My Most Difficult Decision

“Your mother’s going to hell, where she’ll be tormented forever!” my religion teacher threatened.

Right then, at eight years old, I decided, If there is a God, I hate Him. How can a loving God punish my faithful mother?

When my father married my mother, they belonged to different faiths. But they had decided to raise their children in my father’s faith, so I received daily religious instruction from that perspective.

“It’s so sad your mother will never see heaven,” my religion teacher continued to harp. One day I tore up the study sheets in anger and threw them at her, telling her exactly what she could do with her God. By age ten, I was a confirmed atheist, although I attended church with my father. When I was 12, my mother died after four painful years of terminal cancer, further alienating me from any idea of