How I got Out of Religion.

[Rev. Rye]

I also had a disturbing life before I realized how unlikely God was to exist. Granted, I went to a mainline church (Lutheran Church Missourah Synod), which makes this all the more shocking, since Lutheranism does not have the reputation for being as sadistic as Catholicism and Fundamentalist Christianity. I confess that I always had my doubts about the religion from roughly Kindergarten on (I was always wary of the idea that God sacrificed himself to himself so he could change a rule he made himself), but I kept it more or less on the down-low. I ended up becoming increasingly left-wing with The shaved ape we call President Bush at the Throne, er I mean, In the Oval Office, and around this time I was bullied greatly by students and teachers alike for several reasons including:
[

• My Increasing wariness of Bush
  
• The fact that I preferred the Beatles to the shit that record companies were forcing down the throats of my generation (because what right-thinking boy would rather listen to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to Aaron Fucking Carter?)
  
• I wasn't on the basketball team (Yes, every other student in my class was a part of the two basketball teams.)
  
• They thought I was gay (Apparently preferring reading to being an athletic idiot means you like ass sex. In one incident, some students suggested I give another student a blowjob. When I told a teacher, she told me, "well, why don't you do it?")
  
• My parents were prone to arguing with the powers that be at the school, who had repeatedly proven themselves to be consistently bull-headed.
  
• In short, because I was on the Autistic spectrum.
  

Near the end, I was forced to write and give a sermon on (Their views of) the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Commandments on the day of my confirmation to give the congregation a break from the preacher's growing obsession with Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (Incdentally, he had recently given an entire sermon in character as the Angel outside of Jesus' tomb. He died a few years after, and I'm inclined to think it's a good thing). Fortunately, I at least got a $1000+ guitar from the deal. No, I don't shred.

I went off to a Catholic high school to heal from my scars (poetically) and to piss off my Anti-Catholic pastor (realistically) and attempted to avoid new ones by avoiding being with other students when I could. I never pretended that I was Catholic there. Now back to my history with religion: I ultimately decided that I truly can live without the fear of God hanging over me when I read two books: Lord Bertrand Russell's book Why I am Not A Christian, and The Damn Bible (King James Version, my other confirmation present). After reading the first book, I realized that odds are, there is no God, and that Christianity is one of the most apalling belief systems known to man. After reading the second, I decided that even if there was a God he was no more worthy of our constant praise than any of the protagonists in a Marquis de Sade story. After that, I didn't even pretend that I believed in God anymore. Of course, I still thank my Freshman year English Teacher, a (fairly liberal) priest, for getting me back into literature (strangely enough, by mentioning James Joyce's Ulysses in a class as being the most difficult book ever, when it turned out that it wasn't even the most difficult book by Joyce) and writing. By Junior year, many of my teachers knew that I didn't believe in God, or at least was very anti-religious, and even the most fanatical teachers seemed to accept it and not actively try to convert me, even one literature professor who was willing to twist established works of English literature into his view of Christianity (he once claimed that William Blake was a conservative Catholic) was willing to acknowledge that his arguments probably wouldn't work on me (near the end, he even plugged Expelled, claiming that it was about how teachers are being expelled for talking about Jesus, which manages to not only be far from the mark in real life, it was far from Ben Stein's claim). Even my parents accept my atheism, although it took a long time for my mother to accept it, because the idea of her mother in heaven and the old pastor in hell help her sleep at night, and as much as I find the belief in Hell to be abhorrent, I really don't think there's a better end for the pastor.

At this point, religion has become an occasional theme in my writings, including a film treatment I wrote based very loosely on my own struggle with religion entitled Catch the Wind (I needed a title, and this was the song currently playing in my head). In the treatment, A popular Straight-A student girl (loosely based on me) at a Lutheran school whose study of the Bible in her Senior year grows increasingly dark as her science teacher attempts to rape her (based on a teacher I had who was discovered to have molested a girl years ago, but still lives on school property), and she falls in love with a bad girl in the school, even going through a gay-to-straight program in the school when her love is found out. It works about as well as you expect it to.