Description

By Robert Kimball

ISBN: 978-1-84991-967-8
Published: 2013
Pages: 308
Key Themes: Mental Health, Schizophrenia, Religion, Personal Experience

Description

How to Stop Believing in Hell, a Schizophrenics Religious Experiences is about ending a lifelong fear of Hell. It should attract the interest of anyone who suffers from spiritual terror. There are a great many such people. The book is often dark and sometimes comic.

Robert Clayton had a beautiful early childhood spent in an adobe house in the Sonoran Desert. Then he was spooked by religion. At ten, he was praying continuously to drive away blasphemous thoughts. At eleven, he asked God to destroy his immortal soul so that he could not go to Hell. He took a vow of perpetual celibacy when he was thirteen. At twenty, he lived in terror that he was all that existed and that he was already dead and in Hell.

He began stealing from churches. By committing sacrilege he hoped to separate myself from God and the fear of God. Later he committed the unforgivable sin by blaspheming the Holy Ghost. He ceased to believe in God, but he still believed in Hell.

He was hospitalized. After a few months, he received passes on Sundays to attend services at an independent Pentecostal church. He had learned that the church members did not believe in Divine punishment. He was led before the altar and told to repeat various pious phrases. The phrases soon became nonsense syllables. He repeated those. Then his tired tongue began spastically uttering nonsense on its own. He still believed in Hell.

He had sex for the first time with another mental patient at the hospital to break his vow of celibacy. It was quick and mechanical. There was no foreplay. It did not help. After being discharged, he became an alcoholic and heroin addict. After he quit his addictions, he began walking down crowded sidewalks speaking loud nonsense and screaming. He tried very hard to stop and could not. He found a job as an elevator operator. He began talking to himself, then screaming on the elevator. He was fired and became one of the many crazy street people in his city.

After an act of providence that allowed him to reason disingenuously against his lifelong beliefs, he escaped his fears and eventually became a successful lawyer.

About the Author

Robert Kimball has a B.A. in English, magna cum laude, from the University of Arizona and a J.D. from the University of Virginia. He is a Phi Beta Kappa. He taught a variety of high school subjects in Arizona and Mexico for thirteen years. He was an attorney for the Federal Communications Commission until he retired. He has written many published decisions on matters such as aid to the handicapped, free speech, pornography, corporate mergers and the right to extend telecommunications lines. He was born July 4th, 1945.