by Christopher Jack

Created on: January 24, 2007   Last Updated: May 11, 2007

I was raised in a very religious family, and had absolutely no doubt of God, or Heaven, or Angels or Demons for that matter, until the age of sixteen.

One night- most likely after a long hard day of high school and classes like Biology- i was lying in my bed staring up at the ceiling when a terrifying thought came to me: What if there is no God?

Before, the idea had seemed ludicrous, but now, now I was beginning to learn things that suggested other possible reasons to why we're here. Biology? Genes? Chromosomes? Apes? My mind was under attack by theories that made too much sense, and my mind didn't like it. What if... what if when we die, that's that?

The thing I call my soul then withstood years of what I also like to call darkness. Pure, merciless, relentless darkness that consumed me. Fear became terror, terror became pain, pain became suffering. I lapsed into a stage in my life where crawling into a dark corner and dying didn't seem like such a bad idea. Anything to get away from this awful never ending darkness that had consumed my mind.

I avoided the truth. I avoided science classes the rest of high school, and when college came around, phew, there wouldn't be a chance in hell you found me signing up for anthropology. I ran from science, I fled from my fear. And still the darkness grew.

Here I was, suddenly realizing that life possibly had no real purpose, no real meaning, that this was possibly all some accident and we're just dust in the wind, along for the ride before we inevitably cease to exist as if we were never even there. Life became pointless. A burden.

Then one day I realized that I cannot run from the truth. One day, the truth will catch up to me. One day, I will either die and cease to exist, or I will die and stand before the judgement seat of God. Both were terrifying ideas, but the latter was much more appealing. Something inside of me almost preferred the idea of burning in hellfire for all eternity to just ceasing to exist. At least I would still be me.

Yes, hell seemed like a better idea than ceasing to exist, but hell didn't really seem like a great idea either. I wanted to go to this place people called Heaven. Who knew if it was really there or not, but that's where I wanted to go.

An idea suddenly hit me: If I die, and there is no God, no afterlife, then nothing I do in my life really matters anyway. This is all pointless and I may as well jump off a bridge right now and it would be no different. Sure, my relatives might get sad, but one

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