God Or No God

Before I found AA, I would go to any lengths to argue against the existence of God. I kept a small Bible (which I have no idea how I came to possess) in my bookcase, next to the science fiction books, and waited joyfully for the day the door-to-door evangelists would visit. I'd been raised Catholic but had stopped going to church as soon as I was old enough to go by myself because I never felt that I fit in. Church didn't seem to apply to me or offer me any salvation because I was somehow different. As my alcoholism progressed and my internal feelings of guilt and self-worthlessness mounted, I knew that if God existed, I was hopelessly damned; the logical result was that I started denying God's existence. I came to believe that everything had to have a logical explanation, and I shut off all intuition--or, as I called it, guesswork--in favor of working everything out mechanically or mathematically. As you can imagine, this was a very frustrating existence. The only time I could see the "answers" was when I was too drunk to do anything about them, and hangovers somehow always erased the answers I had been so sure of.