the devil only exists because of your belief in him

On Mondays in kindergarten, my teacher always asked what we did with our Sundays. Each time I relayed my churchless afternoons, she acted as if she had never heard of such a thing. The other students were similarly bewildered at the concept of life-without-Bible-verses, and life-without-dad-slapping-you-during-cus

tomary-prayertime-shut-eye.

I was a child aglow with questionnaire sieges, so, naturally, I asked mother why we had family bike rides on the Sabbath instead of bible study.

"The people around here raise their arms in praise to sermons about sins of alcoholism, then they go to work with hangovers on Monday morning. They condemn gluttony and watch their waistbands stretch out. They give their vows under the nose of a priest, then they sleep with their neighbor's wife."

My mother never sugarcoated life for me, not even at five.

Both of my parents managed to maintain the consistency of sand dunes. After they began to home-school Julian and me, we transmuted our near-Atheistic beliefs to Catholicism. There was never much of anything to divulge in confession, though I suspect I would have eroded my rosary to dust if I was Catholic these days. My mother strung a brazen crucifix over our front door, inherited from her late grandma. She stopped braiding my hair and started pulling it instead. Bruises don't show on the scalp. Julian was never good with his Hail Marys. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

From the radioactive decay of my mom's days in Salt Lake City, there was a lady by the name of Mary Baugas. She made decadent birthday cakes while relaying passages from the Book of Mormon to my family. I started to question Catholicism. It didn't have enough icing.

We played touch-and-go with the Baptists. I went to vacation bible school, where they gave us candy for memorized verse. They told us that Catholics were occult. I felt withdrawn from children my own age, so I never made any friends. I thought there was something wrong with me. I told one of my VBS teachers that one day. 1 Corinthians: When I was a child, I thought like a child, I talked like a child, I reasoned like a child.

I became a member of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian church. The preacher there brimmed with self-righteousness until he shook at the pulpit. He gave all his children the same leaky-tap-blue eyes. I found his daughter on a social networking site a month ago. She blogged about the time she drank herself silly with altar wine. Not all churches have mellowed to grape juice. That one sip was always so bitter. My parents never touched a drop of alcohol, until my mother became a single parent. I swept up the shards of 80 proof bottles one afternoon in the seventh grade. She told me, "Never get your stomach pumped. It hurts."

I joined Bellevue right before I turned twelve. No one there ever knows your name, but I think that the fragments of my family liked it that way. Services there have more singing than preaching, more tithing than fellowshipping. After we stopped going there, they still gave us the food we couldn't afford to buy. Years later, our advocate and counselor was convicted of molesting his son. Many of the church authorities had known for twenty years.

By ninth grade, I had read the Bible in New King James version and New International version. I had dabbled in the Quaran, obsessed over karma and nirvana, and attended churches of Lutheran, Methodist, and non-denominational persuasion. At fifteen, I renounced all religious affiliation I previously upheld. Though I publicly denied the existance of any deity, I was personally convinced that God hated me, and began to insert it as a sort of interjection in any given conversation: "God hates me."

The truth is, I spent hours of my childhood trying to convince myself that someone was listening to my prayers through a styrofoam cup. For every day that nothing changed, I pretended that maybe my prayers were lost somewhere along the string between God and me. After fifteen years, I stopped despising religion. I started seeing it a sort of answer key, a flashlight to help people make their way through the dark. Who am I to hate that kind of thing? I'm no good at answering questions and I can't even walk around my house in broad daylight without glasses.

1 Corinthians: When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. I stopped praying through styrofoam cups. I stopped praying at all. I'm my own Jesus now, and I'll save my goddamned self.