Under The Glass Ceiling

I thought I knew God. All my life I tried to do the right thing and claimed that I was a Christian . It's funny in hindsight, because I was deep into the occult and also a very mean, very vengeful person. I wouldn't deny that God existed, and that's about the extent of my devotion. I agreed, the ten commandments made sense. But you'll notice the ten commandments don't (directly) say anything about loving people, and I certainly didn't. Looking back, I don't even know how I simultaneously hated myself and also thought I was better than everyone around me. Logically, I don't understand that. But spiritually I do, because that's exactly what the devil does to your mind.  I was judging everyone around me for not making the decisions that I made, which aligned with the Word of God (or so I thought). I wouldn't lie, I wouldn't steal, I wouldn't cheat, etc; although I did still do those things, just to people that didn't count. Because when...

       In my teens to early 20's I took a deep dive into the occult. I always believed that God existed, but I didn't feel connected to him or even know who he truly was. I was raised in a Christian household but took no interest in the Bible. Despite being forced to attend Church services I paid no attention to the message being preached. I've come to find out that the message being preached, or lack thereof, in most Churches today is boring and ineffectual by design. Or by negligence and ignorance of those conducting said services.       My father was a pastor when I was very young, and again after I had essentially moved out on my own. It's curious to me, in hindsight, that I missed out on his teachings, which were very different teachings from the Churches we attended in my formative years. I remember my father dragging us from Church to Church every Sunday trying to find one that he believed taught what the Bible actually said. He never did f...

 I've been a conspiracy theorist my entire life. My mother was a conspiracy theorist, because her father was a conspiracy theorist. I remember pouring over my grandfather's books and newspaper collections as a child; the very beginning of my disdain and distrust of both the media and the governments they painted pretty pictures for. Or, sometimes hideous pictures, depending on the commission. He'd been clipping and collecting newspaper articles since the Alger Hiss trials of the 1940's, and with three copies of "Witness" in his collection, it was one of the first politically fueled books I'd come to read.  My mother was convinced the government had a dossier on each member of the family, because my grandfather told her there was. She was convinced they were monitoring our every move, waiting to pounce on our dissent and imprison us, apparently. My father was a pastor of a few very small, non-denominational Churches during my childhood. Nothing large or not...