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source. I was asked to not only read the Bible, but to memorize Bible verses. If it wasn’t for the easy access to the sordid Word of God I might have had an innocent childhood. Instead, I was a worrywart before my time, shivering in constant fear of a god who, from what I could tell, huffed and puffed around the cosmos looking like my dad did when my sister refused to take her vitamins that one time.
    God wasn’t exactly a children’s rights advocate. The first thing a child reading the Bible notices is that you’re supposed to honor your mother and father but they’re not necessarily required to reciprocate. This was a god who told Abraham to knife his boy Isaac and then at the last minute, when the dagger’s poised above Isaac’s heart, God tellsAbraham that He’s just kidding. This was a god who let a child lose his birthright because of some screwball mix-up involving fake fur hands and a bowl of soup. This was a god who saw to it that his own son had his hands and feet nailed onto pieces of wood.
    God, for me, was not in the details. I still set store by the big Judeo-Christian messages. Who can argue with the Ten Commandments? Don’t kill anybody; don’t mess around with other people’s spouses; be nice to your mom and dad. Fine advice. It was the minutiae that nagged at me.
    One of my favorite television characters was Star Trek ’s Mr. Spock. I would torment my hotheaded sister, Amy, an extreme child who batted back and forth between only two emotional states—love and hate—by reproaching her feverish fits (while ducking her punches) with the comeback “You are being so irrational.” Same goes for church. My Spockish nature tended to clash with some of the more fanciful details of Bible theory and practice that are part of Pentecostal life.
    It was made clear to me that I wasn’t supposed to trouble the moody Creator with any pesky questions about the eccentricities of His cosmic system. So when I asked about stuff that confused me, like “How come we’re praying for the bar to be shut down when Jesus himself turned water into wine?”, I was shushed and told to have faith. Thus my idea of heaven was that I got to spend eternity sitting at the feet of God, grilling Him. “Let me get this straight,” I’d say by way of introduction. “It’s your position that every person ever born has to suffer because Eve couldn’t resist a healthy between-meals snack?” Once Igot the metaphysical queries out of the way I could satisfy my curiosity about how He came up with stuff I was learning about in school, like photosynthesis.
    Until the mark-of-the-beast police machine-gunned me to that Great Q & A in the Sky, I soon figured out that I should keep my qualms to myself. Christianity is no different from any other cult—it isn’t about faith. It’s about agreement, about like-minded people sitting together in the same room at the same time believing the same thing. That unity is its appeal. Once someone, even a little six-year-old someone wearing patent leather Mary Janes, starts asking questions that can’t be answered, the whole congregation’s fun is spoiled. (Though my mouth was the least of my mother’s worries at church. My sister’s constant childish fidgeting was a more pressing concern. During one Sunday sermon, as Mom was dragging the little hellion out to the parking lot for a spanking, Amy kicked at the pews screaming at the congregation, “Pray for me!”)
    However much I privately questioned the logic of Genesis, I never once doubted the inevitability of Revelation, never once doubted that the world would end. Because living in eastern Oklahoma and believing in the Apocalypse made a lot of sense. When I read the part in Revelation about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, how the end times will be set in motion by horses breathing fire and brimstone, it reminded me of the