"There was a little boy," he began, "Who was very smart and very energetic, but was also very disobedient." I could already smell my Dad's handiwork in this parable. His friend Dan Draley, whom I admired a great deal, had offered to tell me a story. now, I expected something along the lines of the song he had sung earlier that night to entertain us children, a rousing ragtime number called, "Broccoli Brains." Evidently, Broccoli Brains was upset. Nobody would let him play baseball because he was a giant stalk of broccoli. To the surprise of none of us who were listening, when they did let Broccoli Brains play, he won the game for them.

But this story, of which I was to be the sole beneficiary, was shaping up a bit differently. To begin with, the boy was clearly intended to be me. In addition, there was no anthropomorphic vegetable, and the story was therefore boring. "The little boy never listened to his parents. He would just stare at them when they asked him to do something and do the exact opposite." Again, I recognized my own charming characteristics. "One day the little boy was running across the street without looking. 'Stop,' his father yelled, but it was no use. A truck came and smashed him into the concrete. So you see, Brandon, it is very important to listen to your parents. They know things that you don't know, and it could be a matter of life and death. Goodnight, now!" With this he shut the door and extinguished the light behind him.

I disagreed with his analysis, however. The moral Dan drew from the story was that children should always listen to their parents, but really the opposite was true. If the boy hadn't heard the Father, if he had just kept running, the truck would have missed entirely. Instead, when the Father yelled "Stop!", the boy did. In the path of the vehicle. Of course, this is not the meaning intended by the story, which may if fact have been apocryphal, but it is indicitave of two things about my religious upbringing.

Firstly, The Witnesses take only what they want to out of any given story. In the course of rereading the Bible, I am astonished by how many things which I assumed to be canonical were simply made up (Nimrod and the tower of Babel) and how many disturbing details were glossed over (Lot and incest, Noah and drunkeness, Abraham prostituting his fucking wife for personal gain). To be a Witness, a suspension of disbelief is necessary that makes me wonder how I ever did it.

Secondly, My parents ruled by fear. "You behave, or you'll be run over by a truck!" is an excellent summary of the messages my siblings and I recieved throughout childhood. Sadly, this message was erroneous and, in reality, did nothing to teach me how not to be run over by a truck, which is something that I would have done well to learn.