1969: My youthful anger over hypocrisy in religion

I had always thought religious people were kind of crazy and extreme as a child growing up .But then, I got blunt trauma childhood epilepsy which I barely survived and found I needed God on my side to survive that. So, even though I still thought religious people were pretty crazy and still do, I also realized that without God in my life I just wasn't going to survive! (which was also true).

However, then I got to the point where I really was having a lot of trouble in the hypocrisy of all people who were religious I knew. Everyone was what I call a "Sunday Christian" where they would be all pious and go home and screw their maid or whatever. And since I knew about a lot of this in people older than myself and people my own age, hypocrisy really bothered me because it was like living a lie.

Another aspect to this was I realized many people in religion were gay (both men and women) but were closeted which also bothered me a lot. So, this saying one thing and doing another really bothered me too.

So, I felt surrounded by liars on all sides and I felt like all this lying and deceit was sort of making me crazy and making me want to stop being religious at all.

So, one day my father came to me in 1969 and said, "If you keep going in this alternative direction you are going to be osctracised from our church."

I said, "If they cannot accept the new more progressive me, then I don't want to be a member of our church anymore." Though I meant it my father gave me a painful forlorn look and realized I was serious. I was 21. What did I know?

When you are young often you are idealistic and looking for people to believe in that aren't hypocrites. I knew my father was not a hypocrite but most other people I knew were. So, I guess the extremely well disciplined father I knew was too strict a criteria to place on other people who were mere mortals in comparison.

I think this was my mistake in expecting other people to be as good as my mother and father actually were. Most people are pretty crazy after all and no one was as disciplined as my father or as sweet and intuitive and saintlike as my mother was.

So, I think this was my mistake of expecting too much of people in general and not realizing how exceptional my parents actually were.