How I Lost My Faith . I

I was a god-loving, god-fearing child who attended Sunday School at a small Baptist church near the elementary school I attended for as far back as I can remember.  I would stand on our picnic table in the middle of our adjacent field and belt out religious and patriotic songs I'd learned in church as loud as I could, not caring one way or another whether the neighbors could hear me.

All that changed one Halloween when I was seven or eight and discovered that the preacher was allowing people to celebrate this "most pagan, Satanic of all all holidays"—inside the church!  I clearly remember being utterly appalled at seeing ghostly hangmen in the cemetery and witches and monsters running amok through the church (I can still see clearly someone dunking for apples and a monster staring through the window).

For the next two or three years I began to read books on evolution, and since my "God" had let me down, it seemed like the second-best source for answers to questions I could not yet fully articulate.

Now, I'd been trick-or-treating every year like most kids up to that point, but it  never struck me as counterintuitive to be preaching about God and angels and Paradise, only to turn around and promote a celebration of His eternal enemies—in His own house, no less!  Even at that age, I felt moral outrage over what I considered to be utter blasphemy.

Two or three years later, at age 10, I was introduced to the teachings of Jehovah's Witnesses and discovered logical, Bible-based answers that made sense to me at the time, such as "it's not my fault that I wet the bed!  I can stop blaming myself!  It's Satan the Devil's fault!" 

I distinctly remember making that statement one day to my godmother after a Bible Study with an elder's wife.  It was the first time I can remember ever feeling free of the guilt and shame that had been growing inside me—virtually from infancy—over my perceived inherent badness or evil.  

I was only ten; it would be another seven years before I would feel that kind of freedom again.