Conspireligion, Part 2

I am sympathetic to those lost in the religious world because I lived in their culture for most of my life. When something is drilled into your head starting from early childhood, for the most part you don't even THINK to question.

In 1994 I got involved in a quest to start a church. I was 33 years old and for me, personally, this was my last ditch effort to MAKE myself believe. What I learned is that church planting is hard work, and 5-6 days a week I was typically doing SOMETHING related to the church. At the same time, I made myself read the Bible, in the hopes that I would find some sort of "proof" that would MAKE me believe. But I never could.

During the first years of starting the church there was an interesting fellow member named Dan. Now, I recently heard a statistic that only 10 percent of Christians actually read the Bible, and Dan was one of the 10 percenters who DID read his Bible.

In Dan's world, everything that happened in his life was supernatural. When he got a traffic ticket he knew that "God was testing him." When he announced to the church he was tithing, he said that an offer to get $50 for participating in a focus group was "God blessing him." When a lawn care company treated his yard by mistake, he said that "God was taking care of him."

Dan was also a Sunday School teacher. How crazy it was, I thought, to wake up early, get my kids dressed, and waste a beautiful morning listening to Dan's boring crap. On one particular Sunday he was talking about how God threw Satan and a third of the angels out of heaven, and the Earth was destroyed in a battle and had to be re-created. Or something like that — heck, it was 15 years ago.

The point is that some people sink so deep into this stuff that their "spiritual world" is what becomes their reality. The danger of this fantasizing is that it plays out in their behavior, and sometimes in a destructive way. Or, at the very least, it causes people to become indifferent toward very real problems. This is my number one problem with religion. This is why I think religion causes far more harm than good.

The Escape

In 1997, after 4-1/2 years of church planting, I left that church. However, I continued to attend church for another 8 years, but mentally I had checked out completely. I attended because my oldest daughter enjoyed the social experience and because of the relentless hounding from my mother.

My great concern is that our country is full of people like Dan — many of them are wonderful people but they have little interest in temporal Earth. They don't care if an animal species goes extinct, they don't care about the impact of coal-fired power plants, they don't care about the impacts of limitless population growth. They just don't care because the Second Coming is near, and Dan and his friends will all be whisked away, leaving the wild-eyed heathens like me to run amok in the streets, killing and cannibalizing. But at least we'll have the Anti-Christ to maintain order. Oh, and the latest I heard is that the Anti-Christ is some politician in Europe. I guess it's not Obama after all.

In the mean time, Mother Earth follows the course of Easter Island ... ahhh .... errrr ... what is Easter Island? Is that where the Easter Bunny lives?