Jesus loves me This I know For the Bible Tells me so; Little ones to him belong They are weak and he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me; Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me.... The Bible tells me so! Yes, I was brought up as a Christian, and by good Christian people. I attended a summer bible school in Hunter, Oklahoma between the 1st and 2nd grades. This is the song we sang every day. Interestingly, forty-some years later, I still get this song in my head sometimes. It doesn't go away until it's supplanted by something more modern... like "Blue Suede Shoes" or "Jailhouse Rock" or "Hey, Jude". And, yes, it drives me crazy. I remember the young woman who had our bible school class teaching us to sing that one, and "Itsy Bitsy Spider". That's all I really remember about that class, that and the fact that I really didn't fit in. This was caused by my cousin telling me earlier that year that there was no Santa Claus. So I started questioning everything that I couldn't see. It was a bad year for myths. First Santa Claus, then the tooth fairy, then the easter bunny, then Jesus, then God. All bit the dust in 1953. But I coped. No-one wanted a seven-year-old kid in Oklahoma questioning anything he was told. So I nodded my head and said my prayers when it was necessary. Just go along with the program. I went along with the program for several years, even getting baptized along with my cousin and several other people. That was an interesting experience, lying to a preacher and the congregation. But it had to be done... Then, in 1955, my sister, my brother and I were involved in a car accident. Linda was killed, and brother Dan was also seriously injured, but not severely. Both of my cousins who were in the car with us had extensive facial damage, losing teeth and acquiring scars. All that I had was a concussion and a seriously swollen face, but no broken bones. Losing my sister was "God's Will" and I shouldn't feel badly about it. That was the family party line. That was what these people really believed. I didn't, however. There is no way I could reconcile this thinking with my nine-year-old brain. "God" was supposed to love the children, why would he kill them? They are weak, he is strong. He kills them. I had not really renounced god in my mind then, just kinda thought I'd see the light some day. I thought I was just kinda slow, everybody else seemed to believe, and they were people that I loved and respected. I'd catch on some day. But these people that I loved and respected were believing something that was so evidently contradictory that a nine-year-old kid knew they were wrong. However, I didn't have much in the way of self-confidence, and surely not enough to contradict my elders. So I went along. It was a whole different story for my father. He knew what he believed, and it didn't work, whatever it was. He started down the road to alcoholism with a new relish, fueled by his daughters' death, a road ending with his own death. While he was going through this process, I lived with my mother. You could never ask for a better person than my mother. A wonderful woman, and a good Christian. And i went to great measures to avoid displeasing her. "Sure, Mom, I believe in God. I believe the same way you do...". That was a lie, and she knew it was a lie. And to this day, my mother loves me, but she knows I'm going to Hell. 'Cause I don't believe the same way she does, not even close. But she hasn't given up on me yet... I told myself for years that I was an agnostic, just looking for a god that made sense to me. I researched religions. Eventually, I married a Catholic girl and converted to Catholicism. Another lie, this time to myself. I tried and tried to believe... memorized all the rosary crap, all the saint's crap... I really, really tried. I went to mass every Sunday... so did my wife. It didn't change her at all, the way religion did my mother. She was doing it by rote... I don't know if she really believes or not. Since my divorce, I haven't been to church (except with my mother, at her insistence) and I will never go again. I realized that it was not necessary to lie to the world, to my mother or to anyone else. I was an atheist, and that was that. End of story. I felt that I had graduated from agnosticism to atheism, there was nowhere else to go. I was wrong. I am now an antixian. Indeed, a militant antixian. A very gradual graduation, about fifteen years' worth. The wool is slowly lifting from my eyes. As an antixian, I feel like I am discriminating against other religions, ones that I know very little about. If I knew more about them, I would most likely be against them, too. Ah, no, change that to certainly. For believing in myths, any kind, is absolutely against reason. Organized religions believe in myths. The myth of god, the myth of good and evil, the myth of souls, the myths of heaven and hell. And what I am against more than anything else... is thinking that anyone who doesn't believe the same way you do can be killed with impunity, because they don't really have souls like you do, so it doesn't matter to them or to your god, who is the only true god. In the mind of an xian, condemning a person to hell is a relatively civilized way of killing someone... you don't really have to worry about the body and world opinion and all of that other messy stuff. A nice bit of sublimation, there. And it seems to work for them. Most of the time.... A chapter heading that you will never see in an American History Book... Six Million Jews Killed By Christians In Germany 1937-1945 Except for when they think that they can get by with it... the actual, physical killing. Then it is indeed a gleeful thing, they get to see the results of their actions right now! How many times has it happened? How many places is it happening in right now? Read the news. Study the history. I was brought up believing that the holocaust was the most evil thing that had ever happened in human history. But it was carefully explained to me that it was a racial pogram. The Germans felt that they were the master race, and that it was OK to get rid of the subhuman species that were fouling the air and the land. Only very, very recently did I figger it out.... Those Germans? Well, they were Catholics. And there were some Lutherans in there too. God-fearing people. The pope told them it was OK to kill the jews (well, OK, but he didn't say that it was bad to kill Jews), that they didn't have souls. The preachers, the priests, even Hitler himself... all said it was OK. God had told them that the Germans were the Master Race. It was OK. Go right ahead. Six million jews later... the only country in the world that didn't then have a state religion, the state which separated state from religion, the state that disdained religion... stopped the killing. Shortly after that, the United States of America changed its' Pledge of Allegiance to say, "...One Nation, under God, indivisible...". There wasn't a vote on it. I Want a vote on it. I want "In God We Trust" off of the coins in my pocket. I want to never hear another politician saying, "Family values... church... Good Christians... in God's name..." I don't want the US of A to become another Germany of the 30's. But it could happen, really easily. The Germans. I know a lot of them, I love a lot of them. Very good people. German Catholic... almost impossible to say one without the other here in Kansas. Christians. People who, by definition, don't think for themselves. People who let others tell them how to believe. How to behave. What to do. Who to respect. Who to kill. Not just Germans. Not just Swedes. Not just... any nationality. People who let themselves be led. People who do not live with reason, but in spite of it. Our fellow Americans.... In God we Trust. Bullshit. Jesus loves me This I know For the Bi - ble Tells me so; ..... Yes, Jesus loves me.... The Bi - ble tells me so! So... please don't listen to the priests or the preachers... They will tell you to come kill me someday.