The Painful Truth Blog

“Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” by spoken-word artist Jefferson Bethke has received more than 10.2 million YouTube views as of Saturday night since it was posted just four days ago, eliciting more than 100,000 YouTube comments and plenty of debate elsewhere on the Internet.

From his YouTube page we read: “In the scriptures Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At it‘s core Jesus’ gospel and the good news of the Cross is in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification. Religion is man centered, Jesus is God-centered. This poem highlights my journey to discover this truth. Religion either ends in pride or despair. Pride because you make a list and can do it and act better than everyone, or despair because you can’t do your own list of rules and feel “not good enough” for God. With Jesus though you have humble confident joy because He represents you, you don’t represent yourself and His sacrifice is perfect putting us in perfect standing with God!”

Your thoughts?

I don’t think about my childhood much.  It’s not that it was particularly awful or that I suffered irreparable damage it’s just that it feels unimportant.  Almost as if it happened to another person or it was a movie I saw once but can’t quite remember the details.  It somehow does not connect to me anymore, does not inhabit my soul the way childhood does in others.

But I do reflect now and then, dredging up distant memories like faded photographs blurred and distorted with time and age but still recognizable if you look closely enough.  If you squint just right, adjust the light the image will begin to make sense and you will find yourself saying, “Ah, yes, I remember now. I had forgotten.”

Upon recent reflection into the question of spirituality and what that means to me I found myself looking at some of those distant memories.  I can see myself as a young girl, hair brushed and held securely with a barrette, my nicest dress ironed and immaculate, my white socks and patent leather shoes, everything in its proper place nothing allowed to be out of order. I was sitting in a hard metal folding chair with my notebook and bible waiting for our weekly pilgrimage to “God’s House” to get underway.  Two hours of religious instruction in “the way” about to begin.   The ritual of prayer, hymns, and dutiful note taking that was a part of my weekly duties as a good daughter.  This weekly preparation to save my soul from the sinful and dangerous environment in which I lived known to me as “the world” as if it was a separate state or distant and foreign land was somehow going to keep me safe from the devil “having his way with me” as my mother said making it sound so salacious and almost sexually exciting to a newly hormonal young lady.

I was a good student.  I accepted this teaching because it was expected and it was all there was.  One way~one God.  However it never moved me, never swept me up into a feeling of grace, never inspired or delivered me from heartache.  I was told the answers before I was ever allowed to ask the questions.  In fact even the questions were picked for me and those that didn’t fit into the churches dogma were quickly discarded forbidden to further discussion.  I did what I did, believed what I believed out of fear.  Fear of punishment, fear of abandonment, and fear of not pleasing this God that was a jealous and demanding God somehow displeased with the human nature he supposedly created in his infinite and infallible wisdom.  Forever paying the price for the sin of the first man and woman, a debt that Jesus paid but somehow I still carried on my account.  The sin of individual choice, thought, and desire.  It didn’t add up (perhaps why I have always hated mathematics) but I went with it all out of fear.

Until in my seventeenth year of life having been freed from the church going experience since the age of thirteen when I left my mother and moved in with my father I stumbled on a book in the library about the history of witches and paganism.  Being the bad ex-Christian I was at the time I stole this book, which later I lost never to be recovered–my first lesson in karma.  For the first time in my life the words I read caused a physical and emotional response that had no trace of fear.  There was only a feeling of peace as if lost in a foreign land I had suddenly stumbled on a map I could read and understand.  There was in fact a spiritual world that seemed to fit me.  Although I liked the idea of this particular spiritual path I didn’t start to seek any real training or learning until my mid twenties.  I found myself surrounded by other young people who were drawn to Wicca and paganism as I was, but I felt out of place.  These young people dressed in costume flirted with witchcraft but didn’t take it seriously.  They were like children playing dress up, reveling in shocking and disturbing the status quo with their outlandish and heathen behavior.  They were emotionally unstable, personally unreliable, and some even dangerously intrigued by the idea of wielding magic to gain power over others, involved in practices I found to be morally questionable.  I walked away from these people and their playacting disillusioned and disgusted.  If this was Wicca I wanted no part of it.

Don’t get me wrong I still considered myself a Pagan.  I wouldn’t be running back into the arms of Christianity any time soon, but finding no community in which to grow, learn, and practice with that I could trust or even consider real I simply stuck to the central guidelines and forgot about pursuing any deeper commitment to the craft.  I rarely performed any type of ritual, I did not continue my studies, and I avoided most so called witches like the plague being completely disinterested in any drama or Hollywood type practices.  Most of the people I came into contact with became interested in magic because of a movie they’d seen expecting to find a magical outlet that would gift them with some sort of power they could wield over others.  Hogwash.  There is no power to be had over another only the power to enrich and expand oneself.  Those who seek to control, influence, or even “help” others without their consent are in my mind very dangerous and misguided individuals.

For the next ten plus years I existed in spiritual limbo.  I battled (mostly unsuccessfully) my chronic depression, wore my anger and cynicism like a suit of armor, used my humor and indifference as my weapons of choice, and generally just drifted through my life without really ever showing up to the event.  I was deeply sad as if in a state of constant mourning.  I felt completely disconnected from others and myself.  In the distance beyond the fog and shadows in my brain I heard a faint call.  So faint I decided it must surely be my imagination.

Imagine my surprise when the call began to get stronger, louder, and more insistent.  It was the same voice that spoke to me all those years ago at the tender age of seventeen.  The same invitation to leave my state of spiritual limbo and show up to life alive, in color, and present.  An invitation to come home only this time my Goddess sent me true guides in the shape of friends.  And so now approaching my fortieth year on this earth I resume a journey long ago abandoned, I exchange my armor of anger and cynicism for a warm cloak big enough to share with fellow travelers.  I keep my humor but turn in my indifference and select instead an open heart in which to house my many souvenirs, and set out to join the dance of life with childlike abandon and wonder, trusting that this time faith will sustain and inspire me instead of chain and punish me.  And I know I am truly blessed to have this time to continue my journey.

May 17, 2011:

After spending $2,000 on rescuing my niece from the streets after her PCOG parents abandoned her, she no longer talks to us, unless the topic of conversation is about money. I believe PCOG intimated her parents, threatening them with “disfellowship,” unless they stopped their daughter from telling us about PCOG. Perhaps PCOG read her story posted on this website.

As far as I know, my niece is back “dating” the younger, classmate boy referenced in my first story. Side note: According to my niece, her PCOG mother accused this non-cult member boy of statutory rape, confronting him in the hallway of her daughter’s public high school. My niece is actually almost a year older than him.

Instead of accepting our offer to enroll her in a private preparatory school so she could pursue her stated dream of entering medicine, my niece has returned to her home State to waste her life with this bum, boy classmate, who has entered on his Myspace profile for “Occupation” — “never!” ” Under “Books,” he says, “Don’t read much either.” Under “Blurbs,” he writes: “I’m spontaneous, I’m a pacifist, I’m a hippie, I won’t lie, I won’t judge, and I can’t hold a grudge.” We had given my niece several hundred dollars when she left us. She said she needed this money to pay the nice family she was staying with, only to find out she was staying somewhere else, I believe with this bum.

From what I understand, they are planning on marrying. If she marries, she’ll follow in her mother’s footsteps, who, as a WWCOG member, ran away from home at 18 in the 70s and married a cult member, who told my father he was “wielding the sword to cut the family ties”, when announcing my sister was living with him and his loser parents. Years later, he was convicted of fleecing money from the elderly by creating a bogus desalination company in CA. Sound like HWA? He managed to swindle money from a famous actor. It is said he committed suicide by jumping off a cliff near Las Vegas before he had to serve his jail term. Even though they were WWCOG cult members, my sister and this creep divorced. He committed adultery.

The terrible legacy of WWCOG, HWA, PCOG continues to destroy lives and futures unless members, former members, and non-members take an active role in exposing the fraud. It is a moral obligation to judge evil people such as Herbert Armstrong, who committed incest while claiming to be chosen by God to prepare everyone for the “Second Coming” while reaching into the pockets of the vulnerable to take their money so he and his friends could live lavishly and continued to pursue their piggish ways. It is imperative to judge such evil. The risks are too great not to. If Herbert Armstrong, WWCOG splits, PCOG and all their supporters had their way, they’d end civilization.

-Keith Ace.

Much more in a day, or two.