Monday, September 21, 2009

Stories like this scare me

I found this link at The Reason Project: The Nightmare of Christianity

I am very afraid this will become an all too familiar story: person brought up in a ultra rigid religious way, and hence completely without touch to the rest of the world, finds out about the rest of the world and cannot reconcile the two, leading to personal confusion, distrust, hatred and violence. This may be the new frontier of the spiritual war. That part is not too surprising honestly.

But there was one line in the article that stood out :
"Murray had been indoctrinated so thoroughly into charismatic Pentecostal
culture, however, that even while he railed against his religious upbringing, he
could not abandon his ingrained attraction to religiosity."

An attraction to religiousity. Seems to hit home pretty hard. Isn't the creation of alternative (read fake) churches a continued attraction to religiousity? Even irrelevance itself, is that nothing more than continued religiousity?

As I read the New Athiest books, one thing that always struck me as over the top was the railing against teaching religion to kids. Indoctrination. Please. I let my kids believe in Santa, in the Easter Bunny, and in God and heaven. They are the comforts of childhood, harmless. I rationalized that I was indoctrinated, and I felt it had no effect on me as it means next to nothing to me now. But do I have a continued attraction to religiousity? Heck, the novel is about nothing but the attaction to religiousity!

What does it mean? I'm not sure, but it sure keeps me thinking! And that is the most important part of all.

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