3. "She's gonna feel that one in the morning."

Doubtless, she regrets that statement; knowing now the result of having made it. But I can’t thank her enough. This had been building up since childhood, after all – though initially buried in the benign, little wonderings of a Sunday-School student. “Cain’s wife?” I’d ask, eyes wide; conditioned to accept whatever response I received as the unequivocal truth. The grown-ups knew what they were talking about, didn’t they? Of course they did. They were older. They were wiser. And I was just the girl whose harmless ignorance was tolerated, if only for her youth. (“Ain’t those questions just adorable?”)

Not that there wasn’t an upstart now and again. More than a few situations arose, each seeming bent on either putting my little mind into a tailspin, or my parent’s rueful eyes to rolling with irritation. One fine Sunday afternoon had the preacher quoting a verse, and thereafter saying something along the lines of, “When John wrote this…” Wait, what?!? When John wrote…? Confused, I tugged at the sleeves of mom and pop, “I thought God wrote the bible.” Even putting aside my impressions, one would think that an omnipotent being would be more than capable of penning a manifesto himself, right? Well he did, they told me. He just did it through other people. “But how do we know that?” The response that followed became the standard for nearly every question thereafter: “Because the bible says so, and because we have faith in the word”.

Circular logic, for the win. Though it was enough to shut me up for a time, the situation itself had highlighted a particularly startling realization – holding something to be true doesn’t necessarily make it so. Maybe my perspective wasn’t as accurate as I’d thought. Maybe the world wasn’t so transparent.

The coming years would yield the same results time and again. From the countless contradictions in the word itself, each of them brushed aside as unimportant by anyone and everyone willing to discuss them. To the bible-camp scenes of teenagers in packed pews falling over themselves and mumbling in “tongues”, imbued with the Holy Spirit’s *cough* distinctive grace. (For the sake of full disclosure, I can’t objectively say that the image described here wasn’t a big reason for my religious exodus. It was fairly traumatizing, you know. Going through that, you never really look at consonants the same way again.) When discussing the experiences later in our cots, I couldn’t find a single soul who claimed to have had a genuine encounter with the wispy critter. Not one. They’d each been faking it for the sake of their neighbors. The recognition of the similarities between the biblical and the Babylonian stories of creation, the tale of Jacob and Esau (aka, Horus and Set), the overall realization that most of the Old Testament and even much of the New had existed as fables from older and sparser religions centuries, even millennia before they were ever noted to have taken place, were the bible to be taken as a literal, historical text – the list of examples between then and now is so lengthy; I could turn this short bit of honesty into a volume. Maybe someday I’ll be so ambitious as to cover that. Maybe not. Either way, you get the idea.



All that history. All those little grains of sand, momentary crises of faith, adding up to an avalanche – one that was bound to fall that day in the car when I took that first step away from faith. And fall it did.

Segue to the intriguing part. For if a tale is founded in truth, the more one sorts through the sand, the more evidence one should find to support the account. It’s worth mentioning that you may well have a mistaken notion or two about this portion of my wayward choice.

Many have said that you find what you look for. Fill your noggin with a bias and, however false, you will see it manifested in a dozen everyday ways. The sand-sorting be damned, evidence is all too easy to ignore, given the inclination. (Prime example: scientist – term is loosely applied here – finds what he believes must, must, must be remaining bits of wood from Noah’s unlikely masterpiece. Despite his unfounded certainty, carbon dating determines the age of the planks – another loosely applied term – as being a few hundred years, at most; ruling out the possibility of them having taken part in the fabled jaunt. His response was not to continue searching for remains that might fall into the necessary time frame, but to decide that carbon dating must then be an altogether phony science. Hmm.) But here’s the rub. I didn’t want to disprove the foundation of my faith, as you might call it. I wanted to be able to log the DNA, pat the eye-witness on the back and close the case. I wanted to believe in this beautiful notion of an all-powerful being who was there, watching over me, and loving me, and preparing for me a place that was so much better in justice and in purity than this world had ever been. I wanted to ease my grief with the knowing that I would one day be able to run back into the safe, strong arms of the father I’d lost to a brutal disease. I wanted it to be true. But as my great grandmother always said: you can want in one hand and shit in th’other, and see which one gets filled first. The more I dug, the more questions I asked, the more facts I learned, and the more facts that weren’t there to know at all; the more I realized what the evidence was saying – what it had been saying all along: “It’s not true. None of this is true.”

Not even a little?

“Not even at all.”

Oh… Ouch.