Introduction
I've been working on this for a couple of weeks now -- then I almost didn't post it because I was sick of all the religious talk -- then I decided that was a dumb reason not to post, so here it is. I broke it into pieces because it's long.
Part I: Going to Hell
I was raised in the Christian church, in inland Orange County (Santa Ana) by parents of no fixed stripe of Protestantism. Some of my earliest memories are of playing in church day care. I'm told that at the age of two I conked the skull of the junior minister's son with a wooden stop sign so hard that he needed stitches. I don't remember doing that.
As a young child, I found church pretty much indistinguishable from school. I went to a building full of hallways and little rooms and went where the adults told me to go. The adults told me stories and rewarded me if I remembered things from the stories, there were naps which I never wanted to take, sugary snacks (Kool-Aid and graham crackers), singing, and a lot of coloring.
At the age of seven or eight I started going to children's church instead of day care. Children's church was like regular church except that it was tailored to our short little attention spans -- there was singing and Bible verses, but not really a sermon. They did pass around communion. It was the first time I had ever seen it and I didn't know what it was. I thought it was snacks, and that it was weird they were so small (tiny half-ounce vials of grape juice and dry crackers about the size of a Chicklet), but dutifully took and consumed one of each. Afterward, one of the other children (a boy, not the minister's son whose head I split open) asked me if I had been baptized. I said no -- although I wasn't sure what baptism was, I was pretty sure I would know if I had been. He then informed me that I would go to Hell for taking communion when I hadn't been baptized.
Select Bible verses that I heard later seemed to bear him out -- probably from Corinthians 1:11, where Paul talks about communion and verse 27 says "Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord." When I re-read the chapter just now it seemed pretty clear that Paul was talking about people coming to church drunk and disorderly.
But I was a kid. And I was convinced I was going to Hell.
I was miserable and ashamed. I couldn't tell anyone. I suspected my life was worthless, because at the end of it I was just going to Hell. I would look at my toys and think, "what good are toys to a person who is going to hell?" I thought about death a lot. I wondered, what was the point of enduring the whole rest of my life when I was just going to go to Hell anyway?
Eventually I broke down and confessed to my parents, who gently informed me that I had not done anything particularly heinous, and that even if what I did was bad, God would forgive me.
It seems strange that the concept of forgiveness was so far from my experience. I knew about God and Heaven and Hell and Jesus, and knew I was a "Christian," but somehow I had missed the whole point of the thing.
I had absorbed the culture, but knew nothing of philosophy or theology.
This seems to me typical of how kids think -- they're very literal and legalistic, they think in terms of reward and punishment, and they're superstitious and paranoid. Kids really do think there are magic words you can say that will send you to heaven or hell. And they're confused about morality -- they know there are things they're not supposed to do, but they're not too clear about whether the forbidden thing is rude, wrong, or just something that bugs their parents.
Most of us grow up and become a little more sophisticated in our thinking. But when I look at the fundie extremists out there, and read what they say, it seems to me they still think very much like little kids. They believe in magic words. And they know they're "Christian" but have somehow missed the whole point of the thing.
Next: The Late, Great Planet Earth