A Short Story.

This I'm posting because a friend of mine told me to write another short story. Well, I had and I hadn't. I had already started writing another short story, but I had never finished it. I never really had a solid idea of where it was going, and I never really had a solid grasp on what it was even about. Now it just sort of reads like the opening 4 paragraphs of the first chapter of some book.

It is about religion, and I don't know why. I'm not religious, nor am I religiously atheist, so I don't know why the subject constantly pops up in my writing. I don't mean it to.

Anyway, here it is if you're interested:

“And they have brought the wrath of God upon us. They have created a utopia. Just as we wish to, but theirs is not for the worship of Jesus, our lord and savior, it is not for God, the one true God, the God of the Israelites, and the God of you and I. NO! They have created a Utopia for Satan himself. Sinners run rampant, The women are whores, the men are immoral, and all the children illegitimate. Is this the world you want your children to be brought up in?”

Apparently it wasn’t. My family followed Samuel Parker into the hell that he called “Paradise on earth” in order to escape the tensions and so called “Sin” of the modern world. It was where I was born, where I spent my childhood, not knowing of the outside world, and then, in 2023, the year the US army decided to take military action against the horrors going on within our “paradise’s” walls, where I watched Samuel Parker sacrifice my mother and father (along with 50 or more other couples) in order for God to protect us from the wrath of “Satan’s Army” as he called them.

Perhaps it was the sight of my mother and father slitting each others throats with the knives stained (maybe not physically) with so much blood from so many people. Or maybe it was getting my first glimpse of how these so called “Sinners” lived, and that the outside world (or their “Utopia of Satan”, as Samuel called it) was a much more peaceful, and loving place than the utopia he had created. But whatever the reason, on that day I abandoned religion.

I was thirteen and when rescued from Samuel Parker’s hell (as it later became known) I was placed in foster care. Five years passed, and nearly as many foster homes. Each one worse than the last. Every time they tried to instill a sense of faith in God, hope in prayer, and security in knowing that the afterlife brings better things. But I never bought it. After seeing the hell that Samuel Parker established in the name of this same God I should now love was enough to turn me off of the idea of religion forever.

But I am now eighteen. I am eighteen and never have to live with another fanatical religious family. Looking back, I can understand why they tried to place those religious ideas in me after what I had been through. I know that Samuel Parker’s form is not the real religion that drives so many other people, but in my mind if there is a God, then he allowed those events to unravel, and therefore he is not the one I wish to commit my life to.

It still sort of wraps itself up in the end, despite me thinking I was going to return to it. Strange...