And We Have Killed Him

I was fourteen, maybe fifteen years old when I killed God.

It wasn’t so dramatic. I was kneeling at my pew, listening to the priest say the words that make the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, when I had a thought: “I don’t believe any of this.”

Which could have been a passing thought, of course. A “test of faith,” if you like. Except it wasn’t.

Probably the thing to do would have been to talk to mom and dad about it. Except I couldn’t do that, not even to say I was “having doubts.” Not after living through what happened with my older sister — which I’ll have to tell you about another time. Cliff’s Notes version is that intentional or not, the lesson I learned was that going to mom and dad with anything serious meant a one-way ticket to a psych ward, medication, and therapy once a week for years.

No, thank you!

Parents are for placating with paper-thin lies and fake smiles. Not for sharing anything that brings you serious mental and emotional distress.

Lost your faith? Keep it to yourself. Not a single day for four years or more goes by where you don’t think about ending your life? Don’t say anything, you’ll just upset your mother. Having recurrent fantasies about getting an AR-15 and shooting up your classmates? Perfectly normal, better to play it close to the chest.

Gotta be their perfect little boy, after all. Get your straight A’s. Get your scholarships. Get your academic team trophies. Be an altar boy. Be a lector. Volunteer for Vacation Bible School.

Seethe with resentment every waking moment and want nothing more than death. Just don’t upset the balance by telling us about it.

People talk about teenage rebellion. My teenage rebellion was reading Nietzsche after I was done with my calculus homework.

While the other kids were having parties, getting drunk, doing drugs, and actually living, I was searching for meaning in Also Sprach fucking Zarathustra. (I particularly enjoyed the parts about envy and resentment.) Or at least that’s what happened when I didn’t have my whole weekend stolen from me at some church function where I’d have to play the smiling little puppet and act like I believed in Sky Daddy like everybody else there did.

No wonder when I went off to college I was that idiot who majored in philosophy. Most people are practical-minded enough to go because they’re trying to learn how to live.

I was struggling to learn why.

But, you ask, what was it that made me stop believing in God?

I think I’ve figured it out. It wasn’t any grand scientific or philosophical argument, let me tell you!

It was a book, though. A Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I picked it up the summer after eighth grade, on a family trip where my cousin was getting ordained as a priest — because of course I have a cousin who’s a priest.

I made an awful discovery in there.

Nothing like what you’d expect me to say.

Go ahead, try to guess. You’ll never get it.

I read that according to the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, masturbation was a mortal sin. The kind that would (as my senior year calculus teacher so beautifully put it) get you sent straight to negative infinity.

Unless you confess it to a priest and receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation. And then don’t do it again.

And I was a fourteen year old kid. I was jerkin’ it fifty times a day, easy. It’s a wonder the thing didn’t fall off.

But this put me in an awful situation. Obviously I had to stop…

Which as you might imagine, was not happening. Although I tried, I really did. Sometimes I might have even managed to hold back for three, four days at a time. (Of course, by that point you’re having urges to beat yourself with a cat-o’-nine-tails and having warm thoughts about the holes in toilet paper rolls, but…)

Sex, by the way, did not exist in our family. Period. I like to joke (although it’s not really a joke) that my dad doesn’t know about sex. We were a family who fast-forwarded through the parts of any movie that featured physical contact more intimate than a kiss on the cheek, if that gives you an idea. And we never, ever talked about it.

So I was gonna wind up in Hell for all eternity. Unless I stopped choking the chicken and confessed my dirty, dirty sins to a priest.

Not exactly a conscious line of reasoning leading into atheism, but you can see the nature of the deadlock. It gave me an awful lot of anxiety at the time.

Is it any wonder I ended up killing God?