- Joined
- Aug 8, 2005
- Messages
- 69,477
- Reaction score
- 53,922
- Location
- Los Angeles
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Undisclosed
Why should religious faith be a virtue anyway? A choice to believe or disbelief in a deity is almost entirely irrelevant to someone's moral character.
I know for a fact that my moral character has improved significantly ever since, and yes...in part BECAUSE I walked away from organized religion.
I was spending an inordinate amount of time and devoting an incredible amount of spiritual energy trying to present myself as acceptable to flocks who couldn't be bothered to give me (or my wife) the time of day.
This was true when I was a young kid raised as a Catholic, when I found myself exploring Orthodox Judaism, Buddhism, and most definitely when I entered the Church of the Nazarene.
This last church welcomed my wife with open arms before I came into her life because she was helpless, destitute, saddled with a dying son and on the verge of near suicidal depression after her first husband walked out of their marriage after absorbing the gravity of their son's situation, and her disappearing ability to walk.
But instead of helping her find solutions to her problems, they told her that she should just accept the Lord's Will, and remain helpless, and give her son over to God by praying for him instead of searching for medical help, which cost money.
She wasn't in the VA yet, he wasn't yet enrolled in S-CHIP, and she couldn't even get a wheelchair except for the rusted out one previously used by her now deceased father.
The moment I entered into her life, they grew suspicious, sullen and finally, vicious when they learned that we were going to allow her son to enroll in S-CHIP by remaining unmarried, as our marriage would disqualify him. That's right, my minimum wage job making pallets would have meant we had too much money for our son to be in S-CHIP, and we'd end up burying him instead of saving his life.
The only thing they cared about was our sex life, which was none of their business, but they made it their business, and one Sunday morning the pastor launched into a fire and brimstone tirade from the pulpit about "fornicators" in their midst, while pointing directly at us.
That was the end of our membership in the Nazarene Church, we walked out in the middle of his furious magnum opus. I saluted him the best way I knew how, two middle fingers.