I Was Baptized by a Radical Religious Extremist

I completely forgot that when I was twelve years old that I swore my allegiance to Jesus. What jogged my memory?
When Christocrat John Hagee, pastor of the 17,000 member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, TX, endorsed John McCain, it raised my Holy Spirit from the dead.

If you are unaware of what Hagee represents, here are some interesting articles: here and here.

To sum up his beliefs: Harry Potter is heresy, Dan Brown is a shadow writer for Satan, if Gays were snot then Hurricane Katrina was God’s Kleenex, wants Christians to bear arms and call a jihad against Iran and the Pope helped Hitler.

Amazingly, this is the church I attended from 1983 to 1987. My head was actucally dipped by his chubby, well-fed, manicured, decorated with diamond-cluster ringed fingers.

Wow. I hope the Muslims aren’t right and Allah doesn’t hold this against me. I was a only a child.

However, I know that excuse will not hold up because Hagee made sure that we were very cognitive of our decision to accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour. The last thing he wanted of his congregation was to baptize their next generation like the ignorant Catholic sheeple. His followers must embrace a baptism like a rite of passage. He refused to baptize an infant.

When I was in the back, undressing and placing on my robe with the other un-saved heathen children I was very nervous. You could hear the murmur of the 3,000 members of the church sitting in their pew/stadium and the organist playing a solemn prelude as background music.

Hagee approached us as if we were at the Super Bowl. He barked in his signature cadence, “I refuse to baptize anyone who does accept the Grace of God. Do you all understand this!?”

“Yes!”, we said in unison.

“Do you except Jesus as your Lord and Saviour!?”, he yelled.

“Yes!”

“Say it!”

“We except Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour!”

I started to feel light-headed like we were a pack of Neanderthals getting ready to take down a saber-toothed tiger. I started to hyperventilate and I wasn’t the only one. It was infectious.

“Do you love Jesus?!” he bellowed.

“Yes!”

“Let me hear it!!”

“We love Jesus! We love Jesus!. We love Jesus!!”

“Now you have the Holy Spirit! Let us bring you to the congregation and save your souls at last!.”

At this point, I literally felt nauseous, I was overwhelmed. I vaguely remember what happened after that. I numbly followed the person in front of me. I remember the water being colder than I thought it would be. Thousands of people were on their feet, waving their hands and praising Jesus. He slapped his beefy hand on my forehead, placed his other hand on my back and then pushed me back into the water while holding my nose at the same time. The deafening roar of the congregation was silenced while I was purged of my “sins”. As I surfaced, I felt disoriented much like the thawing Han Solo after being carbon frozen by Jabba the Hut.

Again…if you [Allah] are reading this. Please take this into consideration. That goes for David Koresh, John Smith, the Jews’ mystery Messiah and anyone I’m leaving out.

I wish I wasn’t agnostic and commit to atheism. It would be so much more simple.