Hell Torment Confusion Testimonies Born Again
O ne stormy night in the summertime of 1992, I walked down the basement steps of my parents' house to await the apocalypse. The Iowa air was thick with humidity, the ominous green sky prophesying a tornado. My 10-year-one-time easily trembled every bit I laid out my inventory: animal crackers, juice boxes, a Bible, and every sharp knife in the kitchen.
My parents were home tardily and my kickoff thought was that they'd been raptured upwards to heaven. I was a sinner who had been left behind to face up the Earth's destruction.
Thunder boomed as I opened my Bible to the Book of Revelation, a passage I knew well after years spent on my dad'southward knee every bit he read it aloud to his kids. This would be my roadmap to doom: the stars falling from the sky. The cracked globe spitting locusts with the heads of lions. The beast with seven heads, the body of a leopard, and the feet of a bear will rising from the body of water and exist worshiped by all those left backside on Earth.
I would have to hide from the antichrist, who would strength all those left on Earth to renounce Christ and receive the mark of the beast on their correct mitt or forehead. Anyone constitute with the beast's mark after death would be thrown into the lake of fire. If I successfully avoided this and died of old age, I would exist reunited with my family unit in sky. (Note: There are countless interpretations of how this would all become downwardly, but this is the one I heard most consistently as a child.)
Somewhen my parents did come up home. I packed upwardly my gear, put the knives away, and never mentioned a thing to either of them. I was safe – for now.
Halloween with the Hell House
For any kid raised under the night bubble of religious fundamentalism, moments like this are not uncommon. In the evangelical Christian earth of midwest America, it was normal for adults to tell children they would probably never grow former. The end could and would come up whatsoever minute now. My dad and Bob Dylan were both "born again" in 1978. They didn't know each other, only each were caught up in the explosive tendency of converted hippies known as the Jesus Movement (or "Jesus Freaks" to Hunter S Thompson). Following the cultural and political destruction of the 60s blossom power cause, thousands of dropouts were at present renouncing drugs and getting turned on to the great hippie in the sky known equally Jesus.
Millions were also buying a volume called The Late Great Planet Globe, which interpreted biblical text through mod political events, concluding that Christ would return and the World would burn effectually 1988. The book was made into a motion picture starring (a very portly and probably boozer) Orson Welles and was immediately followed by several other pulp rapture films and Christian stone albums that warned of an imminent doomsday.
Born in 1982, my childhood was filled with more biblical prophecy than Sesame Street good times. The urgency of avoiding hell surpassed whatsoever picayune instruction the world had to offer. Later all, if you're staring down the barrel of eternal torment, who has the time for algebra?
Salvation was attached to conventionalities, and in society to protect my belief I had to censor my thoughts. The book of Mark says that "whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin". So I was careful to never even think a thought that could exist considered blasphemous. This was greatly exhausting; and while I was mostly successful at repressing my intellectual curiosity during the 24-hour interval, in one case sleep came I lost all security clearance to my ain heed.
My dreams were terrorized by a wide-eyed witch who worked for the devil. She would hunt me through dark corridors, cackling and insisting I'd already damned myself to hell. Soon I began sleepwalking, often waking in the darkness of our dorsum thousand. Presently I began fugitive sleep, staying awake, watching TV to stay awake as long as I could.
Teachers at school became frustrated with my falling comatose in class and daily trips to the nurse's part. Knowing nix of panic attacks, the constant bursts of adrenaline and nausea I experienced could only be described as "I experience sick". Throughout my middle and high schoolhouse years, I flunked more classes than I passed.
Release came only when my evangelical friends and I put on theatrical productions that frightened audiences into conversion. Those plays would happen on Easter, but the most fun came at Halloween with the Hell House. Presented equally just some other haunted house, crowds would be led through a series of vignettes featuring abuse, overdoses, abortions, drunk-driving crashes, gang shootings and suicides (this was how we causeless all nonbelievers spent their fourth dimension), followed by the big-budget climax of hell.
Our sinners would walk through a slim, night hallway, where unseen hands grabbed at their ankles. They'd scream, then blindly step into a cavernous, smoke-filled room where the blackness was chaotically punctuated by bursts of flames. Once completely disoriented and emotionally exhausted, patrons were then ushered into a comfortably lit, domestically furnished room with tissue boxes and smiling counselors ready to share the good news of Jesus with them.
Looking back, I now realize that the tactics (guilt, disorientation of senses, casting doubts of their moral identity) would probably qualify as brainwashing. Perhaps I knew that at the time merely rationalized it because so much was at pale. Subsequently all, the year 2000 was almost upon us.
It may seem silly now, but you tin can't overestimate the ability that the Y2K scare had on the apocalypse fever of evangelicals. By this fourth dimension my parents had seen more than than a few terminate-of-the-globe prophecies come and go and weren't equally easily worked up about the doomsday many idea Y2K would exist. In my abode, conversations almost the antichrist and the mark of the beast had stopped years ago, just by my teenage years I'd get far more of a fundamentalist than my parents had ever been.
Despite living in a pocket-sized town, I was a member of iii different evangelical Christian churches at this time. Needing far more than only a Sunday fix, I was attending about nine different religious classes a calendar week. And then at that place were 2 different church camps each summer, four conventions each school year, and countless youth rallies, concerts, and theatrical productions. I even enrolled myself in a rural Christian school my junior yr of high school. I never engaged in sports, and never listened to any music or watched movies that weren't affiliated with Christianity. I was perfectly isolated from any exterior influence.
My dad, however, had renounced church altogether, and my mom simply went on Sundays, and then for the most part my zealotry was self-imposed. I judged their lack of delivery and often stopped speaking to them for stretches of time. Dissimilar drug use or listening to gangsta rap, no parent worries about their kids spending too much fourth dimension at church. Simply looking back, my overdosing on religion was condign a serious problem.
The Y2K scare was a huge focus because information technology was both imminently close and so mysterious even the nonreligious believed information technology was a legitimate threat.
At church camps and youth conventions, we cried, wailed and beat our chests in shame, begging God to forgive united states of america our sins and never leave us backside. In the years of my adolescence, I shed plenty tears to make full an Olympic swimming puddle.
As 2000 approached, my panic attacks grew more severe. I pondered the nature of eternity nearly every minute of the twenty-four hour period. Whether torture or paradise, the concept itself filled me with existential dread. Eternity. As in, forever. And always. And and so more. And more. I just couldn't wrap my head around it.
Spoiler warning: null happened on the showtime twenty-four hours of January in 2000.
Like the Jesus Movement's disappointment at the world not ending in 1988, our faith was silently cracked when the earth kept on turning into the new millennium.
A sunset epiphany
I finished school and began a life on the road, traveling aimlessly around the country, working an endless series of construction, restaurant, retail, factory and solar day-labor jobs. I stayed in hostels, on couches and in brusk-term rentals, making new friends and slowly becoming the thing I'd always been taught to avoid: worldly.
All the same despite the drugs, sex and foul language that at present consumed my daily existence (a not-uncommon lifestyle for young Christians away from home for the first time), my faith in God remained on life support. At that place was too much at stake to flippantly reject it, no affair how many unanswered questions rattled in my encephalon. If conservancy is tied to belief – as I believed it was – then I couldn't permit any seeds of doubt to take buy in the soil of my heed. I clung to the idea that the rapture was still imminent, but my conviction was weak and I was drastic for something to continue my beliefs adrift. I adored intellectual Christians such every bit CS Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, and secular musicians who identified equally Christians such every bit Moby, Bono and Johnny Greenbacks. If they could live in The World and retain their faith, why couldn't I?
My early 20s were spent desperately reading as much as I could get my easily on about the Bible and why it was intellectually feasible. Assertive I needed to be able to refute all arguments to the contrary – even my own – I read secular works by those who despised Christianity, such as Tom Robbins, the Marquis de Sade and Christopher Hitchens.
Then 1 evening in San Francisco in 2006, while watching the sun ready over the Pacific Sea, I quietly said to myself: "I don't call up God exists."
My breath stopped. Cold sweat raced down my back. I winced, half expecting to have a middle attack. Or a giant beast to rise from the h2o.
But nothing happened. The world kept turning. Simply every bit information technology did in 1992 when my parents eventually came home and proved the rapture hadn't occurred. Just as it did in 2000 when society did not collapse from Y2K. My entire life I'd been holding my breath, anticipating a scene of mind-shattering horror that simply never arrived.
I am now 33 years former and am often asked if I'one thousand bitter nearly how I was raised. First, I'd say little of the arraign belongs on my parents' shoulders. They were young, idealistic Christians when they had me, and like and so many religious parents, only had the best of intentions of rearing me in their faith.
"When yous're young, things seem a little more blackness and white," my mom recently told me during a phone chat. It was Easter Sunday and I asked whether she regretted exposing me to the terrifying prophecies of the Bible at a immature age. "Regret might be a bit harsh. Would I burrow things differently today, and non have them be so hellfire and brimstone? Perhaps."
I asked my dad if he'd known about the intense anxiety I'd suffered throughout my babyhood. "I knew you were afraid. You were such a scared little male child. I didn't know what to do."
I would say that some of the almost emotionally rapturous moments of my life were had in Pentecostal church building services, where the loud and hypnotic music, speaking in tongues, primal dancing, shaking and collapsing to the basis, caused explosions of sensory transcendence in my piddling trunk. I've since had glimmers of these moments on a dance floor, a rock concert, or moments of exceptional sexual climax, but nothing has come up close to the indescribable high of a frenetic religious service laced with an uncut dose of pure belief.
At the same time, I've never been able to shake the deeply rooted conviction that information technology'south hopeless to plan for the future. Home ownership, spousal relationship, kids and retirement savings all require a faith that tomorrow will be here in the morn. While my head tin rationalize that one year will probably follow the next, my center cannot handle annihilation more than than 1 24-hour interval at a fourth dimension.
I am notwithstanding plagued with chronic nightmares, which my therapist says are a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. Earlier entering therapy, I'd never heard of the term "religious abuse". The idea that an extreme religious upbringing could be a course of psychological torture was new to me. When reading the horror stories of other evangelicals who grew upwards under the constant fear of rapture (some of whom had the same experiences I had of assertive they'd been left behind), it felt right. After all, I could think of several ex-Christians I've known who have had extreme drug addiction and emotional disorders that fit the bill of someone with PTSD.
In some respects, I experience like I got off easy. I'1000 in a loving relationship, enjoy a strong circle of friends, and have built a reasonably successful career as a author.
Yet any time I come across a news story about global warming being worse than expected, or that the economy is on the verge of plummet, or that some demagogue running for president is leading us toward a nuclear showdown with religious fundamentalists in the Center Eastward, a familiar voice whispers through my listen, reminding me that this is information technology, what we've been waiting for all these years, the terminate has come up, you were right to never showtime a family, because the world is about to be plunged into a one thousand-yr darkness of torment and chaos, so take hold of whatever supplies y'all tin become your hands on and head out into the wilderness, because a fate worse than death awaits those defenseless unprepared.
And so I take a deep breath, reminding the frightened child inside me that he is condom, that the world may be full of dubiousness and hurting and confusion, only we are here, now, and there are no locusts with the heads of lions likely to come out of the World whatever time shortly.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/05/religion-evangelical-christian-apocalypse-josiah-hesse
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