I was asked by two readers in so many days if I could clarify where I stand on God and organized religion. They wanted to know if I could explain how I can so completely separate organized religion from my belief in God. Two legitimate questions. Both said that they felt more clarification on where I am coming from on this topic would help them better put my articles in perspective.
I will try to keep it as straight and to the point as I can.
This is not meant to be an argument for the existence of God but just trying to clarify where I come from.
I believe I have had five personal experiences with a higher power so far in my life.
Here I will only talk about four of them.
Was it God? I dunno but I called it God, maybe for a lack of a better word.
When I was a kid the idea of God seemed kinda cool.
I had really vague concept of God, no doubt given to me by my mother who had a habit of explaining things to me like I was an adult. So a lot of times things she said were way over my head, but overtime I had become rather adept at weeding through the things that I couldn’t grasp and holding on to the things that I could.
Out of all the stuff she told me about God, what I had gathered was that if you ask God for stuff he will give it to you.
So I did. I asked for a jump.
A more articulate child, which I wasn’t, would have called it a “ramp”. A “jump” is what happened when people rode their vehicle over the ramp. At the time I wasn’t very good at making distinctions between the object and the result. Had I been sexually aware at the time I could have just as easily called a vagina an “orgasm” since that is what happens when you are inside one for too long.
So yeah, the first time I had an experience with what I call "God" I was four years old, a single child living in an apartment just off the campus of Eastern Michigan University with my young black militant parents.
I had everything a spoiled child could want.
Everything except one thing. I didn’t have a “jump”.
What I needed was just something flat that I could prop up against a pile of books or something, you know, to create an incline to run my cars off of.
And you’ve got to understand that when you’re a kid, what is possible and what isn’t possible isn’t as obvious. You don’t know enough about the world one way or another to say if there aren't sixty foot tall lizards that come crawling out of the ocean and topple skyscrapers or if the nightlight in the hallway really can keep the monsters that live under your bed from tickling your feet when you’re asleep.
What I am saying here is that there is a level of faith that a child has that is difficult to recreate once you become an adult and get inundated with all the things that aren’t possible.
I have often said as I have gotten older that our lives as adults are boundaried by our limitations while our lives when we were children were colored with possibilities.
It is when that switch is made, when we stop believing in the seemingly impossible that we lose our childhoods.
Well a few days later as I was looking around in the walk-in closet I had in my bedroom where my father cut his friend’s hair on the weekends for a little extra cash there was a piece of wood that looked like the backside of a clip board sitting against the wall behind a pile of old shoe boxes.
Oh my God. I had my jump.
At first I was afraid to move it. I just knew it had to belong to someone else. But I was the one that asked for it. It had to be mine. In order to stake claim to it I convinced myself that my parents had to have place it there in my room for me to find it. It was the perfect size. It was thin enough for the cars not to get stopped trying to get over it yet thick enough not to bend or break as they were rolling over it.. I mean it was perfect.
It was almost too perfect.
So I questioned my mom about it because the more I thought about it the more it started kinda freaking me out. I asked her if she knew anything about this "jump" I had found in the closet. She didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. Not a clue. And the more I thought about it, the more I believed her because why would my mom had hidden it behind a bunch of shoe boxes if she had gotten me a ramp?
Now I am not saying that God materialized a ramp for me, maybe the maintenance men had come over to fix something while we were gone and had just tossed his broken clipboard into my father’s closet and forgot about it.
I didn’t care how it got there. All I knew was that I asked for a jump, expected that there was this thing called a God that heard my request and before I knew it there was this piece of wood laying there behind his shoe boxes.
So as a four year old that is where I stood. God had answered my prayers and given me a jump and that was pretty cool. The funny thing is that I didn’t go crazy with my new found power.
In fact I didn’t think much about it. It pretty much worked exactly like mom said it would. So my attitude was like now that I know I can do it, there is no need to keep doing it. Just know that if things get in a pinch I always have that card to play.

2) My second contact with God (for lack of a better word) was almost like a dream. I am about five years old now. I still haven’t started school yet and I have a really early bedtime.
I mean it was really early.
It’s the end of summer and when it’s my bedtime sometimes there are still kids playing outside my window and I can hear them outside having fun.
I remember hearing what I thought was a strangely familiar voice speaking to me. The only way I can describe it is that it was "familiar" in exactly the same way you are familiar with the people you meet in your dreams that you know you’ve never seen before but you don’t ask their names and you don’t exchange introductions.
This was the exact same way.
I had not given it a moment's thought as to who it was that was talking to me. I felt absolutely no fear. I felt no reason at all to be concerned.
I remember the setting sun still shining through my window shades. I remember the soft yellow light breaking through the parts in the blinds which were swaying slightly from the warm breeze coming through the window above my dresser.
Then everything stopped.
So here I was hearing this voice speaking to me. I do not know if I was hearing with my ears or if it was inside my head.
This voice which I felt was masculine in nature told me that I was going to be a Superman when I grew up.
Now you have got to remember that I was only about four or five years old. Of course, I was excited at the prospect that I had these untapped powers of flight and incredible superhuman physical strength.
I was familiar with the Superman story so after my initial excitement subsided the first thing I asked this voice was who my real parents were? Quickly followed by the “how come my mom and dad never told me that they found me on the side of the road” question.
It assured me that he was not talking about that kind of Superman.
Confused, I asked what kind of Superman was I going to be if not that kind? How many other kinds are there? I probably would have broken down and cried had he told me I was going to be the broken English speaking wack ass Bizzaro kind.
He explained that I would be a Superman because I would have the opportunity to help a lot of people in my life.
Talk about a let down.
So what you’re saying is that I wouldn’t be able to fly, topple mountains or beat up Solomon Grundy when I woke up in the morning?
”Nope. Sorry.”
He invited me to show me what he was talking about. The next thing I know he is leading me along a long picturesque street, which seemed to stretch for miles in one of the most vivid dreams I have ever had.
The street was very hilly, not at all unlike you see on those brochures of San Francisco with the trolley cars. And as we walked down this street there were people on either side of the street all smiling as they came out to greet me. They were shaking my hand and giving me hugs. Some even brought gifts. I got the feeling that I had done something that they appreciated. Don’t ask me what it was.
I have no idea what I could’ve done but I gave them all the love that they were giving me back to them. What I remember most was that all of this love was being reciprocated between us, which is what I think was the most beautiful thing about it. I also remember that there were people of all races and creeds and colors there.
The voice then said; “Do you see? Do you understand?”
I probably said yeah, but I didn’t. What I was, was disappointed.
"So I grow up to be a nice guy. Big deal. I want to be able to fly and shoot heat rays out of my eyes."
When I awoke the next morning it stuck with me. I will be a Superman? What the hell did that mean? So I did what any four year old would do. I grilled my mother over the course of the next few days to come clean about where she found me. I was positive that if I could get her to believe that I wouldn’t love her any less if she would just admit that she and my father had found me on the side of the road in a single-manned space craft from Krypton I could get the truth.
However, she didn’t break. And worse, her answers were consistent. She insisted on sticking to her story that she gave birth to me and that she would never forget all of the pain I put her though doing it.
Her alibi was air-tight. She had a number of people including my father who would swear up and down she was telling the truth, as well as photographs that would corroborate her story that she was indeed pregnant with a child approximately around the time that she would have been carrying me to term and there were medical records that said she had given birth on or around the same time that I would have been born.
Circumstantial evidence I know, but powerful nonetheless.
Dammit.
So what did that guy mean?
I also spent the next few days trying to run, jump, climb, roll around on the ground, trying to do anything that could be considered even the least bit superheroish.
Once again the let down was harsh.

3) The third time was several years later. Now and I had a little brother and we were watching a film called “The Greatest Story Ever Told”. It was Christmas time and we had just finished compiling our list of what we wanted for Christmas and somehow we ended up watching this movie from beginning to end.
Why did I do that?
I was about eight years old now and by the end of that film I was in tears. I could not stop crying. I had never been hit with such a sense of injustice in my life. I remember my mother and brother looking at me like I had lost my mind.
I guess my mother had become so desensitized with the story of Jesus that it just didn’t have an effect on her anymore, and my brother was only about three years old so he couldn’t possibly care any less, but to me it was profound.
It was my first encounter with a screw job. Sure professional wrestling had made a cliché out of it but you've got to appreciate how bad you feel when you are experiencing it for the first time.
Bad things aren’t supposed to happen to good people.
I am not sure what was worse, my anger or my sadness at how someone who seemed to only want to help people had died such a senseless death.
Anyway, I responded in the only way my little 8 year old mind could respond. After I said my prayers that night, still crying to myself, I said a second prayer.
A secret prayer.
I told God that I wanted to make sure that the bad people that killed Jesus would not win. I told him that I was unconditionally offering myself up as a tool for him to use to continue Jesus’ work and dedicate my life to helping people just as he did. I told him that I didn’t care what happened to me but I wasn’t going to sit there and allow that kind of injustice to stand.
Just words from a little kid caught up in the moment and probably writing a check his little ass couldn’t cash.
Good thing God doesn’t take those kinds of things seriously right?
Well not seconds after I said those words I got a feeling that God had heard me. Once again, I have no doubt that it was the same person that was leading me down the street that evening parading me in front of all of those smiling people all those years ago in that dream.
I was overwhelmed with the feeling that it was pleased with what I had said and I immediately stopped crying. Suddenly all of the anger and frustration and overwhelming sense of injustice that I had felt was gone.
Just like that. And what replaced all of that anger and frustration was a sense of certainty that came over me that everything would be Ok.
I never spoke of it. Even at eight years old I knew people would say I was crazy, but more importantly, I didn’t want any adults to tell me that it didn’t happen.
Sadly I was starting to understand the concept of limitations. I was starting to accept what was possible and what wasn’t possible and shit like this wasn’t possible.
Nevertheless the tremendous sense of love that I felt from that moment has remains with me until this day and has help shape my personal relationship with God.
Like I said, I never spoke of it. I knew I hadn't any proof. My brother was sitting right next to me and he hadn't’t heard or seen a damn thing.
He just kept asking me if I was going to be all right.
My brother used to cry if he ever saw me crying. We were close like that. You could honestly see how worried he was that I was so upset. He wasn’t going to go to sleep until he knew I was going to be all right. And knowing my brother there was probably a little bit of self-interest intertwined with his concern, particularly since he had watched the same thing I watched and had not walked away with so much as the sniffles.
I have never felt something so surreal and sublime in my life.
I don’t talk about evidence of God or evidence of the existence of God because it doesn’t exist.
But for anyone who has experienced something like this, regardless of what age they are, it will be “evidence” to them, even in the conventional sense of the word. And like I told a reader who had asked me the same question about proof of God, I can guarantee you, once you experience it, this will be, without compare, the most resolving thing you will ever experience in your life.

4) The last experience I am prepared to discuss came when I was about twelve years old and I had just gotten back from my recently converted Jehovah witness family’s houses. They lived in Detroit and l remember leaving their house with a sense of gloom and doom like no other.
This particular day I had about all of the vengeful God, punishing God, “do as I say or else” God that I could take. It was starting to eat away at me. Basically this was the message from them in a nutshell, since they were Jehovah’s Witnesses they were either going to be one of the 144,000 people that get to go to heaven or the lucky ones that get to spend an eternity on the earth in a tropical paradise. Since I wasn’t a Witness, if I was on fire God wouldn’t piss on me to put me out.
The problem that I had was that by this time I had already found about eleventybillion problematic things in the Bible.
My uncle had given me as a propaganda book when I was 6 a "My Book of Bible Stories" book which was supposed to inspire interest in being a witness. At the bottom of each bible story were the actual chapters in the real bible that you could go to and read the whole story. That is if you could decipher what they were saying out of all of the Thees, Thous and Cometh herewiths.
Well that isn’t the effect it had on me at all.
My uncle got me this “My Book of Bible Stories” and I had the presence of mind to date the day that I got it, June 27, 1978. Being the aspiring artist that I was, I fell in love with the pictures. For all that can be said about the Jehovah’s Witnesses and their publications I am huge fan of that nameless faceless person that does the illustrations in those books each week, but not at all of the nameless faceless people that write the crap inside it. Like most people associated with putting out the propaganda that the Jehovah’s witnesses follow, there aren’t any names to credit the articles to or names to credit the illustrations. These books just materialized each week at your doorstep each Tuesday and those that subscribe to it just absorb it in like a sponge.
Well this was my first encounter with the other God.
This wasn’t the God that gave me a ramp when I asked for it.
This God was a trip.
He was going to come back with a sword and kill all non-believers at the end of the world. And what do you know, it was just my luck that we were living in the last days and it could come at any minute. Each day could be the last day of your life. That sucks. Then on top of that, reading the book, and I did cover to cover, God was basically an asshole.
He killed Lots wife for watching him destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.
Apparently God likes to do his mass murdering without any witnesses.
God sent bears to viciously maul 42 kids because they taunted the prophet Elisha.
Damn dude.
He drowned everyone on the earth but Noah and his family. Then there is this picture in the book of a cat downing as it is being whisked away by the undercurrent of this huge river that just appeared out of nowhere and I remember thinking, “what did that poor cat do to deserve this?” How fair is that? Noah picked two cats like the only thing that mattered was that the cats would be able to breed themselves back after God gets done killing everything off. Then God leaves a rainbow to remind us that he would never destroy us again by flood. Am I supposed to take comfort in that?
So what, he won’t drown us? Big deal. What does that leave him with about eleventybillion other ways to accomplish the same goal?
Then he kills every first born in Egypt over a beef he had with Pharaoh. What did these first born children have to do with anything? Why did they deserve to die?
No, make no mistake about it God was a prick.
And what I was reading, like the story of Job where God makes a wager with the devil that Job wouldn’t turn his back on him even if he let the devil have his way with him, even after giving him warts and killing off his wife and children just solidified it. First of all, what kind of asshole would allow the devil to do something like that to someone? Job is supposed to be his friend. His loyal worshipper and he just sells him out like that for a bet?
A bet with the devil no less.
I didn’t know that they still hung out.
And then the book makes it seem like once God said enough was enough, evidently after he felt the point had been made, God just gave Job a “new” house, a “new” wife, “new” kids and “new” cattle and that just squared everything up.
Not even close.
If God killed my mom and dad over a bet and then gave me a new set of parents that isn’t going to square things between us.
Not even close.
Not a chance.
And from where I was sitting it seemed like the only people that would worship a God like that would be people that were just afraid for their lives.
Then I thought about my relatives and things started to come together in my head.
The same kind of respect that God gets is the same kind of respect that a mob boss gets. They don’t respect you, they fear you.
I was very confused and quite frankly afraid.
What did I do when I prayed to God to give me that ramp? What did I do when I cried that night and told God that I would do whatever it took to make sure that the works of Jesus would not end? What was I getting into when I said that I didn’t want the bad people that railroaded him to win.
What the hell did I get myself into? This God was a megalomaniac. And if he actually expects me to live up to my part of the bargain he is going to have me riding a horse armed with a flaming sword and indiscriminately killing people that I don’t even know.
I mean, what if I were alive back in the days of ancient Egypt but I lived in Persia and my parents took me to Egypt to visit my grandparents like we did in South Carolina every summer? And what if our visit just happen to fall on the weekend that God decides to kill all the first born children in Egypt?
Well I am a firstborn. What the hell did I ever do to deserve being decapitated? Hell, I don’t even live here.
I am a 12 year old pimply faced kid that is coming to visit my grandparents.
I was morally appalled at practically everything I read in that book.
Even stories like about the wicket Queen Jezebel bothered me because they tossed her ass out of the window and killed her and that was supposed to be like a message that you are not supposed to be a bad person and stay faithful to God.
Why? So he won’t send his goons after me?
Where is the chapter about God sending the men that tossed her out of the window to hell for killing someone? Why is Jezebel so bad for killing people but the goons that God sent to kill her still the good guys?
I could practically go story by story in that book and point out an issue I had with it. And here I am a kid and I can see these things but I felt like I was the only one around me that did.
And It frightened me.
Over time I tried to just forget about the stories and just admire the art work inside but even that became increasingly difficult.
I wanted to say, does anyone else have a problem with this?
They would tell me that God doesn’t perform miracles anymore and he doesn’t talk to people anymore and that anytime you hear anything like that, that is the work of the devil trying to stir you away from God.
To be honest with you, that was the one thing that did it in for me.
There is no way that anyone can tell me that it wasn’t God that comforted me that night.
Maybe their God, the one that kills innocent children doesn’t talk to people, doesn’t perform miracles, is planning an sword wielding attack on all non-believers and can strike at any moment, but not mine.
I was so glad that my mother never bought into what they were selling. My mother and her father JD were the only two people in her family that hadn't’t been baptized into the faith by 1980.
By the time I was eight years old my uncle, whom I worshipped the ground that he walked on would barely speak to me anymore and my grandmother would grow increasingly distant over the years as they got deeper and deeper into this cult.
What I took from then was that God’s love was conditional.
That summer I started walking around with a Bible in my hands reading it every chance I could. I was intimidated by the fact that my uncles could just point to scriptures that they had underlined that so cryptically spelled out the doom of every non-Jehovah’s Witness, and since I fell into that category, I figured I better read up. Maybe there was some magic cryptic scripture in here that I could use as a loophole.
I mean they had to be right? They had evidence. All I had was a feeling that I had gotten well over six years earlier. Even I was starting to believe I was just a dumb kid who just dreamt that up.
And then it happened again.
I was sitting in my bedroom underlining my Bible, going over it like it was a legal document trying to find some loopholes and I closed it and just asked God, am I going to burn in hell?
Point blank. Am I going to be damned to something eternally fucked up when I die?
And the answer I got was an unconditional “No.”
And just like when I was six, it was the exact same feeling. The exact same certainty. That love that I can’t duplicate, that I can’t call upon at will was there, but the answer was so certain that it was unquestionable.
Whew. That was good to know.
What happened after that probably could have been predicted by more someone more mature than I was but it was completely unforeseen by me. It was like in a video game when you defeat the “end boss” and it unlocks another part of the story or the player gets a special weapon. Suddenly I had no reservations whatsoever about speaking my mind when I saw things that I believed were unjust, whether they were in the bible or not.
I no longer had reservations about saying that something in the bible was wrong because I no longer believed in a illogical, mysterious, lighting bolt tossing, jealous, vengeful God.
That was a huge step for me because before that there was always that little twinge of fear in my head that although I felt I was seeing all of these contradictions and things that morally appalled me, I was supposed to just play the game and act like I didn’t see them.
Maybe that is what all the adults around me were doing. I wasn’t seeing anything that they hadn't seen. I was just too stupid to keep my mouth shut about it. Maybe there was some scripture in there that I hadn't come across yet that forbid them from telling me to just ignore things. Maybe God would strike them down too in their sleep or kill their first born if they clued me in on what was really going on.
I had always said that if my mother and I were walking up to the pearly gates side by side and some Angel drew his sword and cut her head off right in front of me and then smiled down to me and welcomed me into eternal paradise, I would pluck his wings out of his back one by one and shove them up his ass.
From that day forward I started to become the man that I am today. I began to make a concerted effort to define myself and my principles and to be merciless when it comes to demanding that people be critical in their thinking and self-analytical.
What was unlocked was my intensity, an intensity that would be a problem for me throughout the next dozen or so years of my life.
I still didn’t have as many answers as I had questions.
And I knew that the answers to the questions I wanted I would have to find all on my own.