About

My name is Erick Eggleton, and I am not your enemy.

I wanted to start this bio with the simple ground rule that I am your friend; no matter who you are, no matter what you believe or don’t believe… I am your friend. Before we have the opportunity to disagree about anything, I want you to know that as a human being; whether female or male, theist or atheist, communist or capitalist, gay or straight, white or black or any shade in between… I consider you a member of my family. I want it this way because I have spent too much of my life defining myself by the things that I am not, and choosing my friends based on the narrow band of acceptableness that was embedded in me by the culture that I grew up in. No more. If you want to be my enemy, you will be it unilaterally.

I was born near the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee, USA. I grew up in a culture that was immersed in Christianity, so of course I was a Christian. My grandparents took me and my sister to church every Sunday, and we learned there from an early age to love Jesus and fear God. The funny thing is that even though I believed in God, I didn’t behave as though I did. I was an extremely unruly child and later teenager. I was the kid that was always on the ‘usual suspects’ list when something went amuck in the neighborhood. The Hell Fire and Brimstone preaching, as terrifying as it was, wasn’t very effective on me. But, as they say, God had mercy on me, and I survived my childhood no worse for wear. Around the time I turned eighteen I parted ways with the Baptist denomination in favor of the Non-Denomination/Word of Faith movement, and really started to ‘walk the walk.’ I got Born-Again (for real this time), and started speaking in tongues as the Spirit gave me utterance. It was a fun time. I felt really good about myself. My church helped a lot of people in the community, and it gave many including myself a purpose.

Things started to get a little shaky for me and my Christian belief system when I began to seriously study the Bible. I’ve always loved animals, so when I got to all the animal sacrifice in the Old Testament, well, I was deeply troubled by it. It didn’t get any better when I started reading about how the Lord used his ‘chosen people’ to commit genocide in the Land of Canaan, slaughtering men women and children, and only saving the young virgins to be used as sex slaves. And then there were the Levitical laws. It seemed like the death sentence was the catch-all punishment for nearly every offence, including but not limited to: picking up sticks on a certain day of the week, dabbling in other religions, not being a virgin on your wedding day,  using God’s name inappropriately, back-talking your parents, or being attracted to someone of the same sex as yourself. People got put to death for damn near everything, and I wasn’t ok with that. I took my concerns to those who seemed to be somewhat among them, and they effectively quelled them with the magic of apologetics. After a good counseling session or two, I knew that God really loved the Canaanites when he was having them systematically slaughtered because he was preventing future generations from following in their sinful footsteps. And I didn’t feel quite as bad for the animals that were being sacrificed because I now knew that God loved the animals as much as I did, but it was necessary to burn them on the altar so I could be saved from Hell. It made total sense! It was ok for women to submit to me because Adam was made first, and it was Eve who screwed up with the whole ‘apple incident’ anyway. There little pep talks kept me believing for a while, and even feeling somewhat good about it.

During this time in my life I started to get involved with a couple of fringe groups, namely the American Patriot movement and the Abortion Abolition movement. Now, I don’t think that liking to shoot guns or expressing your belief that abortion is murder should be classified as ‘fringe activity,’ but what I was involved in certainly was. I fell in with a group that was planning and preparing for an imminent war against the Government of the United States. We would go heavily armed into the forests of East Tennessee, where we would train and make plans to survive the coming apocalypse. A lot of the members of this group were ex-miliary, including one retired Army Ranger. The initial group was pretty non-violent, and manly concerned with the defence and survival of their families in a S.H.T.F. (Shit Hits The Fan) scenario. I didn’t trust the government any farther that I could throw it, so I fit right it. The trouble started to come when we took on some new members that were hard-core racists. I knew that I was mixed up with some people who I didn’t want to be mixed up with when we were having a mock battle late one night in the woods. After the action we all hunkered down next to the fire for some weekend warrior bonding time. Somehow we got on the subject of World War 2, and one of the new guys made the statement, “I think Hitler had a lot of good ideas.” Things went down hill from there. The other newbies began to express their opinions about the “fucking Mexicans/Jews/Blacks/Chinks …etc. taking over.” We were all heavily armed, so I didn’t make a scene there, but I did part company with them the next day.

At the same time that I was involved with the Rambo wannabes, I was also hanging with another group: The Abortion Abolitionists. The Abortion Abolitionists weren’t your run of the mill pray-in-front-of-a-clinic-and-pass-out-pamplets pro-lifers. No, these were the ones who believed in taking physical action to prevent abortions from happening. It was a confusing time for me. I initially got into the pro-life movement because I couldn’t stand the thought of a woman (or teenage girl most of the time) going to a medical facility to have their unborn baby sucked out the their womb into a trashcan by a dude with a vacuum hose. I started going down to the local abortion click where I lived to pray and beg those entering not to go through with it. Occasionally, we would turn one away, but most of the time we were ignored. I eventually began to hear about a group called ‘The Army of God.’ Far from the peaceful protesters that I had been associating with, A.O.G. would simply show up at an abortion clinic in the middle of the night with a couple of jugs of gasoline, and burn it to the ground. It made sense to me at the time. They were killing babies, so, reducing their facilities to ashes seemed like a perfectly reasonable response. It was something that I never did, but I met a few people who had. The moral line really started to blur for me when I fell in with a sub-group within the Army of God called the Defensive Action movement. These were the ones who wanted the abortionists to take a dirt nap, if you know what I mean, and some of them had actually tucked them in.

I’ve always had a problem with killing. I don’t like it, never have. Where I made the mistake was believing that it was ok to take a life if it meant that by taking that life I would be saving many more. I bought into this ideology so strongly that I actually drove down to Florida to picket the prison where Paul Hill (a man who killed an abortionist and his body-guard with a shotgun) was to be executed. I called him a hero to the news reporters. I am still amazed that I was able to believe that a man could be a defender of life and a taker of it at the same time, but I did believe it. I praised Paul Hill and others like him on a Fundamentalist Christian web site that  I ran at the time. I even signed an online statement in defense of another abortionist killer by the name of James Kopp. I was headed down a dark trail, and may have followed it to a very nasty deadend if not for one amazing thing that happened to me.

In the winter of 2004, the universe had pity on me and sent me a guardian angel by the name of Denice Irene Wurtsmith. This wonderful person who would later become my parter in life steered me away from all the trouble that I was on a collision course with. When I finally had someone to love and care for, my life changed. The things that seemed important didn’t seem as important anymore. From that point on I began to grow up. Sometimes I think that if only everyone had someone like Denice in their life, a lot of the crazy shit that goes on in the world just wouldn’t happen.

After a while I began to enter what I like to call my personal evolutionary period. My mother became deathly ill. I went to her in the hospital intensive care unit, and prayed for her life. I had my christian friends come to pray and believe with me that she would come though, and sure enough she did. She made a full recovery, in spite of me being told by doctors and ministers alike that I needed to give up an prepare to lose her. This put me on a spiritual high of sorts. Not long after this I had a cousin who fell ill, only seemingly not as severe. I went and prayed for her, and had complete confidence that she was healed by the stripes of Jesus. Well, she died not long after that. She was a young woman with two small children, and she died of a simple blood infection. I searched for answers for a long time, but all I heard and all I read is that “the Lord works in mysterious ways,” and that, “I should just accept it and give glory to God.” Well, I couldn’t accept it. I began to tread on ground that I used to be afraid to tread on. I started asking questions, questions to which no one had answers. I wanted to know why God would heal some and not others. I wanted to know why there were so many people starving to death all over the world while we were having potluck dinners once a week here. And most of all I wanted to know why a God who says that he IS love would make a burning Hell to torture people in forever.

The crack had become visible now across the expanse of the dam. I think this happened when in my mind I accepted the mere possibility, the minute possibility that I could be wrong about everything. When I conceded this, that is when a small trickle of water began to flow out of the crack, but being the fine Christian I was, I stuck my finger in the mental leak and plugged it. The dam, the self-policing doctrines in my mind were now compromised. All my beliefs and everything that my world was based on was now contingent on only one thing… the validity of the Judeo-Christian Bible. My acceptance of the Bible as a literal and true explanation for everything was the one thing that held the whole mess together. If the Bible contradicted itself anywhere then it could not be the word of God. As hard and cruel as it was in some places, I still accepted it as the inerrant word of the living God, and held fast to it. This all changed when I noticed the first of many inexplicable contradictions.

Have you ever stared at one of those drawings where it looks sort of like a beautiful lady in a hat, but if you look at it a different way it becomes a picture of decrepid old woman? It’s one of those perspective tricks that your mind plays on you. I remember the first time I saw it. I immediately saw the young lady in the hat. At first, that’s all I thought it was. Then someone told me what to look for, and it transformed in my mind into the old hag. The picture hadn’t changed but the way I was looking at it had. That’s how it was for me and the Bible. I had already read the Bible through twice by this time in my life, but this was different. This time I was looking for the old hag, This time I saw it for what it really is.

The first contradiction that I notices was the account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, found in the book of Matthew 1:2-17 and Luke 3:23-38. The two writers give grossly contradictory records of Christ’s genealogy. It was pretty simple for me after uncovering this. Either one gospel was right and the other wrong, or they were both wrong – either way, the Bible could not be inerrant. If two of the books in the Bible don’t even agree to the lineage of the messiah, then how could any part of it be trusted. In that instant, my literal believe in the Bible was shattered into a billion pieces, and I have yet to meet an apologetics person skilled enough at spinning bullshit to put the pieces back together again. This event for me was the dawn of my personal ‘age of reason.’

Since then I have learned a lot. I now place my faith in the scientific method to help me understand the universe that I live in. I have discarded my ancient, prefabricated values for a set of values that I have forged through much thought and consideration. People are more important to me than beliefs now. I understand that people are more a product of their environment that anything else, and this gives me a lot of patience with them. It’s hard to get mad at someone when you know that if you had been raised the way that they were, you would probably be doing exactly what they’re doing.

Ultimately, I want to make the wold a better place than the one I was born into. I know, it seems like a lofty goal, but it’s one that I think can be obtained. The only problem is that I can’t do it alone. I need you. We need each other. We may be as different as two people can possibly be, but I challenge you to look a little deeper. I need air, water, food, shelter, and most importantly love. I would be willing to wager that you need all these things as well. We are more alike than we are different. So, how about we join forces for a while? We’re all on this odyssey called Life together you know.

I am Erick Eggleton, and I am your friend!