It was a question I had asked my mom hundreds of times as a child. She always repeated “You’ll just know. You just feel it.” I remember once bawling in fear of the End of the World, telling my mom I didn’t want to go to hell but I never got the feeling. My mother told me that was my fault. I didn’t have it in my heart. Imagine, as a five-year old boy, hearing that.

I can’t explain the trauma it caused me in my childhood to hear that, but I can tell you that I had night terrors. Not just nightmares – but episodes of hysteria and fear centered around that. And my stupid fucking parents never figured it out.

Maybe I can’t blame them. I didn’t know until I was 30 and I was far smarter than my mother. My father never shoved that dumb shit on us. He let me stay home from church on Sunday’s because he didn’t want to go either (they were divorced). Oh yeah and he was dying and a millionaire. My mother has been married 8 times and her family is considering taking custody of her, like a conservatorship, because she lacks any decision making. My father vs my mother. Reasoning vs insanity. That’s always what the argument with religion has been. I just had to be the human case-study.

To this day, my mother will tell me she will not hear anything of God not existing. No surprise either, she thinks she is a Christian and bound for Heaven. As my grandfather lay dying, she hovered over him with the awareness of a trained dog and told him he needed to ask forgiveness for his sins before he died. She did the same to my grandmother before she died. My mother is what a person becomes with Christianity – foolish, annoying, uninformed and judgmental. Remember, she thinks everything happens for a reason and God has already laid this out. Any wild urge she gets to spews venomous misinformation out of her mouth and she lets loose. It was meant to be or she wouldn’t have done it! It is nothing less than destructive.

I wanted to believe and did believe and followed Christ and worked for the church. Let me tell you, if there was a Christian in America, it was me. You don’t get any closer than I was but I never felt saved. I never had that light turn on inside. Not from Christianity.

However, I can describe to you my personal feeling of being saved. The feeling of knowing you’ve got “it” right or finally figured “it” out. It’s a thrilling moment because a rush of adrenaline, pride and accomplishment hit you all at once. It’s when I had the courage to admit to myself what I had long suspected and could, as an adult, factually prove – that the Bible was fictional, incoherent, self-contradicting book written entirely from a primitive man world view. It literally is about a blood sacrifice God, just like the Aztecs had. It is ridiculous. It advocates murder, genocide, sexism, racism and something I’ve been guilty on – sexuality discrimination. Thanks Leviticus. And even in the modern day, it isn’t just a harmless belief – as I learned with my mother.

Religion is dangerous and poisonous. Islam might be the popular religion to call violent, because it is, but Christianity has destroyed more than we can measure. You owe it to your children to wake up, read the stupid, incorrect book you claim you believe in but clearly don’t understand. When you start to see the inconsistencies and wake up, then you can get away from this hogwash.

I love my mother – and not because a bloodlusting God from the Old Testament told me to. I’m compassionate, even though she probably never will realize the type of person she has been. The good news is now I save 10 minutes per day praying for her, which when you consider 30 years, is a lot of wasted time! Maybe she will come around. But even if she doesn’t, the bogus stupid bullshit stops with me and my generation. My kids will know what they need to understand the world and not be scared into believing terrorizing fantasy religions. They’ll know, just like I always should have, that people lie and mislead and that no Almighty God would provide us with faulty instructions on how to reach him, conveniently, through privileged individuals. It is stuff a child can’t figure out – but an adult can and should.