Religion...briefly

I wanted to briefly throw in a few things about religion before I have to run Zach to Football. I have never been one to love a church. Growing up we would try to make it to Salem on First Sundays, but more often than not we would miss it. We would usually make it to most of revival week and when younger this was fun because you would sit in the hot church for the initial singing and preaching (about 30 minutes) and could then run around outside until the festivities inside died down (this could take anywhere from 1 hour on a slow night to nearly 3 hours).

As one neared the Age Of Accountability this church became less and less attractive. The Age of Accountability is reached when all the hellfire preaching and pressure from the congregation sinks into your skull and you actually think you are going to go to hell in the next second if you don't do something immediately. I have seen this, tragically, in children as young as 7 or 8 and in older people up into their 40s. With older people the congregation generally would have to convince them that whatever spiritual struggles they had been through and whatever church they had been to up until that point was not enough and their damnation was ensured unless they repented in the approved fashion. This generally worked best if they married into the church (e.g.-my father) as most newly married people cherish the idea of eternity with their spouse and generally want to get along with the crazy in-laws. People older than 40 aren't usually sought after and have too much pride as a rule to humble themselves appropriately before strangers.

Mercifully for me I passed through this age in one brutal week at revival through many altar callings and hours of prayer. I will always be thankful to this church and love it for the good music and the fact that it is where I first reached God. The only way it worked for me then was that I eventually entered into a place where everyone around me was forgotten and I reached out knowing I was accepted. I don't know how I knew or even how I got there, but I knew. I was 12 at the time and we were about to move to Waleska so it was a time of change in every sense of the word.

I started to become dissatisfied with the church because the impetus on individual salvation led me to think my work was done and also led me to become very judgemental of every other faith. I am not overstating things to say that in this church Catholicism(or for that matter Methodism) were as likely to lead to damnation as Budhism or Islam. These faiths were no better than atheism in many eyes (mine included for too many years) and even First Baptists were viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism(first at what, we wondered, with their indoor baptismal pools and fake wine and AC and indoor plumbing).

I didn't really begin to change my views until I got married to a strong willed woman (that's putting it kindly) who had seen much more of the world than I had and knew there were good people everywhere. She was also mortified when my Opera singing aunt tried to drag her to the front of the church for an altar calling one time. My wife thought they were going to pray for someone else and when she realized what was going on she was none too pleased. The arrogance of these people to assume they knew anything of her or what she had been through without even really talking to her is what inflamed her. We left immediately and never went back until my mother's funeral. We attended a small methodist church for awhile and really liked it until it started getting bigger and had all these committees. We literally had about 25 committees and only about 150 regularly attending parishioners. I will continue later as Zach is going to be late.