Raised in an end-times cult

Many of you have read or heard about how I was raised in an anti-trinitarian, pseudo-pentecostal, Last Days-prophecy church that set dates for the rapture and taught that the pope was the anti-christ. Here is a little story about how all that teaching affected me when I was a youngster:

Everyone said, when I was a lad, that I was going to be a sure-fire preacher someday. Maybe even, um, an apostle. So perhaps that talk encouraged me, or perhaps that talk was encouraged by, my little neighborhood sermons. I guess a lot of church kids "play preacher" growing up. We certainly did. My cousin Michael would lead the singing, which is funny in itself because he can't carry a tune and wouldn't sing out loud to save his life as an adult. Then I would hold forth with my big ol' King James Bible. We'd even built a little pulpit in the Brown's clubhouse out back. Neighborhood kids would gather 'round.

Now, what you need to know about this is that almost every kid in our neighborhood was male, and almost none of them ever went to church. They were, in fact, a profane lot. Lot's o' cussin' and fightin'. To them (and I'm sure, to their parents) church-going was for sissies. So if I'd have been a regular play-preacher, repeating things I would have heard in a regular Sunday school program, I'd have either been whipped regularly or ignored. Because you see, unchurched boys, raised on a steady diet of violent shows, video games, Dungeon's And Dragons, horror movies and pro wrestling do not have much patience with a message like "Jesus loves me, this I know." Tragic, but true.

What they do think is cool, however, is something like this:

And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.
3And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.
4And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.
5And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.
6And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

So I was a pretty popular little cult leader (not that the verses themselves are "cultic" in any way). Of course, my texts were not unusual to me -- they were what I heard every Sunday. And I figured the popularity of my sermons was due to the Power of the Spirit, not the bloodlust of boys. Oh, I do have some things to make up for ....
One day I took my text on Revelation 17:
1And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:
2With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.

A few parents expressed concern to my folks. It seems they hadn't gotten around to explaining to their kids what a great whore was, in either the literal or symbolic theological sense. Nor had they brought up the subject of fornication.
Now, I had no idea what these terms literally meant either. I knew that my preacher claimed the passage refered to the Roman Catholic Church, and that the Beast of Revelation 13 was the European Common Market, and the Antichrist was the Pope. That's all I meant, and that's what I taught to the wide-eyed kids. Most of their parents could have cared less about any of that.
However, my ol' friend Bob comes from a Catholic family. So he, all of eight years old, went to his mom and asked her why she worshiped the Great Whore of Babylon. This put a bit of a strain on our friendship, and the relative degree of welcome I felt when I'd come to visit Bob in his house. So his mom talked to my parents, who talked to our pastor, who explained to me that I shouldn't necessarily cast my pearls before the swine. That ended the neighborhood preaching.