How Pat Robertson, et. al. tried to eat my soul:

As children, many of us took our cultural myths to be absolute truth, I had a very strong, personal fear of God-the-punisher who would send me to hell at the drop of a hat.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night, convinced I had a 666 somewhere on my body, and determined to pray it off.

Nobody ever told me that my normal self-discovery as a young man was sinful, but I was sure of it nonetheless. I repressed that part of myself so forcefully that I would on occassion break out into fits of continuous masturbation lasting weeks at a time, followed immediately by pious repentance, guilt, fear, and prayer at a level bordering on compulsive. (well past bordering, truth be told)

My parents were not only not responsible for this state of affairs, but I am sure they would have acted to correct it had they known. I got my religion secretly from billy-sunday types on television, long after everybody had gone to sleep. I had a need, and they filled it with poison.

(lets not forget the little Jack Chick comic-book pamphlets describing how you always go to hell unless you "accept Jesus Christ into your heart and life as your lord and personal savior" Even now I can recite that crap verbatim, I must have repeated that magical formula thousands of times.)

That kind of religion is medieval. God DID create the world in 7 days, and if you don't believe that, you go to hell. Dinosaurs were coexistant with man, because it says right there in Genesis that Adam named all the creatures, well... there you have it. no questions.

It's as if the enlightenment never happened, and the nation founded on the principles of Humanism just forgot all about that devillish hooey. Coming out of that mindset required going through different stages of understanding, rethinking the thoughts of those who went through it first, when they could still actually get burnt at the stake for it.

But The World is too rich; the "temptations" of the flesh to real to be sin. To truly sin, to me, would be to waste ones experience here on earth in constant dreadful prayer to a mean old crusty god who probably will just toss your sorry ass to hell anyhow.

At some point, those of us who, as children had a "fear" of GOD must awaken from our dream, either gently or violently, and see the world, not as a mythic battleground for souls, but as The World, the very garden of eden, snakes and all.

Many of us began our "descent" reading the likes of Nietzsche- That could be somewhat disorienting, as if a stranger ran into your bedroom and began shouting at you, "wake up! you are dreaming! stop that stupid dreaming and help me light your house on fire!"

A bit of a shock, perhaps.

My first hints at awakening came by way of a Bill Moyers interview with Joseph Campbell on PBS. I began to watch it because while flipping through the channels, there were scenes from Star Wars .(when you're 12 years old star wars gets your attention!)... I got sucked in, watched the whole thing 2-3 times, I understood for the first time that there were other people who had faced this awful fear of everlasting hell and won, put it behind them, never to be haunted by it, they seemed happy, intelligent, wise... and that putting this childish nightmare religion behind me was the first step in a long journey toward "The Truth" or a closer approximation thereof.

Even before this event, I had an insatiable thirst for mythology. I wanted stories about all the old gods, all the old heroes, but they were hard to find, outside the bible, the Greek pantheon was readily available, but perhaps they were too foreign to me, as a child I didn't understand them properly, and as a Christian, I prayed for the souls of the poor dupes who worshipped such gods.

As time went on after seeing that show, I never read one of Campbell's books, in fact its only this past June I finally bought one, ("Creative Mythology" still working on it... 12 pages to go!)
Instead, I read all the old myths I could find. I loved the stories about Gilgamesh and Enkidu, I re-read the bible, several times, especially the old testament, this time with new, unafraid eyes. I found there no manual for living, but I found the oral history of an ancient, sometimes wise, sometimes silly, civilization.

And I found, to my great shock, Mithras and Osiris and Orpheus, Tammuz, and a host of other gods. (Ever notice how much easier it is to view another culture's gods as imaginary?)
Mithras and Orpheus being the ones that struck me most squarely on the chin. Not only was the dying/resurrected god a common motif well before AD 1, the actual teachings, the prescriptions given by Mithras, and possibly more cryptically by the Orpheus cults--- mirrored the gospels. It was all there: love your enemy, turn the other cheek, help the poor, everything that was so good about christianity was already present in religions of the region centuries before Jesus. It struck me that COMPASSION then, was nothing new. Probably not such an unusual thing for a mystic religion (as opposed to a civic one) to preach compassion...

Then, I found gospels of all kind and type, revealed at Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea, they were republished after centuries of being supressed, literally, into the earth. Suddenly there were thousands of different Christianities! Before the great repression of Justinian, there were hundreds of cults with different beliefs, many different interpretations, many gospels being written... and I knew for sure that those tent-revivalists were definitely absolutely wrong.

There may be a god, or a thousand, I don't think it matters one whit to us mortals. We certainly shouldn't waste our (possibly) only incarnation worrying about what they'd want us to do. All the morality, the compassion, the feeling of what is right, these are within us, and no religion is necessary for us to flourish.