Truth
How I Was Saved
Abstract
by Francis Fisher
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 21 April 2006
Caught Short in Church
I had years at the C of E school oppressed by the routine of continuous praising and thanksgiving, and the forced attendance at the church next door. One day, I had a terrible attack of diarrhoea during the church service. I held my sphincter as tight as I could and held back the onslaught through the pain until the service ended. Back in the classroom, however, I could hold on no longer. The smell was awful, and there was a pool of diarrhoea on the wooden seat of the chair. The teachers sent me home to be cleaned up, and I realised that Christianity was a load of crap.
Perhaps it was not surprising. My parents were Christians, one Catholic and one Anglican, but neither were Sunday go-to-church types. They were also fair parents. They did not make me go to sunday school but asked me whether I wanted to go. My answer was that I went to school five days a week, why should I go on Sunday as well. They accepted it as a reasonable reply. I was not obliged to go, and never did. But I did have to go to the Anglican school, not because of any desire by my parents to indoctrinate me with Christianity, but because it was the local school. So I went.
The school was miserable—seemingly endless brick walls with tiny romanesque style windows, making it look like a warehouse, or a prison. Inside, that is what it felt like. Life was awful. Even the non-didactic time was awful. As little kids we were put into cots and told to sleep. A small child thus confined with no urge to sleep for an hour simply suffers an hour’s punishment. And for it we were obliged to thank God and to love Him. Well, that might be possible, but who could love the teachers who rapped your knuckles with a ruler, if you did not keep still in your cot, or if you spoke univited in class? But we were told that God expected us to love the teachers even though they were odious and cruel. It all seemed such a puzzle, and so too was all the mumbo-jumbo, as a brother of my father always called it. I still do not know what the point of it is. If God is intelligent enough to create the world, why does he want people to go through all this empty ritual for Him?
No God but the Devil
Before I had finished there, I was sick of it. I knew then, what I know all the more now. That religion when it is imposed on you against your will is Satanic. No God except the Devil would want anyone to be forced to worship Him in pointless and robotic ways, and no good God could possibly expect it. Constantly bowing before the supposedly beneficent Christian God was like a Chinese water torture. It dripped at you incessantly, wearing down your will until you became mindless and succumbed. It seems hardly surprising that few manage to get through their school days without being conditioned into an empty religious routine, fulfilling no real purpose but always acted out as a bad habit.
Just when you should be enjoying the experience of learning, you are interrupted continually with nonsense, like religious instruction, and assemblies devoted to singing hymns and saying prayers. You are taught that God made the world in six days in these religious instruction lessons, yet he did not even make the sun and night and day until the Wednesday, the fourth day, so what was a day before then? Christians are to be like little children, but little children see the incongruity of such things while adults explain it away.
You are taught that Jesus rose from the dead to prove that we would all be saved if we remained Christians, but the local anglican vicar was absent for several weeks being treated in hospital for some serious illness. Why would he want to be treated if he knew, as a Christian, that by dying he would go to heaven because of the resurrection of “the Lord”. There was something deeply insincere about the whole thing but we were expected to be Christians, and stick to all of this moo-poo for the rest of our lives. I felt that any such life was more like death, and found out many years later that some Christians thought the same but had all been burnt into oblivion by being tied to stakes and slowly roasted to death for the good of their souls.
Saved by Chance!
My parents moved house, and so I had to move schools. The new school was a secular school. A morning assembly was still obligatory, but it was much less intense. A hymn, a prayer, and a list of announcements by the headmaster. The school was poorer, being in a rough district, and the pupils were rougher, but that was tolerable. The overall religious oppression had ceased. Bliss!
I never really liked school after my first experience of it, but began to do much better than I had before. This school encouraged you to learn, and the so-called RI lessons were much more a matter of comparative religion and an examination of ethical systems. You cannot escape from God in school, but at least He had stopped sitting on you, and left you to think for yourself. Life had revived for me, and I began to do well. The lid had been lifted on a dark dungeon, and I had been allowed to climb out. Chastened by the experience, I was not to be tempted by any devilish religion ever afterwards. No one who thinks about how awful a theocracy is, would want to impose it. Religions are private matters between the individual and God, and not a punishment imposed by devils who pretend to be saints. They might also remember that the religion imposed might not be the one they prefer. What do religious people do then? Rebel?
Most people go through crises in their lives, and feel the need of a psychological crutch. The appeal to God might provide it, though equally often it does not. There are plenty of sick and depressed Christians to prove that God is no certain help to anyone. It is obvious that He has not shown Himself to these unfortunates despite their endless prayers and masses. What they might need, indeed, is the assurance that they are not constantly being judged as being wicked by some oppressive extra-dimensional God that knows your very thoughts. There is a way out of depression, and it does not mean compounding it by additional worries and fears with empty promises at the end of it all.
Those who think they have had signs from God in answer to their prayers, ought to think that they are more likely to be signs from the Devil, especially as the Christian God said there would be no signs. Who then showed the signs, if they were supposed to have been seen? Children wonder why God could not send unquestionable signs to everyone, if He really wanted to save them.
Institutional religion, poured into young heads seems more likely to make monsters than it is to make angels. It is certainly effective indoctrination from an early age, but it should be classified as a form of child abuse. It certainly affects people’s lives, and it is far from always being to the good. In conclusion, let me paraphrase part of the conversion experience of Robin Olaf Vogsland:
I have always remembered how I felt those years before I moved schools. I still know how empty and dead and hopeless I felt. It was a preview of hell, and I will never go back to that—ever. No matter what I have to give up or put up with, nothing religious is worth living under such totalitarian oppression in the name of God. I will not live with that emptiness ever again. The scars of those years remain, memories of evil and unkind deeds, psychological torture, stiffnecked people inculcating pointless habits hard to break. But enforced Christianity has compensated me, though the experience, with a clear understanding of what I have been saved from.
