Author Description

How might it happen that a boy of five or six would be tortured by the question of the existence of God? How would this happen, even if that boy were raised to be an atheist by atheist parents? If the boy was never baptized and never taken to church? Was never told about any religion? This book records the spiritual autobiography of a boy who, raised in a household which discouraged belief in anything religious, nevertheless came at a young age to worry about the place of God in his life and family, and suffered from intense fears that he would be condemned to hell because he had not been baptized. Looking back, here is the way the author describes his early years: "I grew up in a household with no place for God or religion. My mother and father were atheists. They did not believe in any divinities, and certainly not in the divinity of Jesus. Perhaps like some of their intellectual friends, they dismissed the idea that Jesus of Nazareth ever existed. This was in America in the 1930's and 40's, a time when scientists and intellectuals challenged the claims of Christianity. For my parents the questions of who Jesus was and whether he had actually walked the earth were irrelevant. "Is there a God in heaven? Is creation a gift to us from God? Does God love and care for his children? These were not questions my parents would entertain. Such statements had been denounced as meaningless by the scientists and the rationalists, who insisted that all discussions of God are pointless." The author recalls his childhood swept by the cold winds of atheism as especially painful because his mother, suffering from the loss of meaning of the atheist's vision, sank into a deep depression and then into madness. She suffered a series of nervous breakdowns and spent most of the author's early years in and out of mental hospitals. As a child the author felt "spiritually bankrupt." He felt he "counted for little in my parents' world. I counted for even less in the larger world. I looked ou