I Just Lost Faith In Faith
This was my first article for Freethought Today. It ran in the June 1984 issue.
Religion is a powerful thing. Few can resist its charms and few can truly break its embrace. It is the siren who entices the wandering traveler with songs of love and desire and, once successful, turns a mind into stone. It is a Venus fly trap. Its attraction is like that of drugs to an addict who, wishing to be free and happy, becomes trapped and miserable.
But the saddest part of the dependency is the fact that most participants are willing victims. They think they are happy. They believe religion has kept its promises and have no desire to search elsewhere. They are deeply in love with their faith and have been blinded by that love–blinded to the point of unquestioning sacrifice.
I know this is true because I was one of Christ’s disciples for over nineteen years, and my subsequent self-excision was/is traumatically painful.
My Dad was a professional musician during the 1940’s. At one of his concerts he met a female vocalist and, as things go, they went (lucky for me). They got married and, when I was a toddler, they both found true religion. Dad threw away his collection of original Glenn Miller recordings (ouch!), turned his back on his former “sinful” life and enrolled in seminary to become a minister. He didn’t finish because of the strong demands of raising three boys. But he lived his faith through his family and through lay ministry in local churches.
My folks’ spirituality was so strong that they often found it hard to find a church that met their needs. So we church-hopped for many years. I can’t remember all the churches, but we were Baptists, Methodists, Nazarenes, Assemblies of God, Pentecostals, fundamentalist, evangelical, “Bible-believing” and charismatic.
Read the rest Here
hattip to monday morning insight
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