When very young, I was threatened with punishment by the devil. When I asked about him, he was described as being in a black outfit with a long tail, horns, and a pitchfork. He had endless ways to punish me, but his specialty was fire, which he was to apply into eternity.

I was reminded of him most often in church or on Sundays. Vaguely, I remember being in a big Baptist church in Gillsburg, Mississippi, sitting in a hard pew, singing, getting up and down, bowing my head, and being slapped if I whispered anything to my cousins. To be caught meant the devil was on his way.

You know something? I didn’t believe he was coming. When I was always right about that, I decided there was no real devil. I was about five years old.

Now God was another matter, primarily because older folks saved their highest levels of piety for him. He was credited with a lot of good stuff. Because good stuff, at the time, seemed to be happening all around me, in my opinion, maybe there was somebody up there. Who knows, right?

But by the age of seven, I had reservations: Grown-ups said World War II killed millions. My poor old daddy had come back home after the war a ruined man. He beat my momma and drank continuously. We became extremely poor and hungry. The Great Depression lingered in Mississippi long after the war. Everyone we knew was poor. I began to wonder where this guy was. Didn’t he see this mess? God’s will, Santa Claus—are you kidding me? I wasn’t sure about much except that he wasn’t looking out for us.

Dad reenlisted. Three years in Occupied Japan included my exposure to Shinto and the architecture of the Buddha, a substantial enlargement of my world that supplied the answers to a few questions. It was our family’s golden age: we had a big house, two maids, a valet, a driver, and my dear dad and mom were a long way from Mississippi.

Then a few years in merry Maryland postponed my questioning a trifle, until I was introduced to the United Pentecostal Church. One night I went up the hill to the church from our house in Joppa, Maryland. The women were so excited they insisted on kneeling over me and speaking in tongues. When they began screaming and hollering, I figured it was time to go home. I was eleven.

Hawaii is a beautiful place. Good stuff was happening all around. I went to the Church of Christ in Waianae, where there were a lot of girls. The biggest deal you could make of yourself was to get baptized, which took place in the Blue Pacific. When I returned to the beach, it was clear that everything had stayed the same; there was no change. I was embarrassed when the girls wanted to know how I felt and I couldn’t answer. It was just about the last time I was involved with a church for the next sixty-five years.

In Italy, at the American Academy of Rome, with the help of the late Jungian psychoanalyst Lee Roloff, I began another journey, asking questions and testing answers. Socrates, Seneca, Aristotle, Plato, James, Mill, Locke, Hume, Schopenhauer, Montaigne, Epicurus, Thoreau, Voltaire, Bacon, Rousseau, Jefferson, Madison, Freud, Jung, Becker, Wilson, Gilbert, Brown, Kubler-Ross, Sagan, Nietzsche, Singer, Russell, Pico, Fromm, Kant—you get the drift. What was going on here? Why and how could religion even exist beside or against these and dozens of other giants? Yet it did, in glorious music, soaring architecture, intricate ritual, stunning clothing, and unbelievable sway over the minds of what seemed countless, sane souls. How did it get this way? “What is truth?,” was a dangerous question. Truth can stir the kettle up pretty good—people have been made to drink hemlock, have been burned alive on a stake, been gutted, and had tongues removed, eyes gouged out, and jaws screwed shut. Have mercy; it’s quite disturbing.

Anyway, the years have gone by. I have answered many of my questions: there is no hell and there is no devil. There are no gods, and there ain’t much after this life worth bragging about. What there is of course is the good stuff. There’s plenty of that. I would recommend that you get about enjoying it before your time runs out.