Portal of Evil News is being shut down at the end of the year. This is something I posted there some time back and I didn't want it to be lost in the purge, so I've decided to do double duty and cross-post it for your benefit to save it.
I was raised Catholic in a very Catholic part of town. I grew up fascinated by the idea of science as it was explained to me; to make discoveries based on evidence, and to see that evidence in the world all around me. I internalized that and applied it to what my parents and church were telling me about God. I chose to see God's hand in this wonderfully-ordered universe I can barely comprehend even now. I believed it but would not have called myself devout by any stretch of the imagination.
When I was 14 and a Freshman in high school, I started attending a large area high school with a ton of people I didn't know and had the normal anxieties about fitting in. My older sister, who was at the time very religious, attended a religious retreat for teenagers in town and suggest that maybe I should go if I wanted to meet people; some people I half-knew from school would most likely be there. I thought, "why not? Maybe I can talk with people about how beautiful the idea of gravity is, how cool and tightly-packed evolution is, etc." So I went to the camp. This was my first exposure to what I would learn about 5 years later was part of the huge movement called "Evangelical Christianity".
My first time around was pretty harmless and fun. We laughed, sang songs, heard the sort of inspirational stuff you see pastors at megachurches preaching these days. It didn't make much of an impression on me spiritually but it was kind of fun and I got to know some classmates, so I signed up to go again, this time as a staffer.
I was assigned to something called the "prayer team". See, one of the Big Reveals for the new people at the end of the weekend is that this whole time, there has been this group of like ten of your peers behind the scenes taking shifts to pray for you around the clock, 24 hours a day. To an outsider I am sure it sounds bizarre but it struck me as a nice gesture.
Anyway, on prayer team this time there was this Evangelical kid. Home schooled, the works. The first night, he comes tearing into our sleeping area during his shift and wakes us up. He is babbling about having had a vision of a demon. I would have laughed it off but what happened next was one of the most chilling events of my entire teenage life.
The kid launched into this long description of a squat, lizard-like thing manning this huge bell on wheels, like a medieval siege belfry. In a panic, he says, he was scribling down nonsense on this penpad he happened to be holding (writing in tongues, I guess) and said the only thing legible after he recovered was the words "Mal Agog". He said he somehow knew that was the demons name.
Everyone looked really concerned about the presence of demons or this kid's grasp of reality or I don't even know what, but I just found myself repulsed by this. This was not the world of ordered, structured beauty I believed in. This was nonsense.
We got a counselor to come talk to the kid. He repeated the story, and the guy looked all grave and gave a speech about how we are engaged in spiritual warfare, how Satan doesn't like what we are doing here, and so forth.
I want to make something clear: when Evangelicals talk about "spiritual warfare", that is not a euphemism for their evangelism. In my experience, it reflects a sincere believe that behind the veil of physical reality, angels and demons are engaged in a violent battle for your soul. You, specifically.
As it is, my prayer shift was next. The counselor looked at me and said he would take over my shift if I was "too scared", like I was in physical danger if I took over prayer duties right then and there. I said I would go, that it was no problem, and everybody watched me leave the room quite literally like I was a soldier going off to war.
As I sat there praying, or trying to, I felt nothing. No presence at all. This space in which I was sitting was supposed to have been the spot of, I don't know, some kind of breach in physical reality and there was not a single part of my mind that did not consider it a plain, dark room.
And then it hit me.
I had never felt anything. Certainly nothing close to what was turning that homeschooled kid into blubbering paste over in the next room. Had he honestly thought he saw a demon? Was he scared he didn't, so he made the whole thing up to prove his piety?
Here I was, sending prayers into darkness. I heard nothing in return, and the definition of fanaticism is, when put in that situation, to pray louder.
I did not lose my faith in God then. I don't remember specifically when I started identifying as an atheist, but it definitely became inevitable after that night.
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Topic: This Is a Thing (Read 4686 times)