Uncut and Uncensored - You've Been Warned!
(Full names omitted to save everyone grief.)
Hi. My name is Eric, and I am a sinner.
This is my story.
I was born in July, 1970. That makes me twenty six years old as I write this. My father was a young professor at Wayne State University (and still is today), my mother a tennis pro. They had met at graduate school while studying physical education at the University of Wisconsin a few years earlier.
Both grew up in the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod. When the Wisconsin Synod broke fellowship with the Missouri Synod over the growing liberalism in that Synod, my father's church withdrew from the Missouri Synod and joined with Wisconsin. When they came to Detroit, they ended up joining a Wisconsin Synod church.
I attended government (i.e., public) schools throughout my formal "education." I always had excellent potential but never applied it fully to my schoolwork. I was always reading and studying my own choice of subjects on my own. I'd work just hard enough to get good (not great) grades in school, while I spent most of my time inside and outside class reading something that rarely related to schoolwork.
I don't remember going through a period of learning to read. Once I couldn't... then I could read anything. Almost immediately I was reading anything in sight. I'd grab library books my mom had brought home from her dresser, read them and have them back before she even knew they were gone. I remember reading science fiction by Brian Aldiss (sp?) when I was six, Larry Niven's Ringworld when I was seven, Tolkien's epic Lord of the Rings and other works when I was eight. I had a baby-sitter who would be the valedictorian of his class, and I was always reading the same books he was after he'd finished them.
Except for sunday school material everything I read was secular. I was most interested in history and war. Especially World War II. I read everything I could get my hands on from the libraries, school book brochures, parents, friends, bookstores, everything. At my grandparents I'd sneak downstairs after midnight, and they'd catch me reading from the 1955 Encyclopedia Britannica's four hundred page section on the Second World War. They ended up giving the set to my parents.
I didn't have many friends, but I was very close to the ones I had. I never did have a friend who lived within decent walking distance (a demographic fluke, I suppose), so outside school I could only get together when a parent drove us. I had a couple close friends from kindergarten, but we stopped visiting after a few years. My best friend when I was seven moved out of state. Then I transferred to a "Talented and Gifted" program at another school, breaking ties with other friends. When I graduated from the TAG program I lost all my school friends again as they went on to different middle schools.
But the worst blow came when I was about twelve. I still had three very close friends at that point; Aaron, a friend at church where we were inseparable; Amy, a tomboy a few blocks away (we had younger brothers the same age) who was great fun; and Paul, a friend at school in band and with whom I played Little League (his father was the manager). All three moved away within a few months of each other, just as I was entering adolescence. After that I turned inward, swearing to never again be emotionally vulnerable to another person.
I spent most of my time in my bedroom when not at school. I became enamored of Dungeons and Dragons and similar role playing games, playing the games alone (as well as you can do that!) while living in an intellectual fantasy world. I switched from reading history and warfare to science fiction and fantasy. My grades began a long, slow, but very steady slide that would continue through college.
I entered the International Baccalaureate program when I was in eighth grade, taking the morning bus to high school early for classes there before travelling back to middle school for more classes. Out of about sixty at the start I was one of two full diploma candidates left by the middle of the senior year. More on that later.
I was always a "nerdy" kid and around this time I was the spitting image of the skinny kid with thick glasses in the "Revenge of the Nerd" movies. All I lacked was the tape around the glasses. I was isolated, emotionally abused by most other adolescents, and generally miserable. I kept my mouth shut but I positively hated people, society and America in general. I wanted to live on a mountain top somewhere and take potshots at anyone who got near me. When the career counselors first started asking about my plans (knowing I was a star IB student) I listed "park ranger" as my first choice, inquiring about how one got to be stationed at those remote fire towers used to observe wilderness areas, living in a 10" X 10" box at the top.
Another thing causing friction between me and the human race were my convictions. Between my regular church attendance and my study of history and war I had a strong sense of right and wrong and I couldn't stand the latter. As a Lutheran theologian might say, I knew the Law but not the Gospel. God was a rational intellectual concept, not a personal being. Forgiveness was something I had little understanding of, whether coming from God or from myself to others.
I had no interest in participating in group events such as sports. My parents made me. I can remember delaying talking to the track coach past the sign-up deadline, then breaking into tears when he confronted me harshly about it. He was surprised I made it through the season, more so when I signed up for cross-country the next season. I was never great but I was not a quitter and ended up serving as cross-country captain and was there when our track team took the class A state title my senior year.
Whoever said that human beings are social beings was right. After walling myself off emotionally from the human race (and God) for years I found that out the hard way. Although I was in a complete state of denial that I needed anyone emotionally, in reality I was extremely vulnerable and ready to throw all my emotional eggs into one basket.
Yeah, you guessed it - I "noticed" a girl. We both had younger siblings in Sunday School at church, so we'd work on homework out in the hall for an hour or so each Sunday. It took me about a year just to work up the courage to sit near her. I fumbled every attempt at a conversation and became anxious every time I was near her. But it wasn't until my senior year that I admitted the terrifying truth to myself - I was head over heels in "love" with her.
This was not real love, though it was hardly as twisted as a lot of what passes for "love" in the world today. It was, first and foremost, spiritual adultery because I had placed all my trust in her as my sole hope for happiness and (merely temporal) "salvation." Spiritual adultery is loving, trusting and needing anyone more than God. Second, it was an emotional need I was experiencing, not true Christian love. I was incredibly sincere about it in my heart, but sincerity doesn't change what it was.
The anxiety I had felt up to that point became extremely severe and painful panic attacks from there on. I had no idea what to do as far as actually asking her out on a date or developing a friendship (my experience in the former was non-existent, in the latter mostly forgotten). I soon realized she was from a wealthier family than mine, which just humbled me more and gave my anxieties more excuse to inflict heartache on me.
In short, my life was a desperate mess. I couldn't bring myself to talk to her and I felt like I couldn't live without her. Satan had me in a pretty tight grip! Everything I did revolved in at least some remote way around furthering my odds with her. Few teen-agers want to go to church as severely as I did then so I could see her, which is the wrong reason completely for attending church!
My senior year I chose engineering as a major partly because I had decided I wanted to do something honestly useful with my life, but also because "she" had mentioned an interest in it. (Besides, that's what all the other bright seniors were selecting, and I couldn't think for myself at that point anyway.) "She" mentioned going to the University of Michigan, and since I was a year older I decided to be there when she got there.
So I applied and was accepted to U-M, intending to study aerospace engineering (I had always been a bit of a futurist, technologist and space travel nut).
It was the week of my final suite of International Baccalaureate testing that I really confronted my feelings about the young lady to whom I was enamored. I decided that I absolutely had to confess my feelings to her before I went away to college, for a was terrified someone else would steal her away in the interim. As a result I was a distracted wreck the week of testing. I don't know for certain if it made any difference, but I ended up with a score of 4 on a scale of 1 to 7 for each of my six IB tests. You needed 24 points for a diploma, which was worth one full year of college credit.
So I got the diploma, right? Not quite. You see, in addition to my spiritual adultery I was also a believer in evolution, particularly aspects of natural selection. I considered it a fundamentally great way to view reality. I was totally oblivious to the contradictory nature of Bible history and evolution or implications for evolution. I spent a lot of time doing armchair theorizing about evolutionary processes as a teen-ager.
One conclusion I came to was that in the absence of natural selection, mutations would tend to accumulate and the overall health of a gene pool would decline. I extended this further, recognizing that this would still happen if natural selection was not rigorous enough to offset the continual tendency of the gene pool to be diluted. (Now I understand that entropy is so powerful and improvements by undirected natural processes so astronomically rare that it is really formally impossible for serious evolutionary advancement to ever occur.)
I applied this thinking to humans in a racist fashion. I always took it for granted that if you believe in evolution, you have to be a racist. The two go hand in hand, no matter how much "politically correct" scientists may try to duck the issue. Evolution means the separation of species into various superior and inferior groups, with advancement coming by the extermination of inferior groups to make way for continuing evolution among superior groups. This is integral to all evolutionary paradigms and there is no way around it.
However, I was not an orthodox evolutionist. Applying my thinking to human history, I concluded that civilizations effectively minimize natural selection. Medical care allowed many inferior beings to survive who would otherwise die out. How many of you need to wear glasses or contacts? More than half the American population does. How many of you are diabetics? Millions more need constant treatment to survive. How many of you would be able to survive indefinitely in a wild state? The mutation load in our civilization is tremendous.
Therefore, I reasoned that civilizations actually became more genetically degenerate over time, until they had fallen so far they literally collapsed from their own collective mutation load. Then, more primitive, "cleaner" races living under more severe conditions took over, perhaps eventually forming their own civilization and thus continuing the cycle.
I applied this inversion of ordinary racial evolutionism in a paper I had to write for the IB program. The paper was worth -1 to +2 points when graded. My subject was the fall of the Roman Empire. As you can imagine, I boldly presented my racialist model of human history in explaining why the Empire fell (I was completely oblivious to the "politically correct" atmosphere and complete denial of racial differences among the college academia of that time, among whom my paper would be evaluated).
The paper received a -1, I received a "+1/2" from a lunchtime philosophy/epistemology course I took my senior year, and I ended with a score of 23 1/2, just short of the diploma. To this day I can't help but wonder if my other scores (six "4's" without exception?) were completely honest. I was too distracted emotionally at this point to care much, however.
And so I went to college. I never was able to plainly confess my feelings to the young lady. During the first semester I ran nearly forty miles one night to her house, leaving a cheery message saying hello in chalk in her driveway. My plan was to sleep in nearby woods and then run back the next morning. However, the November cold and the discomfort of my crude shelter kept me from sleep that night, and I ended up straggling home and getting a ride back to school from my astonished parents.
Separation from even seeing her and the frictions of dorm life wore me down. With no emotional reserve and no one to lean on I grew increasingly depressed. I did not get along well with my roommate. He was a wealthy pre-law major who struck me as arrogant, was a two-timing womanizer who slept around, socially liberal and emotionally abusive to his girlfriend. On one occasion he struck out at me as a chauvinist for my (rationalistically based) anti-abortion stance, then within thirty seconds was on the phone with his girlfriend putting her down and callously chewing her out. For someone utterly bent on faithfulness and gentle kindness to one special lady it was utterly sickening, as was the behavior of most other students.
I had trouble sleeping (I have always been a light sleeper, having grown up in a very quiet neighborhood). One night after several especially sleepless days the kids in the dorm had the music turned up after quiet hours had begin (which was often the case). They were also making quite a bit of noise. I went out, asking them to quiet things down so I could sleep. Usually this helped somewhat, even given my anti-social reputation. This time they responded by turning up the music. I asked again only to be met with derision. Something snapped.
The third time I came out with a large combat/survivalists' knife (the kind that comes complete with a compass and a all kinds of supplies in the handle) hidden in my bathrobe. When they gave me a hard time again, I suddenly brandished it before my roommate and a half dozen of the other torturers. Things got real quiet, and stayed that way several nights. The knife was later confiscated during a visit by campus security, but no other action was ever taken. But it was a sign of what can happen when you are pushed too far and have nothing to fall back on emotionally.
Sometime during the spring of my freshman year I found out that you-know-who had decided to attend Michigan State rather than U-M. I was crushed. I didn't know what to do, until I met with a math tutor who suggested that MSU was actually a better school for engineering undergrads than UM. There was more applied science, the grad students teaching classes were more likely to be able to speak English decently (a real problem at U-M!), professors were more available, etc. The perception that U-M produced a better engineering graduate could well be explained by the fact that they had better caliber students as inputs in the first place.
So I had the perfect rationalization to transfer. Unfortunately I applied too late to be accepted for the fall semester. I would have to transfer in after Christmas in January. This threw me into another spin of terror and depression. What if she became involved with someone else before I even got there? The best laid plans of mice and men....
I passed the summer unable (as usual) to get near her without breaking into a terrified sweat. I rationalized that I was just nervous trying to talk to her around her parents and other people in a public place, and that I would be OK if and when I could talk alone with her. But that was frustratingly impossible in church.
My last semester at U-M was a disaster. I wasn't interested in anything and just slid through my classes. My grade point average dropped from something like 3.35 to 2.75. Finally I transferred and arrived at MSU. My big chance to pull my life together and find happiness had arrived!
Things did not go well.
My first roommate (as far as I could tell in the week I was there) was apparently a gangster or a hoodlum, and an extremely messy one at that. (By contrast, my senior year at MSU I was voted as having the "cleanest dorm room" not just on the guys wing but including the gals wing as well.) Within days I scrambled to secure another room. I was in the dorm next to the one housing the object of my desires, able to visit her easily.
And visit I did. However, the same old panic attacks remained, and I could never quite get words out of my mouth, at least not what I wanted to say. I could blather perfectly well. After a stress-filled week (for both of us) of annoying her she called me a jerk, kicked me out and told me to go away. Even then I cared for her and tried to keep an eye out for her, sometimes timing my visits to other buildings (especially at night) to watch over her. If she ever got into trouble, I wanted to be the heroic white knight to rescue her! Doubtless this was misinterpreted. I think by this time she was rather suspicious of me and my intentions, and I can't blame her! Obviously I was having severe communications problems.
Through it all I constantly blamed myself, kicking myself mentally for every mistake, every personal shortcoming, every dumb comment or opinionated statement or wrong gesture I made. This only increased the pressure I put on myself in subsequent meetings and left me feeling crushed and defeated the rest of the time. I prayed a tremendous amount for the ability to communicate and be what she wanted me to be like, but the prayers were never answered (more on that later).
There was a method to my madness. If I blamed her in any way, I might as well give up and say, "well, if that's just the way she is there is nothing I can do about it but despair." By blaming myself for everything I felt that if I could just try harder that it could make a difference. I poured an immense amount of intellectual and emotional effort into trying to plan and act by sheer will-power to overcome my weaknesses. As long as I blamed myself I could hope to do better, and thus make a difference. But the stress and the depression was intense. Demons hung like greedy leeches on my dying soul.
After a month Valentine's day was coming up. I hadn't approached her in the interim, so I decided to finally come out with it and make my intentions clear come Hell or high water. I bought roses to be delivered to her, two valentines cards with the most sincere and spiritual messages I could find, and wrote a note confessing my adoration for her. I snuck to her room early in the morning of February 14 and slipped the note and cards under her door before classes.
My heart pounding all day, I prepared in the evening to go talk to her once again. Walking the six flights of steps to her room took more force of will in overcoming fear and anxiety than anything else I have ever done. I approached her door.
She was angry. She said her boyfriend was rather upset as well.
Boyfriend??? I had had no idea, absolutely no idea at all, I tried to stutter.
She said her father was upset with me as well.
I felt terrible. I was going into shock. Her parents had always been patient, decent and kind to me and I desperately wanted their approval. How could they have such a wrong view of me? How could she see me as some sort of sinister threat? And now it was too late anyway, my dream of being the first and only person to share her affections shattered. She hated me. Her parents hated me. Salvation was gone, shattered. Hope was gone.
Dazed, incoherent and going deeper into shock I turned around and stumbled back down the stairs.
At 8 PM, February 14, 1990 I walked into an empty children's playground across the street from her window with a knife in hand. I was clothed in regular shoes, blue jeans and a shirt, no jacket. The snow was falling heavily that night, perhaps 15 centimeters deep on the ground. I knelt in the snow in agony and held the knife to my neck. I began cutting.
Whoever makes movies showing swordsmen slicing enemies' heads off must be an idiot. Ever try slashing entirely through a cooked steak with one slash of the wrist? Real flesh is even more tough. You have to work at it, especially with the dull knife I had (essentially a sharpened butterknife). I had lost the sharp jackknife I usually had in my pocket two weeks earlier. Years later I realized the significance of this. I never lose things. Providence.
I kept cutting, gradually working deeper and lengthening the gash from my left ear to the center of my throat, perhaps twelve centimeters long.
I am a general skeptic of those who claim to have received communications from angels or God, even within the Christian community. But I have no other explanation for what happened next. It could not be hallucination because I observed nothing else unusual by my senses that night (and I was on guard for anything the rest of the night), nor am I prone to hallucination or have ever hallucinated. In short, there are psychological criteria for hallucinations and I didn't fit them despite my distress.
Nor was anyone else within fifty or more meters of me at the time. Yet I clearly heard a voice, not with my ears (indeed, more clearly than ears could ever hear) yet as plain as day. It simply said:
"Eric, don't give up so easily."
That was all. At the time I had no idea if Whomever was referring to my life or to the girl (I have since ruled out the latter). But I stopped cutting. There was plenty of blood but no penetration of the jugular. The depth of the wound was such that the two edges pulled apart 5-7 millimeters in the center of the gash. Since I never sought medical attention for it I still bear the scar, running for several centimeters on the left side of my neck where the wound was deepest.
He turned to lock the door
as he wiped away a tear
The
hopelessness of missing love,
his adolescent fear
As he struggled for
the strength
to put the gun away
He found courage and the
hope to
face another day
He could have been blown away
before he had a chance to
say
Hey world, I am here and I have something to give
Hey world, I'm
alive and I am wanting to live
Petra, "Hey World,"
Unseen Power ©1991 Petsong Publishing.
Still in shock I got up and started walking. And walking. And walking. I do not remember clearly how far or where I walked that night, except that it was for a number of hours as the snow continued to fall. I know I at least reached the far side of the large campus, for I can remember plunging through thin ice covering pools of water on the flood plain, repeatedly dropping knee deep into freezing water and not even caring. I contemplated throwing myself into the icy river but the danger was past. I just kept walking.
Eventually I returned to my dorm, took a pen and sheaf of papers down to the study hall and began writing a note of apology and explanation to her parents. I ended up working steadily for almost twenty hours at it, pouring out my whole life story in what amounted to a cry for help. I mailed it to them, finally falling asleep inexplicably comforted by a feeling that everything would turn out alright somehow. Turtleneck sweaters and upturned flannel shirt collars worn for the next week protected me from the attention of others.
There is a story of an old man walking along a beach. Beside him walks Jesus. Behind them are a pair of footprints stretching back along the beach, representing his life. The man asks why, at the hardest times of his life, there was only one pair of footprints. Where was Jesus when he needed Him? Jesus replied, "I was always with you. It was then that I carried you."
This story beautifully illustrates how Christ cared for me in the period following my near-suicide, even though I did not yet know Him as I should. When her parents received my letter, contrary to my explicit wishes they immediately contacted my parents and shared it with them. In my letter I had declared my hatred for my parents, of a mother who was too busy working to be around when I was a child and of a father who also was emotionally distant. I blamed them for my inability and inexperience in communicating myself emotionally and intimately. I repent of all that now. They were wonderful parents and most children can only dream of parents as good as mine were, despite the inevitable human shortcomings.
So I was horrified when my parents showed up at my door in tears, driving me into a shell and causing all kinds of pain for all concerned. Apparently when her parents learned I had not received them well, concerned for the safety of their own daughter (it was my throat I slashed, not hers!) they contacted campus authorities and demanded action.
This is the most terrible irony, one which leaves a lasting impression and no doubt influences my contempt for the ability of government to intervene in troubled personal affairs. Rather than receiving any care or concern (except from my parents, whom I was willing myself to despise) in my pain and suffering, I was being cast as a threat and agressor! If God had not been extending His care over me at this point I do not know what would have happened to me. The human race was certainly no help. Her parents had completely betrayed my trust and the authorities were out to get me.
Police showed up at my door about a week later demanding that I come with them. They had driven a squad car around the grass of the dorm to the door nearest my room so I could be hustled off without incident. All I was allowed to take with me was a coat and contact lens storage items. With a handkerchief wrapped around my handcuffed wrists I was led away.
The irony is that when they knocked on my door I had been just finished some crackers and peanut butter using the very knife I had slashed my neck with. I had stuck the knife in my pocket when I went to answer the door. They never asked me if I had a weapon on me, and I wasn't about to admit the embarassing and sure to be misunderstood fact that I had the knife in my pocket! By later shuffling it between a torn seam in my coat and under my pants-covered socks I ultimately evaded detection in three searches and two trips through a metal detector. So much for police security.
I was taken first to the emergency receiving area at a Lansing area hospital (I don't even know the name). I was there for some time, during which I viewed up close and personal the real-life dramas of stab-wound victims arriving, patients thrashing in pain and medical personal scrambling around while I tried to keep out the way. I was then led to a side room and later faced an evaluation when a psychiatrist finally arrived.
It was immediately clear that I was presumed guilty of being some sort of stalker or otherwise a threat to the young lady. During the intense but short questioning period it became apparent to them that I was on an even keel and certainly not an imminent threat. They were looking for a stark raving madman and pulled up short a little, I think, when I didn't fit the bill.
So I was given a choice. I could demand release, recognizing that my choice to do so would be held against me as "refusal to seek treatment" if her parents chose to keep harassing me via legal channels. Or I could submit to further evaluation, locked up in a State mental facility without any clear understanding of the length of my stay or what I would have to accomplish to win release.
You can probably guess at this point that I am not enamored of certain aspects of our government's social/medical/legal apparatus. It is an impersonal behemoth that can eat people alive and destroy them.
I was determined to clear up the misunderstandings and suspicions held against me and be vindicated, so I chose the latter route. I was taken to another facility (again, I do not even know the name, if I ever heard it, nor the location except that it could not have been too far away).
The length of my stay was less than three days. That is, just long enough for them to evaluate me, find that any suspicions against me or my sanity were inaccurate, and release me on the condition that I continue to see a private psychiatrist on a regular basis. I was miserable and suffering somewhat from depression, but their major concern was that I was somehow convinced that the young lady really did love me, and I quickly dispelled the notion that I had any delusions of her opinion towards me at that point. (An interesting aside: my roomate for the stay, as well as probably half the other patients, were burnt-out medical personnel.)
And so I began to pull out of the nightmare, thanks to Christ and the support of my local pastor who visited me, and no thanks to anyone else! Still, I was a humanist without a personal relationship and full faith in Christ, a twisted view of Scripture where I disagreed with it, an evolutionary mindset, and a continuing fool's hope that I could still win the love of the lady of my affections, who mattered more to me than some far off, distant and personally irrelevant God.
I began to see a psychiatrist at an ostensibly Christian counseling center just off the MSU campus, and continued to do so until graduation. In my judgment it was almost a complete waste of time (as well as money, the amount of which my parents were forced to expend I can only guess at). The psychiatrist (or psychologist, I cannot recall which) was a kindly old fellow, a former pastor who had gone into psychiatric counselling. All I can really remember of my sessions is his assertion that the book of Genesis contained two contradictory accounts of Creation. This was when I first began considering and advocating the literal creation position in my senior year, but before I knew how to respond to such hogwash.
My only real "psychological" problem was my lack of faith in Christ. Certainly "Christian" counseling should have identified and targeted that as the key issue but it never did. I am convinced a great deal of humanistic psychology is literally psychobabble and completely useless or harmful, yet is uncritically accepted in far too many churches and "Christian" psychology circles.
As I said above, I began to be interested in the issue of creation and Genesis in my senior year. After the traumas of my sophomore year I had agreed to attend a church-sponsored college student rally in Wisconsin to "show I was making progress." Someone at the rally gave a talk, the topic of which I cannot remember but probably dealt with the epistemological foundation of knowledge/science. Outside a local creationist chapter had a book table. Being a bookworm I never could pass a book table without buying at least something, so I picked up a little book titled Blind Faith: Evolution Exposed. It would be almost two more years before I found any other creationist material but this book planted a seed that slowly began to take root and grow.
I had always been skeptical of purely naturalistic evolution, even while I had been enamored of selective processes. Some of this I have detailed above. For example, I had recognized very early on that evolutionary processes have no mechanism to explain the development and formation of stable, complex ecosystems which recycle innumerable biochemical components. Without this recycling process we would quickly drown in sea of toxic chemical waste products. Yet evolution, which operates at the individual level or the species level at best, cannot select among multiple ecosystems because (1) ecosystems do not reproduce as organisms do and (2) there is only one ecosystem at a time in a particular area. Dynamic ecosystems are infinitely more likely to violently fall rip apart as random system changes occur (such as the removal of species in a particular food chain due to extinction, which causes a cascade of more and more extinctions throughout the food webs), and there is no particular reason why they ever ought to restabilize before complete destruction without pre-programmed damage control mechanisms. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
In addition to the one book I also had another strange encounter. I was in the habit of logging onto local BBS's using false names and information, and the summer after my senior year I chanced to pick a name identical to that of an evolutionary biologist on a BBS connected to FIDOnet. As a result FIDOnet started sending me copies of his FIDOnet mail even though I was on another BBS (so much for computer security!)
As it turns out he was in the middle of a rather deep thread regarding the coelecanth, the "living fossil" fish thought to be extinct for tens of millions of years until found alive and well in the Indian Ocean. His correspondent was a creationist who was at least as well informed at a technical level as he was. I cannot remember the creationists' name or much of the content of their conversation, except for the astonishingly good "text pictures" of the coelecanth one of them drew using ASCII text to draw the fish in detail. The one thing I do remember is being impressed that this creationist could go toe to toe with his opponent and was not educationally or intellectually inferior in any way.
So by my senior year I was no longer afraid to be saying that I could not believe in evolution without God's intervention, despite the little material on the subject that I had on hand. I got into a fierce argument (a classic "flame war") on a local BBS with a freshmen biochemistry student and atheist who lived a few floors above me. This was unbeknownst to him since I misrepresented myself, using a false name, as a local high school history teacher (remember, I was still not a Christian... I was also a pretty big computer pirate but that's not important to this story).
Looking back I would call that first debate of mine a travesty of ignorance on both sides. I didn't even know what to say when he said that gill slits in human fetuses proved we were descended from fish! (See the link for more info on what turns out to be a long-running and blatant evolutionary fraud.) When he attacked Genesis I side-stepped the issue (after all, my psychologist was telling me it was contradictory anyway) since I was only defending the idea of an intelligent Designer, not Genesis or the Bible or the fact of a young earth. I was still arguing on the basis of the scientific data, with little reference to or concern for Scripture.
The watershed came in January and February of 1992. It was at this time that God launched his final victorious assault on my humanistic defenses with a two-pronged pincer movement. It would consist of the simultaneous discovery of a cache of creationist books in the back of the campus church I attended, and a visit to MSU by the famous Christian apologist Dr. Josh McDowell. I already knew of my need for Christ in an intellectual sense. Emotionally I knew I needed someone I could rely on and had been primed by the continuous letdowns I suffered at the hands of the human race. What I needed was a conviction that the Bible could really be trusted as God's Word.
And that is exactly what I received from the books I read and reread over those two months. From McDowell's A Ready Defense to Morris and Parker's purely scientific treatise What is Creation Science? I discovered that when I disagreed with the Bible, I was the one who was wrong. I had no excuses left.
Once I became convinced of the young-earth position, it led inevitably to the discovery of God and then to repentance. I can only describe my experience as being like a man who has searched for God all his life, but is barely able to see a speck out in the distance with his telescope. Switching from the atheistic old-earth belief to the young-earth, Biblical position was like discovering that one has been looking through the wrong end of the telescope! Turn it around and suddenly there is God everywhere, larger than life. It was an awesome realization.
And so I became a Christian. With it came the end of my idolatry of the young lady whose affections I had long sought, though I didn't give up completely in hoping to be reconciled to her until some time thereafter. As the months passed and my faith grew, my depression ended because I was no longer alone. I had a best friend again - Jesus Christ. I became reconciled to my parents and began sharing presents with my family again at birthdays and Christmas - something I had coldly refused to do in the years following my near-suicide.
I also reawakened intellectually. In high school and college my grades had steadily declined (though they were still decent) and poor study habits had become the norm. I was no longer reading very much (though still more than the average person). As I graduated from MSU this situation radically reversed itself and I have thrown myself back into my studies with more zeal than ever.
Many of you are no doubt familiar with the zeal new Christians so often display to share their faith. In my case that translated into a, perhaps ill-considered, enthusiastic e-mail to practically every e-mail list at MSU inviting people to hear Dr. McDowell speak after I heard him the first night. Naturally I got a lot of hate mail. It is perhaps significant that most of it came from library personnel, for public and college libraries today are bastions of censorship and intolerance when it comes to orthodox Christianity or even conservatism in general. Their censoring of thousands of books and periodicals, on average at each library that we could reasonably expect to see in a fair system (I am not counting the more esoteric material) makes a mockery of leftist propaganda about attempted "censorship" of licentious and pornographic materials by others.
In any case I soon found myself chest-deep in debates with all the humanists I had roiled up, and was immediately put into the place of defending my new faith. Others joined in supporting me. Disinclined to argue endlessly, I eventually extricated myself (I knew at that point I was insufficiently informed to respond to all challenges; ironically I still felt more comfortable sticking to the science side of things than the Bible), but not before I learned quite a bit from the enemy. The enemy, you see, can be your best teacher if you need to know where your side is weak, where you are lacking knowledge, and of course in learning how pagans rationalize.
Indeed, it was a book titled The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationsm, by a Marxist atheist paleontologist that finally clinched the creationist position for me. He made it clear (unintentionally of course) that anti-creationists willfully ignored the creationist arguments and what we actually believe and could not mount a serious attack on our position, instead relying on innuendo, deception, suppression of information, smear tactics and self-annointed authority to bash anyone who dared to be a creationist. Most (not all) other anti-creationist material is no better. Most literally cannot even deal emotionally with the fact of our existence (especially since many of us have all the regular scientific credentials), much less deal objectively with our interpretation of evidence. Creation science destroys the religious foundation of everything they believe in.
I encourage anyone exploring the origins conflict to simply read anti-creationist material, so long as they also read relevant creationist material and research the references and documentation as well as they can, because I simply have not seen an anti-creationist book that makes a reasonable case for itself. I will spare you my further opinions on the matter. Stop being a mindslave and think it through for yourself, understanding first that your opinions and speculations will never reach final perfect conclusions of themselves. And mind you, Christians with a true faith granted by the Holy Spirit shouldn't need rationalistic apologetics to trust the Bible completely, despite what "experts" say.
I mentioned earlier that God never affirmatively answered my prayers before I became a Christian. I believe I know why now. With my belief in evolution and long ages I had a twisted and sick view of God. A God who uses millions of years of death and suffering and cruel, ruthless natural selection to create what He wants is not the God of the Bible! If He had answered my prayers it would have been an affirmation of this wrong view of God that I had.
So now I am twenty-six. I've read literally hundreds of books and thousands of articles (and maybe tens of thousands of e-mail messages!) on the subject of creation and evolution, books on everything from the correct translation of one verse (Genesis 1:2) to thousand-page textbooks on cellular biology. I'm excited to be a part of the rebirth of Christian, Bible-based scientific endeavor as we see rapid progress now on everything from geologic radioisotope profiles to the synthesis of a creationist paradigm for fossil hominids and even a potential understanding of the method of formation of the earth, stars, other planets and astronomical bodies during the Creation Week.
My interests have widened and now encompass a large portion of the cultural battlefront between Satan and Christ. My discovery of the rebirth of the courtship process as a refined model for marriage, of the philosophical foundations for thought and knowledge (and the religious underpinnings of philosophies themselves), of biblical principles for government and social affairs from abortion to welfare and many other topics keep me as busy as ever. As you explore the InfoCenter you will see one man's attempt, by God's grace, to bring both individuals and society back to Christ, and receive the benefits thereof, both spiritual and temporal. I also seek the destruction of the humanistic/satanic infection of the Church, and to strengthen the faith of Christians and challenge them to lead a more complete life based on God's Word all the time and in all things without regard to contrary human opinion.
Thank you for visiting! My apologies for the length! May God's grace be upon you, and may you seek and find forgiveness and grow in the wisdom and admonition of the Lord.
In His name.
By Grace alone. (Ephesians 2:8-9)
Eric Blievernicht
October 3, 1996
Some people gotta learn the hard way
I guess I'm the kind of guy who
had to find out for myself
I had to learn the hard way, Father
Now I'm
on my knees and I'm crying for help
From: DC Talk, "The Hardway,"
Free at Last, ©1992 Up in the Mix Music/BMI
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