avatarElizabeth Emerald

Summary

A college student grapples with existential dread and terror after a profound, yet scientifically explainable, religious experience challenges their understanding of God and morality.

Abstract

The narrative recounts a transformative encounter where the author, a college sophomore, is visited by members of the Campus Crusaders for Christ offering a divine gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. The author's critical inquiry into the implications of accepting or rejecting this gift leads to a surreal experience interpreted as a divine sign. This event triggers decades of torment as the author struggles to reconcile the perceived nature of God with their own rational understanding and moral intuition. The resolution comes not from theology but from science, with the discovery of hypnopompic hallucinations explaining the author's experience. Despite this, the author continues to manage the lingering psychological impact of the event through intellectual engagement with atheistic literature and personal narratives of de-conversion.

Opinions

  • The author is skeptical of the evangelical claim that belief in Jesus Christ is a prerequisite for salvation and views the alternative—eternal damnation—as an absurd and morally repugnant proposition.
  • The experience of a divine sign, later attributed to a hypnopompic hallucination, is initially taken as confirmation of a cruel and vindictive deity, causing deep psychological trauma.
  • The author finds solace in the explanations provided by science, which offer a rational framework to understand the seemingly supernatural experience.
  • The Campus Chaplain, a Catholic priest, is seen as more reasonable and nuanced in his theological views compared to the evangelical visitors.
  • The author rejects the simplistic evangelical narrative and finds continued support in secular literature that reinforces their skepticism and helps manage the recurring fear and anxiety resulting from the experience.

Holy Terror

Post-traumatic religious torment

Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash

One evening, at the start of my sophomore year in college, there was a knock at my dorm-room door.

On the threshold stood three young women with beatific visages.

“Campus Crusaders for Christ,” they called themselves. They had come to share the “Good News”:

God loves you. He loves you so much that he sent his only son, Jesus Christ, to die for your sins.

This, His ultimate sacrifice, is my gift, should I choose to accept it.

No catch. I simply had to sign for it. Symbolically, that is, the symbol being an “X,” as in the sign of the cross.

Meaning, provided that I acknowledged the crucified Christ as my Savior, the gift of God’s forgiveness was mine to keep. To have and to hold, from this day forward, until death do I depart from my mortal remains and ascend in spirit to dwell with Him in Heaven forevermore.

No catch?

The crusaders assured me that everyone is entitled to this fabulous gift. No sin is too big to be forgiven. One-size-fits-all forgiveness — a giant squeegee, slate-wiping guaranteed. Pedophiles, Cheerio killers, ethnic cleansers: come on in!

Just say the word; make the mark: “X” that box.

However, should you — for some unfathomable unreason — choose to decline this wondrous gift, there would be a bit of a glitch.

If you were to stamp it “return to sender,” the Bully in the Sky would send you straight south.

One-way ticket, hand-basket to Hell and the works: a woman scorned hath no fury like the Big Daddy of a rejected Jesus.

What is wrong with this picture? Let me count the ways:

  1. Suppose a person simply does not believe that God exists — would he be consigned to suffer forever if he were wrong?

2. Suppose a Jew, having been taught that God is the One-and-Only, discounts the divinity of Jesus — would he be tormented for eternity if he were mistaken?

3. Suppose Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had simply said, “sorry-for-my-sins-forgive-me-Jesus” — would they have scored a free, non-stop flight to the Pearly Gates?

4. Suppose Charles Manson and Family sent their regrets to J.C. — would they qualify for a package deal, tickets to Paradise all around?

The Gospel-ettes chimed, in unison, a resounding “YES!” to each of my questions, beaming in anticipation of my approval.

I patiently explained to the Crusaders that they were surely mistaken. Either God did not exist, in which case my questions were moot; otherwise, the only acceptable answers were “NOs.” Their postulated God-who-loves-us-so-much could not possibly be so monstrously perverse as to punish the “oops-guess-I-got-it-wrong-ers” whilst rewarding, at last call for forgiveness, the “desperate-to-save-my-own-ass-ers.”

When it became apparent to the missionaries that they were not about to budge my position, they reluctantly left me unsaved.

I mulled over the encounter off-and-on throughout the evening, and when I awoke the next morning, it was still on my mind. Those people had been so sure, yet their position was patently absurd.

Yet, they had been so sure…

I lay in bed, pondering, for about ten minutes. At last, it occurred to me to go directly to the Source.

I said, “God, if you exist, and if what those evangelicals told me is true—that I’d better get with Jesus or else! — give me a sign.”

I left my body and floated near the ceiling, serenaded by a heavenly choir, as an electric current whizzed through me head-to-toe, three times in rapid succession.

I AM AWAKE! THIS IS REAL! I re-re-repeated to myself, as the shock slammed me: Don’t you ever try to convince yourself that it must have been a dream!

Ever since that day, forty-five years ago, I have tried — repeatedly, desperately — to convince myself that it had been a dream. Because, you see, if it had been real, then God Himself had confirmed to me the monstrous truth of His nature.

And that knowledge has, for forty-five years, been my unbearable cross. Horror at the knowledge that God is evil beyond measure is ingrained in the beams; terror at the prospect of being personally destined to Hell is the spike through the feet.

In the early days of the dreadful revelation, I wandered, wild-eyed, about the campus. My despair was compounded by the realization that not only was I doomed to suffer the torment of this terrible truth, but I was doomed to suffer alone.

Sure enough, reactions to my tale ran the gamut, question-beggars, case-closers one and all: from “God is Good” to “There is no God,” to “It was only a dream.”

I made my way to the Campus Chaplain, who was — thankfully — a born-once Catholic. I related to him what the born-again Christians had told me.

Father Paul wryly replied that he was all too familiar with the typical evangelical position. He said their spiel was smug, shallow, and simplistic; in short — his word — “bullshit.”

I was momentarily relieved. After all, he should know.

However, there remained the inconvenient fact that God had told me himself that the crusader coalition spoke His Truth. How to reconcile these competing facts, I wondered.

“It must have been a dream,” Father Paul reassured me.

Alas, I was not reassured.

I sought secular counselors, two of whom supported the dream hypothesis. The third suggested anti-psychotic medication. (I passed.)

It wasn’t until fifteen years later, when I was thirty-four, that my “prayer” for resolution was answered. Not by God, but by science.

There is a phenomenon of sleep, called “hypnopompic hallucination,” which explains my experience. It boils down to having your dream and being awake, too.

I knew I’d been awake; I knew it hadn’t been a dream.

I was right; I was wrong.

There is a period upon awakening when the mind operates in dual modality: that is, you are awake in the sense of having an accurate awareness of yourself and your surroundings, yet dream images persist and get conflated with reality.

In the deluxe version of hypnopompic hallucination bizarre sensory effects — such as electrical pulses, levitation, and auditory accompaniments — enhance the experience.

Bingo!

Three for three. A scientific explanation! All the “but-what-abouts?” got butted out in one swift kick.

The reign of Holy Terror should accordingly have ended, twenty-five years ago, with this revelation.

But…

In the battle of the brain and the belly, the “but” always wins.

That but-in-the-gut was spawned forty-five years ago in that instant of unholy horror, that instant wherein the enormity of God’s evil was bequeathed to me in a sudden sucker-punch.

The power of that punch knocked me flat with a fear that cannot be unfelt.

There have been, mercifully, remissions, some lasting many months, even years.

To forestall recurrences, I treat myself with maintenance doses of therapeutic agents: atheistic authors, such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris.

Adjuncts are autobiographies of “unborn-again” Christians, such as John Loftus, Dan Barker, and Bart Ehrman.

I try to avoid triggers such as might re-activate the terror. Whenever terror threatens to overtake me, I promptly re-dose myself with the aforementioned antidotes.

For example, whenever I hear an AM radio preacher ramble about the Resurrection, whenever I come across a magazine from Christian Research Institute proclaiming proof of the Creation, whenever I’m trapped in a conversation with a wannabe-converter who has no clue that I’m a don’t-wannabe-convertee.

All told, given the circumstances, I cope as best as I can. I consider myself to have a chronic condition, strange in nature though it may be, that needs to be managed.

As with such conditions, control, rather than cure, is the operative word.

Hope though I might for a cure, I certainly am not — absolutely not! — going to pray for one.

Nonfiction
Religion
Christianity
Spirituality
PTSD
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