When you’re lonely and sick, when you don’t know who you are and realize you never did…you think some things. You have regrets. Because it is a time when even the strong can’t help but lose self esteem, self confidence. I don’t know how I’ve been this way for so many years and survived the times when it got worse. When I was barely human, reduced to misery I can never describe. How much can a man take? When he looks for spiritual guidance and instead finds a host of jackals who look at him as prey? How does anyone live through that?

1999

I was working at Airgas near Catonsville, Maryland. I ran a generator which produced Acetylene gas. You know, the stuff used for cutting torches. I rented the ground floor of a house, and was alone for the first time since I’d been married. I needed something I didn’t have. Most of my time was occupied and divided between work and sleep. The work was exhausting and left us in the Flammable Gas Section saturated with ammonia and lime, byproducts of acetylene generation. I’d return home filthy, stinking and exhausted. In the summer, it got hot. There was a drought so severe that the local news did a report from Liberty Reservoir. The water levels had gone so far down that places no one had ever seen were not only exposed, but growing grass.

Heat exhaustion was a constant. I’d get a shower and come out naked, the house hot and stinking as if a dead dog was under a crawlspace. Yes, that’s happened before, but this was the first time I had experienced it. Despite telling my landlord, he shrugged it off. Said he couldn’t smell anything. I think he buried his dogs in the crawlspace. He lived out back by the waterfront. Had a bunch of dogs. Anyway…

My bedroom was my refuge. It had a window unit, and in the cold air, no smell was present. I’d just cook in the kitchen and eat in the bedroom. I watched a lot of TV. Basic cable came with the apartment. For a while, I was content. But lonely. A 39-year-old man, single. Lonely. Not wanting anything to do with women because of the stalking (more like terrorism) I’d endured, I had to settle for watching TV. Working at night, that meant that I was bound to run into the 700 Club. Daytime television is not, and never has been, much fun. And feeling that emptiness inside myself, well, I saw the show one day and I remembered my roots, growing up in a Southern Baptist church. I needed God. My faith had long since left me; a broken family, a divorce, two stalkers…it just seemed as if the God I believed in wasn’t there when I needed him.

Pat Robertson was not unknown to me, but I had never seen the show. I watched as he and a co-host, a woman, prayed for healing for people they didn’t know. I was fascinated and taken in. Who, after all, needed a healing more? Plagues of nightmares since my childhood came and went. My mind was chaos. I could watch Monday Night Football and not be able to talk about it the next day. I didn’t even remember the score.

Off and on, there were drugs and booze. I preferred the drugs, but my addiction became so acute that I ended up withdrawing and spent all week in bed.

I keep sidetracking. Sorry. Back to the 700 Club. Pat Robertson snared me. I took him for a man of faith. I feel rather silly about it now, but then, I needed something. I thought he had answers. People would email the guy and claim to have been healed as he prayed. But his prayers were, like a fortune teller’s predictions, tricks. Generic, but bound to have something that many people would hook onto like a fish going for a piece of bait. He’d say, eyes closed, “I see someone who’s knees have bothered you for a long time, and the Lord is healing you now”. I waited for weeks until he would describe my problems. Never happened. Of course to him, people like me are vermin. No one deserves neither pity nor prayer; victims of abuse might remind him of liberal causes.

I heard the commentary he did when his news anchor was on. I saw him give a whiteboard talk about adultery.

Wait. Hold on a second.

His explanation was gross. It was in the Ten Commandments, he said, because wives and concubines were regarded as a man’s property, “and you are not to plunder that”.

Plunder?

Property? Property?

I was thinking, well, if that’s how it was then, maybe it’s changed a bit in the modern sense, when a wife isn’t considered “property.”

Jesus taught that it was a grave sin to even think of adulterous contact. And at the time, even in first century Israel, wives were not the property of a man. Even by strict Jewish law, even if they had to keep a low profile much of the time, they were hardly property.

It showed me that Robertson thought like a real sexist. My eyes opened. Then I saw one of their telethon episodes. The calls kept coming, people led astray by this fake, pledging money, trying to become”gold members” or some bullshit.

He’d show truckloads of bottled water and supplies going out to relief for disaster victims. I doubted that the money he was swindling was even dented by water bottles. Later he’d say things that proved he does not empathize with victims of disaster.

I’d been shaken by Christian leaders before; disillusioned and disgusted. Why, how I had fallen for this thief and heretic was a source of shame I shared with no one. Everyone knew I was an asshole, but that kind of went with being me; I couldn’t bear to prove myself an idiot on top of that.

I stopped watching, but not before I sampled some more bullshit. He had a reporter do a story about a teen who committed suicide after being really into Dungeons and Dragons, a dice game that could nowadays be likened to videogames like Final Fantasy, Baldur’s Gate, and many other video games known as role playing games. Imagine how I, with my past, with demons I’d come into close contact with, reacted. The report said it was an epidemic, kids seeing shadows at night in their bedrooms, even being possessed. And killing themselves. Freak me out!

Well, I believed stories like that. But I don’t remember ever having played any game that drew demons to me. What’s more is that when later I researched this “epidemic” of suicides among D&D players, I found something weird. There was only one such case, and the reason for the death was disputed. And that source also mentioned the 700 Club as exploiting the boy’s death to promote a campaign against D&D as a link to possession. Ouch, Pat! What the hell?

There’s more. Oh, there’s always more. Rants against “homosexuals”. You know, I’m not gonna sit here and play God, nor am I going to put words in his mouth.

Does God hate gay or lesbian people? I honestly don’t believe that’s true, and I’m not going to say so.

Did God whip up Hurricane Katrina to punish witches and gays? Oh, come on. Really? How’s that even a question?

And Haiti, did God cause the earthquake as punishment for the revolt against French colonialism and slavery?

Pat…

You’re just a pathetic racist. That’s no good, telling people that, speaking for God when he loves his children, saying a disaster is divine retribution. You don’t know that. I’m Going out on a limb here, but I’d like to say that those who would do God’s work should comfort people, not shame them and scare the shit out of them. Shame on you, Pat.

Anyway, back to 1999…

That fall, there were mad, terrifying predictions that when the clocks turned to 00:00 hours on 1 January 2000, the world could practically end. I never believed it, because for one thing, the only reason this was being predicted was because computers would automatically go back to 1900 instead of 2000. I knew better. Was never worried. On New Year’s Eve, I laid in bed, watching Time’s Square. That stupid ball came down, and, of course, everything was fine.

I don’t know how the evangelicals had predicted things would go, but Pat Robertson had already made predictions of the dates of the end of the world. He hasn’t been right yet. You know why? Because Jesus said, “Of that day and hour no one knows, not even I, but only the Father.” Translation: do not waste time worrying about it and do not frighten others with things you cannot possibly know. Instead live every day the best way you can and have faith.

But Robertson claimed God had told him. Shown him visions. I’ve got doubts about God talking to Pat Robertson.

I have another WordPress site, “How Close Are We?” in which I examine various things, and my feeling is that we are causing that day and hour to get closer. We still can’t know what will happen or when, but we are definitely pushing our luck. And God does not have to tell me. I can see dreadful things on the horizon without ever opening a bible.

But Robertson doesn’t stop at end-times predictions. No, he speaks for God. Go to his Wikipedia page and there’s actually a subheading that lists controversies. Now a man who claims to be a Christian is going to draw fire; no one can lead a life free of mistakes and sin, but he is extraordinarily consistent in setting himself up for harsh criticism. Of course, no Christian should ever wish that anyone would die, but he did much worse when he called for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to be assassinated. That’s not something Jesus ever did. He didn’t call for Pontius Pilate or Caesar Tiberius to be killed. He said, “Love your enemies, do good to those who spitefully use you.” And he said “You know the commandment, an eye for an eye, but a new commandment I give you; that you shall love one another.”

That’s it. Period. And it makes Pat Robertson a heretic. But recently he’s cemented that with astonishing things he’s said such as, “To be against Trump is to be against God.”

That’s heresy. That’s putting words in God’s mouth that anyone with a lick of sense knows is a lie. Know what Jesus said about lies? Well, he called Satan “the father of all lies.” That’s as plain as you can get.

There is no evidence for, and plenty against, Trump being some anointed leader chosen by God. The evangelicals of the far right fell for him because his racist and hateful views are their unspoken own. They fear and hate the same things he does. He appealed to them for votes, claiming to be something he’s not. He even said in an interview that he’s never felt a need to pray.

Pat, you’re not what you say you are.

Once I saw him read a letter. It was from a woman who had a Buddhist friend, and the friend asked her to go with her to a temple. The woman was asking Robertson if it was okay. He said, “Yeah, if you take your faith with you I guess so,” and later he called Buddhism a religion of demons. He’s also called Islam a satanic cult consisting of killers. It’s far from the truth; only those who listen to the babble of the far right believe that. Anyone who has ever worked with or known a Buddhist or Muslim will tell you they’re anything but. My experience with them has been positive. I fear Repubicans way more than I can ever fear Muslims.

And Robertson is hardly alone. From noted televangelists to Southern Baptist pastors, there are heretics, teachers of apostasy, those who lead believers astray of the Gospels, the doctrinal teachings of Jesus. I’ve had enough of Franklin Graham and Joel Osteen. And don’t get me even started on the seed Gospel, wherein you’re told you can get rich by giving pastors and televangelists money. That’s a grave sin, stealing from people by lying to them, and necessarily lying to them about the true meaning of the doctrine. That’s heresy and thievery.

Every time I’ve hit a spiritual low, I’ve looked for guidance. I’ve never gotten any. I’ve had to look within and keep my faith simple and easy to manage. It’s a hard way to go, but it beats what lies beyond.

A few years later, I would be on the road to homelessness. I looked up one day and said angrily, “Either you do something about this, or I will.”

I couldn’t make it on my own. I needed help. My health both mentally and physically was going south. I could no longer hold down a job. When my situation didn’t improve, I figured God didn’t care. That made sense; who was I to have a prayer answered? I tried three times to kill myself. I spent time after that in a hospital, and on labor day weekend of 2005 I was discharged. I’ve never gone back.

Sometimes, just a little bit of faith can go a long way. I still had a lot of sinning to do. I was near death after a heart attack and surgery. I don’t want to go back to the place I went. I don’t. I brought it all on myself. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. And I don’t have to go back to that dark, lonely place. It had nothing to do with going to church or giving Pat Robertson money.

It’s just about faith. That’s all it’s ever been about. I’ve lived a nightmare. I have. But even if I am an asshole, at least I didn’t turn out like Pat Robertson.