Shocking

This past week my sister and her girlfriend loaned me their copy of "Religulous," a documentary by Bill Maher. (The name is a portmanteau of "religious" and "ridiculous.") Many people know that I am not a Maher fan, simply because he can be a complete dick with such little effort. Yet I agreed to watch it.

He did tone down his normally dickish tendencies for the documentary -- for the most part. There were a few moments I found myself yelling at the television for Maher being slightly unfair to his interviewees.

But for the most part, I did find it to be a rather refreshing (if not comedic) look into just how ridiculous religious adherents can be sometimes. His documentary did a fairly decent job at showcasing the (often willing) ignorance of those who accept as literal, the teachings of their holy books.

It was slightly embarrassing, because I used to be like that.

A few weeks prior, I watched an interesting documentary from 1972 called "Marjoe." The crew followed around one-time child preacher Marjoe Gortner (the second portmanteau of this post: "Mary" and "Joseph") as he engaged in one last hurrah on the pentecostal circuit -- he didn't want to swindle any longer and wanted to expose how charismatic evangelists manipulate their audiences into parting ways with their wallets.

The songs were familiar; the preaching styles, the repetitive words, the healings, the dancing, the speaking in tongues -- all familiar to me, as I had converted to a pentecostal branch of Christianity in 2000. To be honest, my jaw dropped several times as I realized that I had, in the pentecostal church, been prey to the same exact methods Marjoe was employing.

Speaking of jaw-dropping, I just finished Christopher Hitchens' book "god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." I was shocked. I was just absolutely, horrifyingly shocked at how the Big 3 (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have behaved throughout history, all by way of justification of their beliefs.

(Side note: I discovered through this book and through videos on YouTube that I absolutely adore Hitchens and was subsequently grieved to learn of his untimely passing a few years ago.)

This education, which I received over the last three weeks, has caused me to change my tune: I no longer believe that religion is necessarily a good or innocuous thing. It had its place, eons ago, before the human mind had enough compiled data to be able to see what is going on; but in today's world it is a vestigial mental process. For the sake of humanity, we must let it go; if we don't, we will end up destroying ourselves.

When confronted with the ignorance, with the manipulation, with the atrocities, the usual answers are "It was part of god's plan," or "God's ways are higher," or "They weren't a TRUE Christian," or "They weren't following god's word," or "That was so long ago, it doesn't matter today," or the like. Glossing over a ruinous past by brushing it aside. Shirking any responsibility for the religion's report card.

And yet, those things did happen. And on some level they are still happening today -- a topic upon which I plan to expound in a future post.

I grieve that I spent so many years of my life buying into what was being sold over the pulpit. I am ashamed that, as a Christian, I did not read my own holy book to discover for myself the true nature of the god of the bible; and I'm even more ashamed that I glossed over the atrocities therein and those committed by Christians throughout human history by justifying the actions as being part of some grand design of a loving god. I am an intelligent human being, I have a brain and deductive reasoning skills, and I am guilty. Shame on me.

And shame on those who continue following, just like I did, without questioning.

Until next Monday,

Frank