Not wishing to breathe the same air with the Antichrist, each grandmother usually visited separately. And when she did, she always brought fresh books and tracts for me to read (which I loved, and looked forward to), along with a solemn warning that the other was leading my soul straight down into the very maw of hell with her "false doctrines of devils."

All of this was between me and my grandmothers, without my parents or anyone else even being conscious of it. They were the only two people in the world I could argue the Bible with, who knew what they were talking about, and enjoyed it as much as I did -- though they believed it was God's Word, while I did not.

This experience opened my mind at a very early age to the folly of worshipping interpretations, and eventually, sometime in high school, to the realization that when it comes to Jesus, all you have is interpretations -- "images," be they your own or someone else's. As A. N. Wilson says in The Lost Gospel, "He did not wish to deliver them with a finished pattern they could follow. The pattern was something which, if it existed, they must make for themselves."

The kingdom is not just spiritual, it is also biological. It is not only within us, but like DNA, each is a little different from every other, providing the diversity necessary for the species as a whole to track its environment, thus saving itself from extinction, as well as the plurality to prevent totalitarian religions (which are anti-Christ insofar as they are anti-self-realization) from manifesting themselves on earth as totalitarian governments, headed by spiritual tyrants such as "Jesus," whose only desire (as Joseph Brodsky said of every tyrant) is uniformity of thought and action.

Ironically, one thing both grandmothers agreed on was that in the last days the Antichrist forces would come around, and if you refused to worship an image they had made of a "beast whose deadly wound was healed," and receive the number of his name as a seal on everything you think and say and do (his number being that of a man, after all, and not God), you couldn't participate in the economic system. If you still refused they cut out your tongue, and if you still refused, they had the power to put you to death.

While I confess my young heart was sorely intimidated by such rhetoric -- especially coming from those I loved and trusted -- ultimately my mind refused to cower before its beastly images. The Bible said to know the truth; and unlike my grandmothers, I was determined to know the truth about the Bible. Even if it led me away from my country and my kinsmen; even if it led me away from my father's house.