ryansutter·net

This morning I tried riding my bike to the bus and taking it with me for the first time using the bike rack on the front of the bus. Two things to note: 1) I’m a moron for not doing this sooner and 2) I have no idea what the damn combination is to my bike lock. I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but as it is… grrr.

Last night I was in a long conversation via IM with a Witness girl from another state who found my blog over the Internet. She was DF’d a while ago and then started researching the Watchtower Society and started uncovering all their dirty laundry (membership in the UN, Creation book dishonesty, 587v607, the works). She really wants to present her findings to her parents in an attempt to open their eyes to the dishonesty and hypocrisy within the Watchtower Society because they’re both really good people and she believes they would want to be aware if they were being mislead.

I’ve been trying to help her as much as possible over the last few weeks in large part because (holy smokes, the entire bus suddenly smells like pot… methinks somebody has been up to something this morning and just got on the bus… whew…. I mean it smells like a freakin’ field of pot on a sunny day), sorry to digress there… where was I, oh yeah, I’ve been trying to help because I feel like maybe if I we can develop some sort of effective strategy with them, there is a chance with my family.

She tried asking her mother to study with her but her mom said that any studying should be done with the elders from the judicial committee. They haven’t spoken to their daughter in over a year and now they are at least agreeing to talk to her in a week. She has hopes that she’ll be able to present her case when they talk and I wish her the best. My hopes aren’t high though. The amount of mental insulation around the thought processes of a Jehovah’s Witness is truly astonishing.

Let’s look at the box they are in, eh? They have been told that the entire world lies in the power of Satan the Devil. Everything. Business, governments, schools, all secular institutions. They distrust anything that is not explicitly endorsed by the Watchtower Society. If the Society says that all historians who disagree with something they claim are just trying to discredit the Bible and further their evolutionary/atheist agenda, then everything those historians say is immediately unusable in a conversation with a Witness because the Witness will assume that if it appears there is evidence in support of the alternate view, Satan is responsible for it, and otherwise it’s just God-dishonoring worldly garbage. This means that when attempting reasoning with a Witness your best bets are the Bible and the Watchtower Society publications, their two trusted sources of information.

The big problem there, of course, is that the insulated against problems found in those places as well. The Bible they use, the New World Translation, has been meticulously revised over the last 50+ years to erase most of the controversial material, obvious contradictions and the like. If you are able to illustrate a contradiction or problem using another Bible translation, they may be able to just blame the “worldly” translators (don’t forget, other Christian denominations are also under Satan’s control). If you are able to illustrate it using only the NWT, they’ll just say you are twisting things which only proves that you’re an apostate. You see then, they are in a perfect cocoon, one they can only escape through their own efforts. External information is irrelevant, and internal contradictions and conflicts are resolved in a number of ways. If it’s a matter of a teaching formerly espoused by the Society that is crazy (such as the idea that aluminum cookware is dangerous and evil) they will simply say, “We don’t believe that anymore. I know the Society has made mistakes in the past, but they’ve corrected them. That is part of why I trust them. They are progressively gaining brighter light on the Truth.” If the problem is a current issue they have two options, accuse you of twisting the Society’s words or, if it’s so obvious that they can’t even do that, they can say, “I know they aren’t perfect, maybe they will get new light on this in the future. It doesn’t invalidate all the things they are right about.”

There is no way for reason to stick it’s head in the door with a Witness. This is why they are not a normal religion and are instead a cult. Only cults make a point of training their members to reject all but approved sources of information. Typically cults do this by physically isolating their members, but the Witnesses can’t do that because they’re an evangelizing cult and their members need to be out in the world in general. So, they psychologically isolate their members by constructing a little mental box that constrains what information they are allowed to pay attention to and gives them what seems like plausible reasons to deny information that contradicts what they believe. I honestly do not know which technique is more effective. A cultist like those polygamists in Texas lives a life of a kind of forced isolation, cut off from the world by their community so extremely that they most likely don’t even know what’s out there. The Witnesses have to encounter “the world” every day, they live in it, work in it, see things on the news, and they have to develop strong internal controls to avoid being affected by it. On the plus side, they get to live fuller lives then physically isolated cultists, on the negative side they have far more convoluted mental processes. It’s much easier to maintain the illusion of us and them, black and white, when you never see the grey areas. Witnesses certainly do and it leads to a lot of internal conflict.

I really hope against hope that there is a way to talk reason to a truly believing Witness but in the meantime, since it seems there is not, I just have to keep looking for a gap in the insulation.

I have a strange hobby.  I really get into Biblical textual criticism.  Is that weird?  Maybe so…

Today I was listening to a podcast discussion about whether there was evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.  I was finding the whole discussion moderately absurd because it seemed to be based on the idea that the Gospel accounts were somehow historical, something I find no evidence for.  It brought to mind the shocking discovery I made a few years ago that the letters of Paul are actually older than Mark-Matthew-Luke and John.  In fact, the earliest New Testament text is 1st Thessalonians.  I had heard from various commentators that Paul’s writings contained no obvious evidence that Paul had ever considered Jesus to have even been a historical person.  Don’t forget, BTW, that according to the Bible Paul never met Jesus and didn’t start evangelizing until a decade or so after he supposedly died.  So, I thought to myself “1st Thessalonian’s is a short book, I should go give it a quick read”.

I brought it up in my web browser and started reading…  Yo, it’s Paul and boys, we’re happy to see ya, thanks for all the good work, you’re doing great, etc, just a normal letter.  Then all of a sudden, bam!  Chapter 2 verses 14-16:

^2:14For you, brothers, became imitators of the assemblies of God which are in Judea in Christ Jesus; for you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen, even as they did from the Jews; ^2:15who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and drove us out, and didn’t please God, and are contrary to all men; ^2:16forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved; to fill up their sins always. But wrath has come on them to the uttermost.

Then back into the warm fuzzies.  These verses immediately hit me as wrong.  First, it clearly indicates a familiarity with Jesus as a historical person killed by the Jews.  Second, it is extremely antisemitic considering that the alleged author, Paul, was a Jew himself.  Third, at the end of verse 16 they seem to refer to some sort of big calamity that had befallen the Jews which would seem to indicate a familiarity with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE (about 20-30 years after this would have been written).  Fourth, there was just the tone of it.  It seemed like the author had switched into a different voice completely.  It just stuck out like a sore thumb from the surrounding text.

So, I did a quick Google on “1st Thessalonians 2:14-16 interpolation” and bingo, I was not the only one to draw that conclusion.  Looks like my gut reaction to reading the text has been the subject of multiple critical theses and that among serious Bible scholars (read: non-fundamentalists) this passage is generally held to be extremely suspect for the very reasons it seemed suspect to me.  Yes, it appears to be referring to the destruction of Jerusalem, yes that would guarantee this is an interpolation, yes the text is textually and semantically different from the surrounding text, no, Paul doesn’t generally refer to Jesus as an historical person.  So, the text and history argue against the verses.  What about manuscripts?  They don’t help.  The earliest known manuscript (papyrus P46) of 1st Thessalonians dates to about 200 CE, about 150 years after the original letter and 130 years after the downfall of Jerusalem, giving only about a century and a half or so for somebody to insert that phrase.

Anyhow, that was fun for me.  Just thought I’d share… Back to looking for any reliable mention in Paul’s books that he was aware that Jesus actually existed on earth and was killed and resurrected…

As I chronicled in Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series, God and I had a long rocky relationship. We went from good buddies to uncomfortable partners to, ultimately, distant relatives. The end came far more swiftly than I had ever imagined possible.

One day in early 2004 I had a question in my head. How could ecosystems function without predator/prey relationships? I asked my wife about it, she agreed that it was puzzling. I asked my friends the Zimmermans about it, they not only agreed it was strange they also added some fuel to the fire by mentioning that they doubted Noah’s Ark as well. In one afternoon of researching some of this material online my entire previous worldview about Jehovah, creation and the last days was shattered and so was I.

The point of these posts is not to talk about why the flood didn’t happen or any of the apologetic, historical, or philosophical arguments about God or religion so I won’t get into all the reasons that my faith suddenly shattered. The point is to chronicle the history of my relationship with God and I have to admit that the way I felt towards him at the moment I discovered the Flood was a myth and that the history I had been taught was impossible was betrayed. I felt like he had lied to me. I went into the bathroom at work in tears and prayed to him over and over to make something make sense with what was happening. I was finding all this evidence that everything I had been taught had been a carefully constructed myth, a lie, and I couldn’t understand why Jehovah would allow that to happen. I had wrestled with myself, skipped college, done so many things because I believed he wanted me to and yet he hadn’t been honest with me. His organization had been allowed to construct carefully crafted lies like the Creation book to convince people like me that they were on solid footing with their ideas about God and I had bought into them. How could he do that to me?

I didn’t immediately decide God didn’t exist but I did fairly immediately decide that I wasn’t sure he did either. The evidence for his existence seemed to hinge on believing he existed in the first place or else it appeared to be flimsy and dishonest. I decided to consider myself neutral on the subject of God until I could research further and figure out if there was any way back to him.

I wound up divorced, again, and eventually also left the Jehovah’s Witnesses which ended a lot of things in my life (like my involvement with the Nuclear Gopher record label I had founded and more importantly my relationship with my family). But things between me and God weren’t done yet, not by a long shot.

You see, believers often think that atheism is some sort of hatred towards God or even a denial of the possibility of God. I consider atheism to be something a might bit different. Atheism, for me, started as a step back from actively believing that Jehovah God was a real person into a neutral place in which I was able to consider the evidence with an open mind as to whether he existed or not. Basically I began an investigation to determine if there had ever been anybody on the other end of my lifelong relationship or if it had just been me talking to myself all along.

My investigation of God turned out to be even more interesting than I had ever expected. First off, I was startled to learn that the God I had grown up with, Jehovah, had a deep and interesting past that predated the Hebrews who made him famous. I found out that he had been worshipped by the Canaanites as El and by the Akkadians before them and the Babylonians before them and the Sumerians before them. I found out all about the deep roots of the Bible stories that I had assumed were invented by the Israelites, but weren’t. I found out just when and where the tetragrametton YHWH was corrupted into the form Jehovah that my peculiar religious cult had venerated as the name of God. I learned a lot about the followers of this God, but I couldn’t find him. The more I learned about him, the more it became obvious that Jehovah only differed from Odin, Zeus and Jupiter in so far as people still believed in him.

There was no finding God in the study of history or the Bible because, let’s face it, the Bible is a little history and a lot of fiction all mangled together. It’s a human product, written and extensively edited by humans, and fascinating as it is, it has no more to tell you about any sort of God that exists in reality than any other book.

No, if I was going to reconnect with God on any level, I needed to look elsewhere. The Bible turned out out to be a dead end and I was able to satisfy myself that Jehovah was one God I could chalk up to fiction. Still, I tried to think of other conceptions of God, conceptions of God that could actually have a chance to exist. Not sky gods who created planets for fun and muddled in their inhabitants affairs, but gods that could be explicitly experienced and required no faith to believe in.

I looked then to myself and the question, just who had I been talking to for all those years? Who was making me feel guilty? Who was making me feel safe? Who was I leaning on, bargaining with? Who? And the answer was obvious… my own conscience.

This was a little surprising to me. I had for years thought of myself as a person who had a malfunctioning conscience. I didn’t think that my own inner voice was a very reliable guide because it seemed to want me to go against what I thought God instructed in the Bible. I wasn’t supposed to steal or covet, I did both at various times. I wasn’t supposed to lie or commit fornication, ditto for those sins. What was strange was that I never recognized that the disapproving parent looking over my shoulder when I did things I regretted wasn’t God, it was me, questioning myself, judging myself, telling myself “this is not who you are, this is not what you really want to be” and I just never recognized it.

Once I realized what that voice was, who it was, who God had been all along, I saw my life differently. I realized some basic things about myself. For one, I realized that I desire and thrive in a strong family environment and that I’ve beaten myself up over the years for stupid decisions in relationships because they have kept me from building the strong family unit that I crave. I realized that while I have urges and cravings, I do not wish to let them define me. They are not who I want to be, and they are not who I am. They are just urges and cravings. I used to think that I was basically at war. There was God propping up my better nature on one hand and me fighting to undermine it on the other. Suddenly I saw that it was just me all along and that who I wanted to be didn’t require a God and was in fact hindered by belief in one.

Believing in a God caused me to see my own internal strength as external, as something I had to beg for, hope for, and feel humbled to have received despite the fact that it was simply a well I could have drawn on at any time with a proper understanding. Believing in God caused me to hate myself instead of learning how to understand the complexities of being a self-aware animal with millions of years of evolutionary programming living in the artificial construct of civilization where some of that programming is inappropriate. Believing in God caused me to make bad decisions and use them as evidence for myself that I was a fundamentally flawed human being. Losing that belief, recognizing God for who he was, united my mind and made me feel like a whole person for the first time since I was a very young child.

A Buddhist might say I’ve found God, that he was in me all along, etc. I’m not saying it’s God though. I still don’t believe that to have a good, strong, part of yourself that makes you wish to do what is right, a conscience, morals, requires that you call it God. I prefer, in fact, to call it what it is… human. I went looking for God and I found my inner human. Now I’m one happy, healthy atheist. Thank God.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of my posts on my relationship with God I went from early childhood up to my decision to get baptized at the age of 16. I had been close to God and far from God but ultimately decided I agreed with his plan for the earth and decided to dedicate myself to him whether he wanted me or not.

Baptism is a big deal. After baptism you are more than just a kid trying to make God happy, you have responsibilities as a member of his spiritual family. I was told by my father that my day of baptism would be the single most important day of my life, more important than getting married even. Once I had decided to go through with it I prayed a lot. I behaved myself, ending my double life. I felt clean, pure, forgiven. I felt like I was getting another chance and Jehovah was happy. It’s odd, I think I remember actually feeling like he was smiling on me.

I was excited on the day of my baptism. It was at the Mayo Civic Center in Rochester MN. I wondered what it would be like, to come up from the water charged with holy spirit, renewed, restored, reinvigorated. I sat down in front of the stage with the other baptismal candidates instead of my with my family, something I had seem others do so many times before. I stood and gave affirmative answers to the questions they asked, along with the rest. I went back to a locker room and changed into swim trunks and a t-shirt, got in line and when my turn came, I stepped into the pool held my breath and got dunked.

While underwater for only a second or so I was really trying to see if I felt different during the experience. I was trying to sense the spiritual jolt or presence that would let me know something big had happened. When I came out of the water and heard the audience applauding and thought of my family watching with tears in their eyes and thought of Jehovah finally being proud of me again, I was sure I felt it. I was exhilarated. The feeling only intensified over the course of the afternoon as friends congratulated me and my father said, “Today you are not only my son, but also my brother” and hugged me, crying. My new relationship with God formed that day. I was no longer to doubt him or test him. I was his sworn servant, he was my boss.

This was, in essence, the nature of my relationship with God over the next 14 years. My feelings that I was a bad person acting good were still there quite often and I still wasn’t perfect but I felt like Jehovah and I had a general understanding of each other. He knew that I meant well and that I would stumble but I would get back up, dust myself off, and put him first in mind. When my girlfriend and I lost control and had pre-marital sex, I went to the elders and turned myself in and followed all the rules God had set up within the congregation for such situations. I even married her, because I was pretty sure that’s what he wanted me to do since I had already slept with her. Later on when she didn’t want to be a Witness anymore and was talking about having an open marriage I took Jehovah’s side again and told her I couldn’t make her believe in God but that I still did and that I wouldn’t cross certain moral lines. When my mother and best friend both left the Witnesses I sided with Jehovah and shunned them as I was told to do by the Watchtower. I was always a bit of an up-and-down sort of Witness, flirting with inactivity one month, giving short notice talks and going out in service all the time the next month. But Jehovah understood where I was coming from. He and I had a history, you know. He didn’t expect that I be perfect, just that I keep trying, and that’s what I did.

This dynamic lasted through my first marriage, through a wild and crazy bachelor period and into my second marriage. I have to admit that I was never entirely comfortable with the arrangement as I never believed God would let me live through Armageddon. I always figured I was doomed but that I was gonna do the right thing regardless. I also figured Jehovah knew that was how I looked at it and must be OK with it, but I never knew for sure that he was OK with it so I didn’t ever assume I was in the clear.

Three years into my second marriage, my relationship with God was being put under intense strain. My wife was extremely phobic of groups of people and leaving the house so we almost never interacted with our congregation or went door to door. She also had very worldly attitudes about many things, including sex, drugs and alcohol and our life was not a model of Godly Decency. I fought her on some things, humored her on some things and joined her on some things. I was not able to balance out the things I did wrong, however, with the things I did right. I was not keeping up my half of the bargain and I started to feel pretty awful and guilty. I tried over and over again to step up my efforts to cling to Jehovah, even going so far as to call into the meetings and listen to them in the bedroom on speakerphone with my wife. Still, my immersion in the world of the Witnesses was less and less. I was no longer sure that Jehovah even paid attention to what was going on my little corner of the world. He became more and more a distant thing.

Then one day, a new doubt popped into my head and this one I couldn’t shake. Next up, the breakup.

In Part 1 of my series on my evolving relationship with God I explained that as a child God was basically my supernatural defender. I counted on him to keep the demons at bay and help me not to have bad dreams. This changed, however, when I had my first encounters with sexual topics and learned that Jehovah was disappointed in me. I asked him to forgive me for whatever bad stuff I may have done, but I never heard a word from him. On to part 2.

When I was in late elementary school my conception of God changed radically. Several factors played a major part in this but the most important one was, I think, Armageddon. As a Jehovah’s Witness kid growing up in the 1980’s the end of the world seemed a very real danger. As a Cold War kid in the time of President Reagan a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed a virtual certainty unless God stepped in first. I was assured over and over again by my parents, teachers, Watchtower articles and talks given at the Kingdom Hall that mankind possessed enough nuclear firepower to destroy every living thing on earth many times over and that we were teetering on the brink of extinction as a species. We saw movies like “The Day After” about nuclear holocaust. What my parents and the Watchtower Society told me, however, was to not worry because Jehovah would never let that happen. He had a plan and his plan was a different kind of Armageddon. Not nuclear, spiritual.

See, it was actually a good thing that mankind possessed such terrifying weapons because it proved that we were truly living in the last days. There was clearly only one solution to the Cold War nuclear crisis: Jehovah God. His plan was straightforward. Whenever he gave the command, his son Jesus would lead an army of angels to earth to kill all the wicked people on the earth, cleansing the earth of the threats that it faced. The survivors (presumably mostly Jehovah’s Witnesses) would then rebuild a paradise earth. Thanks to a bunch of numerological math that I didn’t really understand at the time, we knew that God had started his end times clock tickin’ in 1914 and that the generation of people who were alive at that time would live to see Armageddon. Of course, by the mid-1980s they were getting pretty old. The pressure was building. It was going to be nukes or angels, but either way the world was going to end.

I was sure it was going to be angels, but for the first time in my life I wasn’t sure they weren’t going to kill me when they came down to cleanse the earth. I started to get really really paranoid. I woke up every morning and listened for the sirens that I figured would tell us that bombs or missiles were on their way to kill us all. I had dreams about God destroying the earth and in those dreams I was always terrified that I was going to be killed like the people around me were being killed. When I woke up from those dreams I didn’t feel like it was OK for me to say “Jehovah, Jehovah” and feel better. I felt like God and I had to get back on good terms first.

You might think that I was chiefly concerned at this point with my own survival at Armageddon, and of course I did want to survive it, but the choice between two end of the world scenarios actually got me thinking in a different way. It introduced my first seeds of doubt. Nuclear war, thought I, was a pretty massive and evil thing. And Jehovah darn well better put a stop to it. But what if, I wondered, what if Jehovah wasn’t really real? I mean, how did we KNOW that he was there and that he was going to do all these things? I knew what the Bible said, I knew what the Watchtower said, I knew what my parents believed, but all of those things seemed to require an initial belief that God was there and that he was a Christian before they could function as evidence. I needed a stronger reassurance. I needed to know that Jehovah wasn’t like my imaginary friend Jimmy Pattern who I pretended to play with as a child. At a district convention in 1985, when I was 11 going on 12, I got that reassurance when the Watchtower Society published a book about creation versus evolution. It was called “Life - How Did it Get Here? By Evolution or Creation?” and I felt it was the answer to the prayers I had been praying about whether or not God forgave me. He must have forgiven me to provide me with a book that answered conclusively all the fundamental doubts that had crept into my mind. My guilt over my sins actually cleared and after reading the book cover to cover in the first week I had it, I was no longer feeling like Armageddon was going to be a big scary thing. God was real, creation proved it. He had a plan, the Bible proved that. His plan was going to stop the nukes, the Watchtower Society proved that. And I could get through Armageddon by being on his side.

This blissful state of affairs lasted for a pretty short time. This was mainly because I entered puberty and started obsessing about girls. I was a nerd and 6th grade was the worst year of my life up to that point. Greasy hair, bad plastic glasses, no sense of style, too smart for my own good, in 6th grade I was picked on mercilessly, teased, tormented, had my books dumped, had my head kicked into my locker and lost all my self-esteem. In 6th grade I felt my life was all just one big humiliation. To top it off, I had started to notice girls, dream about girls, and even collect pictures of girls I thought were hot from newspapers and magazines. I didn’t quite understand why girls were suddenly the top of the list for me, but I was very concerned about making sure that my obsession didn’t drive a wedge between me and Jehovah again. Thanks to the Creation Book I felt like I was on solid ground in believing that he was indeed real, I felt that he had accepted me back in his good graces, and I really didn’t want to blow it. But, weighed against the cosmic creator of all things was… curvy parts, soft lips, shining hair, dimples, twinkling eyes, and of course, that mysterious thing that everybody always seemed so interested in… sex.

In 7th grade I took a sex ed class at school. For the first time I actually understood what all this sex stuff was about. One thing that they mentioned in this class was something called “nocturnal emissions” or “wet dreams” and that was new to me. They mentioned that most boys my age started to have them but I had not. This concerned me. Why didn’t I get these wet dreams? My brother Rhett admitted to having had one once and it got me quite upset. What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I get them? I worried that maybe my plumbing was broken or didn’t work properly. So, one day in the shower, after a long prayerful discussion with Jehovah in which I reassured him that I had strictly medical reasons for what I was about to do, I attempted masturbation. It didn’t work. Oh crap, it didn’t work! Sure, it felt nice and all, but nothing came out! I must be broken! I became even more upset.

Naturally, after my shower and a day of contemplation on it I figured that I needed to try again. It took a few desperate attempts but I was ultimately able to establish that my plumbing did indeed work. What a relief. Now I could stop. I was sure Jehovah was OK with what I had done and as long as I didn’t do it anymore it would be fine. I think that resolution lasted a couple of months until, like basically every other 13 or 14 year old boy on the planet, I tried it again, and again, and again. The feelings of guilt and shame returned but worse this time because this time I knew better. Jehovah was aware of what I was doing, he didn’t like it and I was a bad person for knowingly doing it anyhow. It would have been nice if my parents had explained to me what a normal thing masturbation was and how Jehovah didn’t have a problem with it, but they didn’t and I assumed he did and every time I did it I prayed for forgiveness and promised I would resist the urge next time.

This fundamental dynamic, me the sinner with the feelings of guilt and the problem I couldn’t get under control and Jehovah the universal judge looking down on me with grave disappointment, shaped my life for the rest of my teenage life. On the one hand, it drove me to strengthen my time and energy spent in God’s service, doing his will. I went out in the door-to-door ministry more often, commented more at meetings, studied more and just generally worked harder at theocratic things. On the other hand, I developed a secondary life in which I pushed the boundaries of how bad I could be. I learned to swear, I learned to shoplift, and I learned a lot of dirty jokes. I spent a lot of time praying about my condition, my personality, discussing with God just who I thought I was becoming. I saw myself something like the apostle Paul when he said he had a thorn in his flesh, I was fundamentally flawed in some way and I always had to fight it even though often I lost. Like Paul, however, I also really wanted to be good and tried to be good. So, my big question for Jehovah was “am I a good person who occasionally does bad things or a bad person posing as a good person?”

One day on my paper route when I was 16 I sat down on a bench and decided that the answer to my question was obvious. The answer was: it doesn’t matter which you are, just what is right. I am here, the earth is here, creation proves God exists, the end times are here, and I have a choice. Side with God or side with Satan. My motive for which side I join cannot be based on whether I think I’ll survive. That’s irrelevant. It has to be based on what is right. I believed Jehovah was in the right and I knew his side was the side I was on. At that moment I resolved that while I would try to clean up my act, more importantly I would dedicate my live to Jehovah and work hard on his behalf regardless of whether he accepted or forgave me. Maybe he’d kill me at Armageddon, but maybe I’d have saved somebody else by then and I’d know I did the right thing.

That was when I decided to get baptized and my relationship with God changed again.