by Lang Zaam

Created on: August 06, 2008   Last Updated: December 27, 2008

Baptized as a Christian at the age of 4 months and my parent send me to Christian schools for education till grade 8. In other words I had nothing to do with the decision to be a Christian. Up to the age of fourteen I was not impressed being a Christian at all. My parents had endless debates about the biblical interpretations and my school teachers resorted to corporal punishment when their lousy preaching was annoying, uninteresting and did not sufficiently get my attention.

I had excellent marks in secondary education except I failed bible studies. Strait A's for all the academics was eligible for a honorable mentioning but, you see, I failed bible studies and this was a Christian school so to be up for a reward would be unthinkable in those days.

I was stubborn enough to tell them that I did not fail anything, I was an excellent student with top marks that did not belief in the genesis story as real and all the other metaphorically explained stories of the bible. Subsequent education, including college was through public schools, so I was a happy diligent student receiving excellent marks.

Up to the age of seventeen-eighteen, God was scary and personalized and Christianity meant an unsubstantiated authority, so going to church was out of the question. Much of my time was devoted to learning and at eighteen years of age I was drafted in the army to serve my country.

There was a regulation at that time that soldiers could spend their free time in a military facility, off base, to be with friends to play, read and drink a cup of coffee. These facilities were divided into three groups, Catholic, Protestant and Humanistic. To select affiliatition occurred to me as being very odd at that time. To attend a church service on Sundays, either Catholic or Protestant, was voluntary and I found that odd as well that some of my friend attended while you did not even have to go.

Instead I found time to read books written by Roterodames Erasmus and Baruch Spinoza. These two sparked my interest because Erasmus tried to make religion more user friendly. Spinoza, on the otherhand, tried to proof through pure reasoning that God is actually Nature. It was at that time that I convinced myself to assume that God is nature because that made it to me believable and comprehensible. God has a meaning but no longer the meaning of three or two thousand years ago, in 1958 my God became nature. That made me feel wanting to be responsible for my own actions and became certain that Jesus did

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