Hating God, Loving God

By A. K. Davies

Hating God, Loving God presents the author's graphic and painful memories of being raised in a secretive, abusive, and manipulative cult, and how his childhood sufferings spilled over into a troubled adolescence and a deeply disturbed adulthood. In throwing off the lies told to him by the cult's elders, he also threw away any sense of God's love and mercy.

His pain, fuelled by a hatred of God, whom he blamed for all his troubles, turned him into a bully, a petty thief, and, but for the grace of God, a murderer. Somehow, he survived adolescence, got an education, and set out on the road to making money, believing that the accumulation of possessions was the only thing that would earn him respect. But his pain persisted, and he sought relief in all the wrong places. Even the unexpected love of a good woman was not enough to take away the pain.

Adrift in an ocean of despair, he decided to commit suicide. It was only then when he was at his lowest point that he was ready to accept a truth he had persistently denied: the truth that God loved him.

After giving my life to Jesus Christ, who transformed him and renewed his soul, he went from hating God to loving God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A. K. Davies
• Release date: Jul 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9780646821382

Book preview

Introduction

As I slid that large sharp knife back into the block, I stood transfixed in the kitchen at the realisation that I had only been seconds away from taking a man’s life. And that I had wanted to do it to rid myself of pain—pain I believed was caused by God. I had left for school that day with an idea that would nearly destroy my life: if God did not love me, yet loved all others, I’d take away those he loved so very dearly. Burn for a burn.

In this book, A. K. Davies describes his journey from a loveless childhood and deeply troubled adolescence to a profound awakening in adulthood to the mercy of God. From hating God, he came to love God, but only after a long and tortuous path.

Davies provides an intimate window into the violent and abusive cult in which he was raised. He shares how he endured childhood beatings, survived a roller-coaster adolescence, and made a series of bad choices as a young man. Somehow, he also managed to put himself through school, get a job, and find a loving partner. Still the pain persisted, relief only coming after a series of supernatural experiences and his finding of intellectual evidence that Jesus had truly risen from the dead.

Davies’s inner turmoil and experiences will challenge Christians and sceptics alike to find meaning in their own suffering. This thought-provoking account, Hating God, Loving God, tells a powerful story of the clash between hating and loving God—and of the peace that can be found in Jesus.

Chapter 1

The Cult

W

hat if I told you about a child who was lied to almost every day; who lived in fear almost every waking moment; who was psychologically, emotionally, and physically tortured nearly every day for years and years at the hands of a church that, out of greed and selfishness, sought to control its followers? What if I told you this child was manipulated and brainwashed into believing he deserved all of his suffering, that God was behind it all? Would you say that I was exaggerating? That it could not have been as bad as this? That no one would be so cruel to an innocent child?

But I know it is all true because this is the world into which I was born.

This cult, and all of its subsidiaries, is owned and operated by a pastor in Geelong, Victoria, Australia. Now decades-old, the cult describes itself as the ‘world’s only true church’. While headquartered in Geelong, the cult has bases across Australia, Fiji, Singapore, Ukraine, Italy, England, Columbia, and South Africa. According to research collected from excommunicated former disciples, the pastor has over the years invested millions of dollars from church donations into properties around Australia and built a vast real estate profile, so much so that in the year 2008, he made over ten million dollars [1].

This pastor did not just use people’s desperation for a purpose in life, or their hope for a life beyond, to control every aspect of their lives; he doesn’t just use his booming authoritative voice, much like the Third Reich’s Adolf Hitler, to propagate his twisted lies and brainwash his followers—he manipulates biblical scripture and uses it as his weapon of choice.

This pastor took the biblical advice:

Those who spare the rod of discipline hate their children. Those who love their children care enough to discipline them.

(Proverbs 13: 24)

and twisted it into something it was not saying.

The psychological abuse starts with the desperate parents. After months of being told that God has commanded parents to strike their children, about how everyone not part of the church is wicked and damned to spend eternity in hell, that in order to be saved we must be sinless—it is an easy step to convince them that out of love for their children they must condition them from an early age not to be sinners and to remain within the protection of the cult their whole lives. Not once do these children hear about God’s love and mercy, only stories about hell and brimstone taken out of context. And as fathers in this cult are regarded as the head of the house, it is their responsibility to dish out the punishment, whenever and however they see fit.

Commons sense dicates if you tell a child they are stupid (or, in the case of the cult, a sinner), eventually, after hearing it over and over again, and especially from people who purport to care about them, the child will believe it. In the cult, that was my home for the first fifteen years of my life, if I accidently broke a glass, or spoke when not spoken to, or performed any other minor transgression, my parents were told to take me to my room and whip me for my sin.

At any moment, for any reason, anywhere, children were beaten by their own fathers, elders, and any cult father not only for the sins they had committed but for sins they might have committed.

Now, I can understand if you’re reading this and shaking your head thinking, No way, this didn’t happen, it’s just not possible. A loving parent would never do this. However, I ask you to cast your mind back to the Manson Family where cult leader, Charles Manson convinced his followers to ignite a race war. Consider the Peoples Temple, established by the Reverend Jim Jones, who convinced his followers that a nuclear war was imminent and moved them to Guyana where he ordered them to murder San Francisco Congressman Leo Ryan and the people accompanying him, and then to drink a cyanide-laced beverage, resulting in mass suicide. Then, of course, Heaven Gate’s Marshall Applewhite convinced his thirty-eight followers to commit suicide in the hope of ascending into a spacecraft traveling in the wake of the Hale–Bopp Comet, a spacecraft that would carry them to ‘the next level of existence’. Through his brainwashing and manipulation, all his followers voluntarily drank applesauce mixed with phenobarbital and died [²].

So, there is ample evidence that cults can exert extraordinary control over otherwise sensible, intelligent people.

On a regular basis, from the moment I was born, my father, elders, and random men from the cult would storm into my bedroom and violently beat me until I bled, fell unconscious or simply until their arms became tired. I’d scream at the top of my voice, begging them to stop while I attempted to cover my body. I would crawl away, only to be pulled back for more. Afterwards, they would stand over my bruised and fragile body and bark, This is for the sins we don’t know about. While this was happening, my mother would stand in the doorway, often sipping a cup of tea. She did not beat me, but she made no attempt to help me.

It’s difficult to paint a vivid picture so maybe these vignettes will help.

Before my grandma (who was not part of the cult and therefore classed as a damned-to-hell sinner) was diagnosed with dementia, I had two conversations with her that I’ve never forgotten. The first was my grandma’s initial memory of me. She said I was an young child sitting on the lounge room floor in my nappy, happily playing with a toy train. My mother was knitting on the couch focused on her task, and my grandma was sitting on the chair next to the couch. My father’s car was heard pulling up in the driveway and she noticed that I started to shake all over.

My grandma, puzzled by my reaction, tried comforting me while my cloth nappy filled with my urine. My father stormed in with his heavy feet and headed straight towards me. I cried, Please don’t, Daddy, please don’t, please. My father’s foot met my head, my head met the floor and his beatings met my body. My grandma, shaken and shocked at her young grandson being beaten by his father right in front of her, looked over at her daughter expecting her to object. But my mother kept on knitting as if today was like any other day. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what it was.

The second conversation occurred when my grandma called me one day, before I’d started writing this book, crying helplessly on the phone because she had remembered another time that she’d visited me at my childhood home. She recalled approaching the metal front gate and calling out to my siblings and me, but there was no response. As she patiently waited in the hope of seeing her five grandchildren, our next-door neighbour walked up to her and asked, Do you know what happens in this house?

What do you mean? responded my grandma, knowing what she was referring to.

We hear a lot of ear-shattering screams from those children—the amount of times we’ve considered calling the police ...

People knew, yet people did nothing.

But it wasn’t just children who suffered. To ensure his followers remained (and thus to ensure a steady flow of money), the pastor brainwashed and manipulated his ‘Chosen’ to believe that if anyone left or was kicked out of his ‘world’s only true church’ that God would no longer protect them or love them; that they would be cast down into hell for all eternity at the end of the world. And that if someone were to leave or be kicked out of the pastor’s cult, they were to be immediately disowned by their families. Any family that broke this rule would also be banished from the church and from God’s love.

No one could be married in the cult without the pastor’s say-so and followers could only marry someone from the cult. He would dictate what sort of career men could have and frowned upon women attending university or entering the workforce. According to Brad Warren, an ex-pastor of The Geelong Revival Centre who ran one of the cult leader’s Australian churches, stated, If you are white and Anglo-Saxon or Celtic, you are one of the chosen. This is what they believe and are taught. It has led to racism and antisemitism [3].

Speaking in tongues was also very important in this cult, but the pastor claimed that he and only he could give you this power. He would encourage you to say the word ‘Hallelujah’ over and over again, until the word started to sound like nonsense and then he would bend down to hear your ramblings and give you the gift of speaking in tongues. I’d listen to people utter ‘fish and chips’, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ as they knelt down in front of their chairs and babbled into their seat, as instructed by the pastor so that he could say he had given them the gift of tongues. You were told that if you left or were excommunicated from the cult, you would lose your ability to speak in tongues and lose God altogether. Embarrassingly, to this day I can still utter those ridiculous words that that pastor made me believe was speaking in tongues.

There were no divine rules that he made his people follow, nor was there a rule book handed down from generation to generation. The pastor’s rules, he claimed, were the rules of God and only through him could you enter heaven. Despite his warnings about the consequences of leaving, some people did leave and families were torn apart. And some people were banished against their will. Some of these banished people attempted to commit suicide and sadly, some succeeded.

As a child, I was told by the pastor that God loved and protected his chosen people, yet the pastor twisted biblical scripture resulting in me being beaten regularly to an inch of my life. I was greeted with a smile by the cult elders and fathers, who’d then bash me on the floor of my bedroom. I was told I deserved it; that it was for the sins that they didn’t know about.

You couldn’t leave for fear of going to hell or that your family would disown and abandon you. Children were tortured psychologically, emotionally and physically on a regular basis. But the cruellest thing of all was that I knew no different. I was born into believing that I deserved to be regularly beaten for the sins that my parents didn’t know about. I believed I couldn’t leave because I would be abandoned by everyone I knew and be sent to hell when I died.

I believed that God said he loved me and would always protect me yet wanted me to be broken in every possible way. I believed this because I was born into it. This family, cult, this life. I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know anything else.

Chapter 2

Primary School

A

s a child attending primary school, I would often stand in the grounds watching fathers drop off their children. They would wave goodbye and at times the children would leave the car laughing at a funny joke or embarrassing remark their father had made. I’d see mothers hold their child’s hand as they walked them into the school grounds and said their goodbyes. They would always give their son or daughter a great big hug and loving kiss, and mother and child would exchange the words ‘I love you’.

I hated them. I hated those kind fathers, I hated those loving mothers, and most of all, I hated the kids who had the privilege of calling them their parents. However, mixed in with my hate of these loving parents and lucky kids was also confusion. Why were the parents being so nice to their kids? Why did their children look happy? Why didn’t my fellow school kids have physical bruises or at least fearful eyes when looking at their parents? I couldn’t understand it, but why should I? I thought the abusive environment that I was born into was normal.

I remember during my early years in primary school overhearing a kid no older than seven tell his friends he’d got grounded on the weekend for misbehaving at home. Wanting to comfort this boy, I put my hand on his shoulder and asked him if he was okay and if it hurt. The child was confused.

"What do you mean hurt?" he said, looking even more confused than I.

Afraid that his parents might overhear our conversation, I whispered, When your dad or someone hit you?

This kid paused, then began to laugh in disbelief at what had just come out of my mouth. After he finished laughing, he replied simply, I don’t get hit.

I thought he had to be lying to me because everyone gets beaten by their fathers or random men they’ve never met before. But the more I tried to get him to confess to his beatings, the more defensive he got. With every denial, the more confused I became. Because of his determination to stick to his story, I hit this boy in the middle of the school grounds. He had to have been lying to me, I reasoned, because it’s normal to be beaten both for the sins you know and the ones you don’t know. And my father had taught me that sinners deserved to be punished.

I was sent home that day and of course beaten by my father until he grew tired. However, this wasn’t abnormal for me; it was simply my regular routine. I’d be usually beaten at home after my father returned from work. Then I would be woken up to go to school the next day where I would act out the violence at home. I was just a little kid, but I was becoming a bully. It was all that I knew.

Some days I’d come home from school to find my father’s car already parked in the driveway. I’d try my absolute hardest not to wet my pants as I’d walk up to the sliding glass door and poke my head in to see if I could see my mother. Most of the time, my mother would be standing in the kitchen preparing dinner and would look at my face poking through the door. If she nodded her head, I could quietly walk into the lounge room and sit in the same room as my father, as long as I didn’t make too much noise. However, if my mother shook her head, I would have to quietly slide the glass door across, tiptoe inside, and head straight to my room to remain there until I was called to the table for dinner.

Hollywood dramas and television shows seem so real at times. But Hollywood will never know what it is like to hear the