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My memory serves to bring hazy dream like pictures of a church when I was four years old. My mother was (successfully) trying to convert my father to her evangelical faith and he was complying as any man in love tends to do. They would send my younger brother and I to some far off section of the hollow almost warehouse like building where the children were taught obedience to God. I remember a homely woman would tell us of the horrors of hell; fire and brimstone, gnashing teeth, and then she would throw on cartoon videos of it all. Right away I felt a rebellious charge while in that room watching videos with the other children. Later in life, I would be told that that was Satan trying to control me. But by the time that people were telling me that I had gotten over the idea of a Satan and found it quite comical that they would condemn me to their hellbut that is not the story. Within the walls of these fuzzy memories, I remember my feelings most of all. I remember my absolute fear of hell, and how I was all too sure that at age four that was where I was going.

My next memory of church is age ten, my fear of hell still lingering. At age ten I found a loop hole that I thought for sure would get me into heaven; baptism. I got baptized. I was shaking like a leaf when I was pulled out of the icy baptismal waters and put my regular clothes back on. My shaking was of course not attributed to the frigid water, but to my being filled with the Holy Spirit.
I was forced to go to youth meetings after this. I will never forget the story of Steve Sinner and his two Christian pals. I still have nightmares to this day about him. (Steve Sinner was a good boy who had not accepted Jesus as his personal savior. His two friends were Christians, but did not exhibit exemplary Christ like behavior. Steve sees a younger boy in the road about to be hit by a car and so do his friends. Steve runs out, pushes the little boy out of the way thus saving the child's life and sacrificing his own. In spite of this altruistic act, and his good behavior; Steve is sent to hell.) By this time I was eleven years old. I had decided that I was not a Christian but would give lip service to the faith of my mother. Hell no longer bothered me, for if the people I met in the church who were willing to scare a child into believing and accepting their god were going to heaven, I didn't want to be there.
These feelings were strengthened and became more memorable when I was fourteen and made to go to a Baptist school. The pastor there (to cut a very long story short), encouraged me by argument to read the bible. I read it. Cover to cover. Twice. The contradictions, though numerous were not the most disturbing thing. The most disturbing thing to me was the use of the scriptures to justify vile horrible things that only men of hate could do. Hell wasn't even a word there. In the ancient Hebrew text the word was grave'. Grave, death, nothingness, an absence of the divine. Maybe that is the greatest hell; an absence of purpose, an absence of the divine, an absence of life.

Learn more about this author, Amanda Horst.
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