Today’s contribution comes via e-mail from M.
I was one of those kids who believed in ghosts, but only at night. During the day, they were an absurd idea. Invisible people? Yeah right. At night, though, I would cower under my duvet imagining I could see them.
At the age of four, at Christian daycare, I was sitting on a swing next to a classmate who said, “Do you believe in god?”
He asked it in the same tone older children used when they said, “Do you believe in Santa?”
Suddenly, the correct answer occurred to me.
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
I knew exactly what he meant. During the day, his god was an absurd concept, but at night, he cowered under his sheets not daring to move lest god should see him.
When I was eight, my teachers decided that I had committed too many crimes against handwriting and asked my parents to intervene. They bought rubber grips for my pencils that would force my fingers into the correct position. Then they brought out a Bible and some lined paper. Every night, I sat at the kitchen table and copied the words. The house we lived in at the time had dry-stone walls. They weren’t even plastered on the inside. There was a single window with a wooden frame and shutters on the wall over the table. A cast iron stove stood out from the far wall, a fire whistling from its belly.
I couldn’t help but read the stories as I copied them. They were terrifying. An invisible angel stopped a man in the dark, midway across a river. Lott raped his daughters. A father was ordered to kill his daughter in the name of sacrifice. After a night of handwriting practice, I lay awake and listened for the sound of snoring from my parents’ room. When it came, I climbed out of bed and switched on the light. Then I read books about unicorns and fairies, anything to take my mind off the thought of invisible hands reaching for me in the dark.
For my birthday, I was given a sheet of glow-in-the-dark star stickers. I used a star chart to carefully recreate the constellations on my ceiling. For a while, I forgot about the invisible hands and the voice from the sky asking my dad to sacrifice me. I fell off to sleep thinking about what the stars would look like from the surface of the moon or from Mars. For a science project, I drew my own maps, each night walking up the hill with a flask of hot chocolate to draw constellations and note the phase of the moon. My dad found some books on mythology and explained the stories behind the constellations. For some reason, the myths were less terrifying, perhaps because nobody believed them anymore and they could be read for what they really were: stories.
One day I climbed the hill with my construction paper. The frosted branches of the trees looked suspicious. There were new shadows thrown up by the moon that made it easy to imagine invisible people standing in the wood, watching me. I turned around and went home. In bed, my cowardice turned to regret. I looked up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling and knew that invisible people couldn’t be real. Suddenly it occurred to me that I wasn’t afraid of god at all, but of the fact that other people believed in the idea. Outside, through the woods, the neighbours would all be in bed. Mankind landed on the moon twenty years ago. Yet these people went to church. They each kept a copy of the black book with its stories of human sacrifice. What would happen when one of these neighbours became convinced that a voice in the sky wanted him to kill his daughter? No child was safe. How did these people sleep at night if they believed invisible angels could wake them at any moment for a midnight wrestling match?
Then the revelation came. I remembered the conversation on the swings as a four year- old. The fact that the boy felt the need to ask if I believed in god said it all. If gods and ghosts and Santa were real, nobody would ask me if I believed. Nobody had ever asked me if I believed in trees or rocks or even stars. Even the man in black in the church didn’t believe. I stood in front of him and he asked me if I accepted god and Jesus. My parents waited until I was older to have me Christened because they had the idea that I should remember the event. I was too afraid of the man in black to tell the truth, because even at four, I sensed that I was required to lie.
I imagined the neighbours all snug in their beds, sleeping soundly.
“They don’t really believe,” I thought. “None of them believe.”
It was as if I had spent eight years of my life being the butt of a joke. The weight of fear was lifted from me and I dropped off to sleep.
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“Lott raped his daughters”
No, Lot (there’s no ‘Lott’ in the Bible) was raped by his daughters. There’s a difference.
Lot invited the townpeople to rape his daughters in exchange for their not raping the angels he had in the house, because that would be gay and unhospitable and also gay.
Later on, his daughters did rape him while he was drunk.
I don’t see the point of quibbling over spellings. There are inaccuracies in the stories given, but does it reduce the hideousness of it in any way? Whether Abraham was to sacrifice Isaac or a never-mentioned daughter is not germane to the point that it’s a vile book full of horrible things that are meant to scare children into believing before they are too smart to buy the bullshit. Take that away from it. Take this from a recovering grammar nazi.
I find it odd when I meet Christians who argue that the Canaanites etc. had to be exterminated in a genocide because they practiced child sacrifice, given that God’s commanding it in the OT. I guess it’s only wrong if you sacrifice your children to the *wrong god.*
Yeah; one of the things I asked my son, of whom I just obtained custody and who has been indoctrinated by the fundamentalist half of the family, was if he would want me to kill him if God told me to. He told me no, of course not. I asked him how he thinks Isaac felt.
He’s eight, but questions like this are getting him to rethink his faith. He had never been taught to think of inconvenient people in the Bible as actual people, and I’m trying to rework that and show him the horror of the stories. If he’s going to believe then he’s going to believe, but he can have a real, full Bible instead of an Action Bible, and he deserves to hear all of the stories and to think about them critically.
Well, if a person hasn’t read the Bible since they were a child, they would probably forget the exact spellings and the more complicated plot twists. But what’s key is that they would always remember the trauma and violence of reading such a document that adults claim to base their lives on, especially if they’re a woman or gay.
I just don’t want anyone to besmirch the name of HoF safety Ronnie Lott, who was a bad bad man… but only on the field.