[lsbskins1]

I was raised in the Baptist and Methodist churches. My grandmother was a Baptist, my father a Methodist. In my experience, Methodists were like Baptists on lithium. Spent a lot of time in Sunday school classes and every summer at least one and sometimes two Vacation Bible schools. I sat through at least 100 calls to commit my life and profess my love for Jesus while Just As I Am was sung with great conviction by the congregation. That is quite a public pressure cooker for those who may have never experienced it.

I am not a member of any church now. I am agnostic, that is to say I do not know absolutely, but doubt seriously the existence of a divine, involved force in the universe. God does not now, nor has he ever spoken to me. I am not a theologist by any streach of the imagination, but I have a pretty good grounding in the history of the church (Christian) and some of the major ideas behind the different major religions.

I do not hold much with the "if you really understood it, you would accept it" justification. There is no religious tradition on the face of the planet that has not made that argument in some form or another. They can not all be right. In at least the majority of cases, if not in all but one, people have been led into a false faith. If faith in your "understanding" is the only bar you accept, you set yourself up to be misled.

I will close with this. Though I do not think him divine, I believe the man we know as Jesus was one of those rare humans who see the clear meaning of justice and seek to find ways to truely inspire fellow humans to want to seek and inpliment and inspire others towards that same ideal. Other humans, through the years, added the other crap and distorted and warped the message to their own ends.