The Problem with having refused and rejected Christianity, as I did, when I was eleven years old, as it was formally presented to me in the form of a Catechism,

is that I did not then realize, because the Christian catechism is far from being a complete summary of the faith it purports to inculcate, what a vast, peculiar and heterogeneous body of belief I was refusing to believe in.  I had, for example, no notion, as a polite, well-bred, middle class, American Protestant boy, of the rôle of Satan in most forms of Christianity, which are of a predominately lower-class (at least lower than self-consciously middle-class American); nor had I any idea that lower classes of Christianity, as such, actually existed outside of the fabled "white trash" of the semi-legendary "South," where I had never been and had no wish to go.  So, then and now, I had not even a vestigial belief in the Devil or his awful powers of Temptation.  The story of Adam and Eve (and the Serpent) in the Garden of Eden, and of Eve's eating of the Fruit of Knowledge, and of the subsequent punishment of all Mankind for it, of course I knew from Sunday School--and had already, as a pre-pubescent child, dismissed it as unworthy of belief. 

Likewise, Sin of the damning sort, and its horrific everlasting punishment, and of our need to be "saved" from it--is something that my mother would simply not have permitted anyone to have a long conversation about with me.  So I seldom thought about Sin:  I didn't steal, murder or bear false witness--and I certainly did not covet my neighbor's ox, or his wife.  And I decided early on that "the Apostle Paul" was a liar and a fraud, and, though I didn't know the word for it then, an hysteric.  As a ten-year-old, I saw nothing but puerile, self-serving fraudulence in Paul's supposed revelatory experience on the road to Damascus.