The Escape

Happy Easter. I really wish I could believe all the Easter stuff, but I simply cannot. Instead, my departure from religion feels like an exhilarating escape.

I can now look back on my life, freed from the shackles of religion. Of course, I still have religious feelings and am open to a God of Love, but am not bound by such feelings. I choose a life of love not because I feel there is a God threatening me with hell but because I see love as the ultimate good in the physical universe as well as the spiritual one, if such exists.

I do not know if perhaps I inherited a certain brain structure that made me susceptible to parasitic religion. My paternal grandfather Jake was extremely religious, an unofficial holy roller preacher. He was, at heart, a nice man; he loved to plant gardens, and to sing. He even made a homemade record in which he sang The Old Gray Mare. I do not know who played the guitar in that recording, of which I no longer have a copy, but it might have been him. But he was psychologically cruel to his family. Why? Because he thought it his religious obligation to be. When he read that “in the latter days” parents would hate their children and children their parents, he took this as prescriptive rather than descriptive. He thought he had to hate his children. At least this is what my Dad said. But the Bible did not require him to hate his grandchildren, so he was always nice to me and, as seen in old home movies, the other grandkids too. My Dad was an agnostic, without actually ever using that term. He simply hated the way he had seen religion practiced in his family, and had no interest in having me learn any religion. My Mom had no such antipathy to religion, but did not feel any obligation to encourage me into religion either.

But somehow I had a hunger for religion. I did not get it from my parents. And when I saw Garner Ted Armstrong on TV, I became a convert to his religion, which was a hybrid of Christianity and a strange form of Old Testament Identity religion. (He said that the United States was the actual descendants of the tribe of Manasseh.) What attracted me was his appeal to evidence, as strange as this may sound. He encouraged people to read the Bible for themselves, and to consider historical and scientific evidence with their own eyes. Of course, none of us actually did so; when we read the Bible, we saw only what he told us we would see there. I never went to one of the Armstrong churches or colleges. I was simply confused when Garner Ted vanished off on a journey of sex and other vices. As described in the report In Bed with Garner Ted, he was nearly a predator on young female students in his college. I was rescued out of this cult by falling into another: a “Church of Christ” cult that pretended by be strictly literalistic in following the Bible but which had its own set of unique, arbitrary, and unquestionable assumptions about what to believe and how to worship God. It was not until I was in grad school that I escaped from this cult by falling into various other conservative churches. Oh, yeah, I was a creationist too for about a decade of my formative years.

I wonder how my brain is still functional after going through such perversions of reality. At least I wasn’t a Moonie. But I can empathize with people who are drawn into cults. I am trying to be objective, and to not react against all religion as I would against its parasitic forms. My desire is not to attack religion, though I sometimes do so; instead, I am just excited to discover the world outside the boundaries of the religious cults, especially the world of science.

And maybe there is a little bit of good residue of my bad religious experiences. I am more excited about science in general, and evolution in particular, as a result of having been deprived of them for so many years. That is why I am so enthusiastic when I teach or write (see my books listed at my website).