tell, there were no overt signs that anything was still going on. Still, I continued taking my meds until I was 21 and then I quit taking them (I was scared shitless of my parents finding out); haven't been on them since. Despite what you're about to read, I'm pretty sure I never relapsed. Even in spite of everything. So there's that.

But then there's this.

Two years later when I was 17, my mom found religion. I can best describe it as some benign 20th century 'pastiche' religion from Japan that cherry-picked all the warm and fuzzy parts of the great Western and Eastern religions, except that the founder (who died some time in the 1980s) was allegedly the Second Coming, the Jewish messiah, the next Buddha, the 12th Imam, etc. etc. et al., all rolled into one. Needless to say, I wasn't cool with it at all. At least if she was just some indifferent lapsed Catholic, there may have been some space for me to present something new and radical (the Gospel). Of course, I had failed at that miserably thus far. When she converted to this religion, called Sukyo Mahikari, it was like the deal was sealed: she was lost. I was also alarmed that she started trying to indocrinate my little brother, who was all of 9 or 10 years old at the time.

That's when things began to get real strange around the house. I mentioned in the beginning that my story was somehow extraordinary, even for this forum. Well, as y'all were reading the above acount up until this point, y'all were probably rolling your eyes. Well, maybe some of you won't be rolling your eyes quite so much at what comes next.

It all started when she ceremoniously dedicated an altar inside her house. Some kind of portal was opened that night, and very bad things entered the house and took up residence.

I had heard demon-talk before and figured it was bullshit. A few months before the night of the ceremony, some kids from a Vineyard church (notoriously kooky, even within Christian circles, though each Vineyard is different, to be fair) started showing up to the youth group, and along with their floppy-fish tongue-flapping 'revival' antics came a whole lot of talk about spiritual warfare. I wrote it off as the fantasies of overactive imaginations. Even the youth pastor stepped in and said as much, to prevent such notions from spreading. Sure, the devil and his demons were out there somewhere, actively trying to fuck with us, but surely their activities were much more subtle and subdued.

My image of the devil was that of a smoothtalking aristocratic cad who resided in an ivory tower: some cultured English gentleman with Ox-Cam credentials, with pipe and smoking jacket sitting in an overstuffed chair in his study, who tried to convince you to the contrary of the Gospel with subtle arguments that were presented with utmost consideration for the listener, unlike the condescending vitriol and arrogant elitism of atheist polemicists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Despite my previous fascination with satanic blood-and-gore extreme heavy metal, the notion of a gothic horror movie Dungeons & Dragons Satan, complete with legions of undead flesh-eating zombie demon reptiles, who was out to rape the pope up the ass with his 15-inch steel cock, heated to a cherry red and bristling with barbed spikes... *deep breath* was just silly to me. Sure, the devil was nothing to sneeze at, but surely these kids had seen too many horror movies? Surely they weren't too far removed from kids who took their Slayer albums way too seriously?

Okay, so what? Many of you also fell for the 'spiritual warfare' thing. Well, I didn't seek it out. It sought me out.

I don't want to build some chronological narrative of all that has happened to me. But for nearly ten years, the following things (and more) happened to me several nights a week. Some years were way worse than others, but there was never any peace. I had every reason to believe that these were demons. I had been variously:

- Raped in the ass.

- Thrown around the room, bounced off the walls and ceiling, dropped from ten feet onto my bed.

- Beaten, choked, scratched, clawed, grappled.

- Tangled up in my bedsheets and dragged or tossed around.

- The list goes on and on and on and on.

It wasn't sleep paralysis. I actually was trying to find scientific explanations for it, and I was unable to. I of course wasn't going to tell any psychiatrist: I didn't want to be institutionalized or put back on heavy meds. (They were steadily decreasing the dosage because of how much I'd been improving. I was pretty much out of the woods by the time this shit started happening.) I tried to tell myself it was an overactive imagination, but that didn't make it stop. I even used techniques they teach to schizophrenics to stop hallucinations in their tracks, and that didn't do shit.

The freaky thing was, my experiences were 'empirical' to me. On one particularly bad night, a demon fell from the ceiling and began to wrestle me. I wrestled with the thing for 45 minutes. Its skin was hot but it had no pulse or breath. It was like a corpse with a full body fever. As it was choking me out, I dug my fingernails into its arm. I pierced its skin and dug around in the musculature of its forearm, even touching bone. I was about to take a bite out of its arm, but thought better of it. Even in the thick of such Heironymus Bosch-style horror, I was playing the field researcher. When it finally left, my room was full of green fog. I sat up in my bed (I'd not snapped out of any kind of trance or waking dream; sometimes I would, sometimes I wouldn't, with those kinds of things) and played with the green fog, and tripped as it swirled around my fingers. I got up and walked across the entire house to get a glass of milk. When I came back, the green fog was still there.

That's just one example among many several where it was just too 'real' to rationalize. If I was hallucinating, they must have been consulting George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic because it was one hell of an internal mind-freak. Of course, the jury's still out, otherwise I might not be here.

Well, I don't think I was having some kind of relapse. Concurrent symptoms were zero, and nobody suspected a thing: I was certainly being closely monitored by the mental health authorities and would be for years to come, that's for sure. I know I didn't bring it on myself. I had dismissed such things as silliness... until it started happening to me, pretty much when that altar was dedicated. The one thing that cemented this was about three or four years ago when my brother came forward and told me that the same exact shit had been happening to him for all those years, and that it all started when my mom brought that altar into the house, just like it had for me. We spent hours relating our experiences, and everything matched.

I had converted my brother to Christ a couple of years after the altar came in. One night he came into my room and said that he didn't want to die... basically, annihilation, where your existence is snuffed out. I told him the Gospel and he accepted it. Boy, my parents weren't happy at all. They didn't go ape-shit like they did when I myself converted, but they tried to intervene and dampen it as much as they could, and my mom redoubled her efforts at trying to get my brother into her thing. Well, he knew it was her thing that brought all that shit into our house, even before he knew the slightest thing about the Gospel, so he was not interested at all.

At any rate, we did not find out about each others' mutual nightmare until eight or nine years after it began... when the altar was brought in.

Correlation, coincidences, add it up add it up...

...you want to know what kept me in the church? That. Church started getting really lame by the time I was 18 or 19, and as I went from being an 18 year old with an 8th grade education to being a 23 year old with a college education... and then a 26 year old with a Master's degree (now I'm halfway through my PhD, with plans to be an ivory tower dweller). Well, the closer I've been getting to that ivory tower (whose threshold I now stand at), the less sense it's been making. It's very hard to be a truly educated person and stay in the fundamentalist church. The cognitive dissonance is immense. It's enough to make your skull crack apart. Even before I had any fancy grad degrees, I was ready to say "fuck it" back in the year 2000.

What kept me from doing it? I was literally about to "de-convert" in one single moment. But then the tactile memory of digging into that demon's arm as I wrestled futilely with it, and the sight of that ball of light that came through and kicked its ass out of my room when I screamed "Jesus!!! Jesus!!!!", and the green fog that I sat up in my bed twirling my fingers through, made me decide to stay in the fold. And when I did, I felt the same divine back-patting that I did back in July of 1994 when I decided to stick around in spite of the hard-to-swallow doctrines that I saw in the Gospel of Mark.

You should know that I am sharing only a tiny percent of my "spiritual experiences" here, due to space. It could fill a book. Let's just say that in addition to all that frightful spiritual activity, there's been a long string of visions, prophecies, dreams that weren't just dreams, divine insights and discernments that ended up panning out, and all kinds of couldn't-possibly-be-coincidences. Somehow, I thought, God allowed me to see all that stuff. He had something planned with me and the other bastards unlucky enough to be swept up in all this. Or something.

Well, it's the tail-end of 2007 now. How did I get to this point, where I'm tapping away an account on this very forum?

Three things:

1. Bitter disappointment as I waited for a woman. I waited and waited and waited. At age 18 I convinced myself that God would bring me a Christian wife by the time I was 24. 24 came and went. Then I turned 28. And I was still a fucking virgin. And I had never had an actual girlfriend inside or outside the church. In church, available women were either A) non-existent (which was the case the vast majority of the time; every church I found myself in tended to be a fucking sausage fest); bitchy and unattainable; C) way too many issues (I dated my former senior pastor's daughter once, and it was one of the worst mistakes I ever made); D) vapid, uninteresting, and otherwise a bad fit for someone with a 150-something IQ who's bound for the ivory tower. Apparently, I'd become one of those high-falutin' intellectuals that I so resented back when I was 19 years old with an 8th grade education, unwavering faith in Jesus, and an underclass future. Although I must say that to this day I dislike any pretence of elitism, hence my disdain for the rhetorical style of Dawkins and Harris, despite their words often resonating with me. Hell, I even sniff it in here and it bugs me, even if it's understandable. But I digress.

I had passed up so many marvelous opportunities with incredible women outside of the church... all because they were non-Christian.

Now I have a real girlfriend. She's an agnostic, just like most good Europeans are. She's from Europe - Italy, at that - where Bible Belt-style fundamentalist Christianity is as rare as Ba'hai is here. (Though the Catholic church is another matter, though you know how weird those Italians are about such things.) She's at least as pure and true as any girl that I've ever seen set foot in a church, and I love her. For the first time ever, I'm in love, and it's not unrequited. I had to go outside the confines of the church to get the one thing my heart desired above all else... the one thing I hoped God would give me, the one thing everyone was telling me I wasn't yet good enough for, that God hadn't deemed it the right time yet, that He had someone out there somewhere but I wasn't ready yet, and so on and so forth.

I'm a sociologist. That's my field. And I know a systematic libido-squelching sausage fest when I see one! Don't try and tell me otherwise!!

I'm so afraid that God's going to reveal Himself on any day and declare that I have to dump the first girl I've ever truly been in love with. Also, I know that if I go back, I'd probably lose her if I tried to keep her. I doubt she'd tolerate the "no sex before marriage" bit, or the idea of competing over the souls and intellects of any children we might have, or me figuring her and any unsaved children of ours and just about everyone else we love are basically fucked.

She has told me "don't ever think that I stand between you and God" and "why can't you find a middle way? Why does it have to be one (fundie) or the other (agnosticism)?" Well, I have yet to tell her all that I'm telling y'all in here. Shit, how can you tell someone about shit like that? I'm already certain the majority of you will tell me to seek psychiatric help immediately.

2. Same thing as with most of you here: it just doesn't add up. You don't need me to rehash it all; y'all already know. Well, just today, on the "Fear of Hell" thread in the FAQ, I came across that link somebody posted about Universalism. And, all of a sudden, the whole "hell doctrine" fell off of me like a lead weight. And for a moment I thought "here it is! The answer!" But then I stopped to think again: if this is God's church, how could universalism have become such a minority tradition with no real sway in world Christendom?

There were other times where I sought out sugar-coated versions of hell. I read C.S. Lewis' "the Great Divorce" and took it to heart. I read up in other controverseys about hell, many of which are touched on in the Universalist argument.

Okay, so if there's no hell... then what's the point? Jesus came, saved everyone... whoopty-doo. Liberal Christianity thought that the churches would get filled back up with baby boomers if they softened everything up, and their churches began to empty at an even faster rate. Church is boring, and all its rules - even if they're softened and humanized and cherry picked and given a warm happy smiley face - are a real cramp. Why bother going with the program if there's no consequences for doing your own thing instead? "The fear is what keeps us here." Frankly, I disdain liberal christianity, just as much as I did when I was an out-and-out unquestioning fundie. It strikes me as diluted and weak, as ineffectual and utterly superfluous, even now. Even Sam Harris seems to have more respect for fundies than for liberal Christians.

And then there's the actual history of things. Once I worked as an assistant for a visiting professor from Heidelberg, which is the oldest university in Germany. I once asked him if there were any buildings dating back to the 14th century, when it was built. No, because the whole place got burnt to the ground during the 30 Year War. That was one piece of info that made me stop and go "shiiiiiiiiiit...."

3. If the world is supposed to be saved, then why is the church doing such a shitty job? Why aren't amazing things happening in the streets on a massive basis, like in the Book of Acts? Europe is now less Christian than China is, fundamentalism is largely confined to certain Red States in this country, I'm not altogether sure what's going on in the 3rd World but it doesn't seem to be making regular headlines at any major news agencies, and so on. It seems like the biggest Quixotic endeavour of all time.

There was one more thing. I used to live in fear that God was going to tell me that I couldn't go into academia (my dream job) and that instead I was to be a good and faithful insurance salesmen. Or a miserable bum living on the street. Or a missionary to the Sudan. Not to dog on insurance salesmen or bums or anything. Then one day my fears were confirmed; I confessed this to a pastor friend and he said "actually, [Wild Man], God told me just that, that you're not meant to be an academic, and I've been waiting for the chance to tell you." Aw, shit!! From then on, I quit praying, because I didn't want God to tell me what I really didn't want to hear.

So there you have it.

I talked for hours the other night with a friend about this. I told her everything, even the scary demon shit. Surprisingly, she believes me, because she's encountered scary ghosts in houses she's lived at, even though she's otherwise agnostic. It's hard to disbelieve in shit when it's right up in your face, though you can try to rationalize the shit out of it afterwards. She says she sees that it is tormenting me. It is. It's like a long nightmare that never ends. I wish I could have peace of mind and live a normal sane life, like y'all are, without all this shit in it. Even when I was all up into the Spiritual Warfare thing, trying my damndest to bite back, and with 100% faith, it was not what I wanted. I didn't want to go on to be some kind of professional exorcist or something... that's one spiritual gift that isn't any kind of gift, to be frank. It's one of those things, I guess, where "somebody has to do it", and that somebody is one unlucky motherfucker.

I don't know whether I'm insane or whether I'm supposed to be like Jonah. Jonah, that poor bastard, was ordered to do exactly what he didn't want to do. He only wanted to live an ordinary peaceful life as a good Hebrew kid. And despite what he wanted, he gets tossed off the ship and swallowed by a whale, and the whale barfs him back up onto the beach so that he can footslog it the rest of the way to Nineveh to face the music.

I had a dream last night that scared the shit out of me. It was one of those 'dream that isn't just a dream' type deals. Maybe God was delivering a clear message, or maybe my scared brain was playing the part of the divine trying to tell me something. Well, I Googled "ex Christian" as I'd seen the term somewhere before, and here I am.

I feel like I have to go home and help my brother, because he's still stuck in that house. He's been trying to move out and his efforts continue to be frustrated. I'm also scared that they - if 'they' are what they seem to be - might harm my girlfriend. I'm no longer a virgin, and they always said sex was a spiritual union, so whatever hold these things have on me... and I'm no longer under God's protection because I haven't prayed word one since July of this year, and she certainly isn't... if all this is true... shit.

Since I moved to Las Vegas, visitations have become far, far, far, far more rare, but they still happen very sporadically. The less Christian and the more skeptical I've become (the downward slide began a year or so after I moved here, back in mid 2006 or so) the less frequent the attacks have been, but they still happen now and then. I know my family's house remains the hell that I left it. The shit hits the fan every time I go back, despite my sincerely wishing that it won't. It's hard to disbelieve in things that keep on happening, despite you sincerely wishing that they wouldn't.

But like I said, the jury's still out.

Maybe me and everyone else who has lived through this, who's had the same apparent spiritual gifts, and who has fought the same alleged spiritual fights, are all fucking delusional and crazy and in need of heavy medication to make it stop. Maybe the best favor science could ever do us would be to invent time travel and then send us all back to the 14th century. Or maybe there is a vast spiritual world out there but Christians have got it all wrong, and that somehow the study of the paranormal could be scientized and legitimized even though methodology would be kind of tricky (dontcha think?). Or maybe, just maybe, we elect few who were clued into just how dreadfully vast and real the entire Christian cosmology (particularly the demonology side of it) really is (lucky us, eh?), have been right all along? I don't know. The jury is out.

What would you do if you had experienced all the same shit I allegedly have?

How would it be for you if you were where I am at right now?

What the hell is going on here!?

And if you find this to be upsetting, how the fuck do you think I feel!?

I look forward to your replies. Maybe one of you has an answer that will hit a home run for me. Or maybe this won't help at all. But here I am.

Again, I'm not a troll or some kind of Christian trickster trying to pull some elaborate, twisted hoax. I'm not making any of this up for shits and giggles. Everything I've laid out is the truth as I understand it. Please understand as best you can, but by all means, tell me what you believe to be true.

Give it to me straight.

December 8, 2007

Enchanted, are you having problems on how to use this software?

If you want to reply to something someone said, you have to write outside the quote so that your writing shows as separate. If you added anything to Wild Man's post, I can't find it because it looks like everything else.

If you want to add stuff between what he said, you can break up the quote box.

The Long Nightmare

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