Excerpt from LHROOH:
The end of the world didn't come when it was supposed to.
I was brainwashed to believe, in seminars every Friday at Heritage Christian school, that all the signs were there. "You will know the beast has risen up out of the ground, becasue there will be heard everywhere a great gnashing of teeth," Ms. Price would warn in her sternest, most ominous voice to rows of cowering sixth-graders. "And every one, children and parents alike, will suffer. Those that don't receive the mark, the number of his name, will be decapitated before their families and neighbours."
At this point, Ms. Price would pause, dip into her pile of flash cards of the apocalypse and hold up an enlarged photocopy of a UPC symbolbut with the number manipulated to read 666. This was how we knew the apocalypse was around the corner: the UPC code was the mark of the beast spoken about in Revelation, we were taught, and the machines being installed into supermarkets to read them would be used to control people's minds. Soon, they warned, this satanic price code would replace money and everyone would have to get the mark of the beast on their hands in order to purchase anything.
"If you deny Christ," Ms. Price would continue, "and take this tattoo on your hand or forehead, you will be allowed to live. But you will have lost eternal"and here she'd hold up a card showing Jesus descending from heaven"life."
For other seminars, she had a card with a newspaper clipping detailing Jon Hinckley, Jr.'s then-recent attempt to assassinate Ronald Wilson Reagan. She would hold it up and read from Revelation 13: "Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666." The fact that there were 6 letters in Reagan's first, middle and last names was one sign that this was our final hour, that the Antichrist was here on earth and that we must prepare for the coming of Christ and the rapture. My teachers explained all of this not as if it was an opinion open to interpretation, but as if they were an undeniable fact ordained by the Bible. They didn't need proof; they had faith. And this practically filled them with glee in anticipation of the coming apocalypse, because they were going to be saveddead but in heaven and freed from suffering.
It was then that I began having nightmaresnightmares that continue to this day. I was thouroughly terrified by the idea of the end of the world and the Antichrist. So I became obsessed with it, watching movies like
The Exorcist and
The Omen and reading prophetic books like
Centuries by Nostradamus,
1984 by George Orwell and the novelized version of the film
A Theif in the Night, which described very graphically people getting their heads cut off because they hadn't received 666 tattoos on their forehead. Combined with the weekly herrangues at Christian school, it all made the apocalypse seem so real, so tangible, so close that I was constantly haunted by dreams and worries about what would happen if I found out who the Antichrist was. Would I risk my life to save everyone else? What if I already had the mark of the beast somewhere on meunderneath my scalp or on my ass where I couldn't see it? What if the Antichrist was me? I was filled with fear and confusion at a time when, even without the influence of Christian school, I was already in turmoil because I was going through puberty.
Sure evidence of this is despite that Ms. Price's terrifying seminars, detailing the world's impending doom, I found something sexy about her. Watching her preside over class like a Siamese cat, with her pursed lips, perfectly combed hair, silk blouses concealing a ****-me body and stick-in-the-ass walk, I could tell there was something waiting to burst out of that repressed
Circle Two - The Lustful
Christian facade. I hated her for giving me nightmares my entire teenage years. But I think I hate her even more for the wet dreams she inspired.
I was an Episcopalian, which is basically diet Catholic (same great dogma but now with less rules) and the school was nondenominational. But that didn't stop Ms. Price. Sometimes she'd start her Bible class by asking, "Are there any Catholics in the room?" When no one answered, she'd lay into Catholics and Episcopalians, lecturing us about how they misinterpreted the Bible and were worshipping false idols by praying to the pope and the Virgin Mary. I would sit there mute and rejected, unsure whther to resent her or my parents for raising me as an Episcopalian.
Further personal humuiliation came during Friday assemblies, when guest speakers would talk about how they had lived as prostitutes, drug addicts and practitioners of black magic until they found God, chose His righteous path and were born again. It was like a Satanists Anonymous meeting. When they were done, everyone would bow their heads in prayer. If anyone wasn't born again, the failed pastor leading the seminar would ask them to come on stage and hold hands and be saved. Every time I knew I should have walked up there, but I was too petrified to stand on stage in front of the entire school and too embarrassed to admit that I was morally, spiritually and religiously behind everybody else.
Reverend Earnest Angley was one of the more notorious televangelist faith healers of the time.
The Reverend was one of the scariest people I'd ever met: his perfectly strait teeth gleamed like bathroom tiles, a toupe sat clumped on top of his head like a hat made from wet hair caught in a bathtub drain and he always wore a powder blue suit with a mint green tie. Everything about him reeked of artificiality, from his plastic, over-manicured appearance to his name, which was supposed to evoke the phrase "earnest angel".
Every week he called a variety of crippled people to the stage and supposedly healed them in front of millions of TV viewers. He would poke his finger in a deaf person's or a blind person's eye, yelling "Evil spirits come out" or "Say baby", and then wiggle his finger until the person on stage passed out. His sermons were similar to those at school, with the reverend painting the imminent apocalypse in all it's horrorexcept here here people screaming, passing out and speaking in tongues all around me. At one point in the service, everyone would throw money at the stage. It would rain hundreds of quarters, silver dollars and wadded up dollar bills as the Reverend went right on testifying about the firmament and the fury. Along the walls of the churchwere numbered lithographs he sold depicting macabre scenes like the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding through a small town not unlike Canton at sunset, leaving a trail of slit throats behind them.
The services were three to five hours long, and if I fell asleep, they'd reprimand me and take me to a seperate room where they held special youth seminars. Here, they'd chastise me and about a dozen other kids about sex, drugs, rock and the material world until we were ready to throw up. It was a lot like brainwashing: we'd be tired and they purposely wouldn't give us any food so that we were hungry and vulnerable.
The story goes on like that for another 2 pages, but you can clearly see that something is wrong here. I'll leave you folks to decide what.
and juss with everything happening. i think humans are screwing it up.
)
).
. That is stupid as me saying if Kerry would have been elected then the world would end...which it wouldn't have.
