When I was a kid, my parents did not expose me to religion. I was not taken to church, temple, or shrine, nor presented with any religious text. I do not recall my parents acting hostile toward religion, certainly not faith or spirituality; my mother thanking god at the dinner table in a way that I found moving is not what I would call anti-religious. Never mind that it is a non-specific spirit-of-everything kind of god being thanked, we did not scoff at belief. Nor am I non-religious in the strictest sense; I am what some would call an atheist but what most would term an agnostic; I suspect there is something there but am unwilling to say that I know what it is. A fundamentalist might say I disbelieve in god; I would say that I refuse to disbelieve. I imagine various scenarios that I feel could be true, but always keep in mind that the context which gives sense to whatever might have created the universe is so far removed from my own context, that I probably cannot judge with any reliability what that truth might be. I can only imagine, and perhaps hope.

At best, you could say that I was raised fairly neutrally, never pressured one way or the other, and perhaps was even given a positive view of spirituality in general. So the reason I have such disrespect for so many religious organizations and people who call themselves “believers” comes from their own example.

I remember one of the first memorable exposures I had of religion–aside, of course, from the endless public displays that everyone takes for granted, from the ingrained linguistic quirks like bless-you-for-sneezing to the ubiquitous Christmas-related religiosity that permeates the culture toward the end of the year. That stuff is so thoroughly dissolved into American life that you can go through it almost without noticing. The first time religion ever smacked me in the forehead was when I was listening to the radio in my room one day. I stopped at a station, and stayed for a moment when I heard something bombastic-sounding. More than thirty years later, I can hardly recall it verbatim, but it went very much like this: after a minute of Jesus-this and god-that, the radio preacher stopped in mid-sentence, and said:

–Wait a minute! Wait, a, minute!! God is, yes, the lord is speaking to me right this second! God is speaking to me, he is telling me… that there are twenty people in the audience, twenty people… who have one hundred dollars apiece! And I am not going to stop talking until those twenty people have called in and….

I swear to god that’s what he was saying. I laughed. I wondered at the near-comic temerity of this joker, to think that anyone would seriously believe that the grand lord almighty was whispering facts about people’s wallets to some third-rate radio evangelist. But, perhaps not right then, but certainly over not too much more time, it struck me just as strongly that this guy would probably not be on the radio if some people didn’t believe and send him money, earnestly believing that he was indeed in contact with god and dutifully obeying the will of the creator by sending in a C-note to this Minister What’s-his-name.

And then images of people who always puzzled me came to my mind, about everyone from the followers of Jim Jones to the people who gave all their money and lived on some commune while their god-on-Earth messiah drove past in one of his many Rolls Royce sedans. These people always troubled me, because I could never wrap my head around what they were thinking. Give up everything and do what? Watch this obvious charlatan live in luxury while you labor in his fields, and you pay him for it? What a con! What rubes these people are!

It was not until some years later that a paradigm to help explain this crystallized in my mind. I was attending a junior college, and I could not fail to notice the large number of religions and cults that advertised, or tried to, on campus, more than almost any other venue I had witnessed. And it occurred to me that there was a reason, similar to the reason why the military was so intent on making their pitch to people of like age. It is an age ripe for shaping people to believe; a group perhaps more likely than almost any other to be filled with people trying to decide where to go in life, but more importantly, a group that was vulnerable emotionally, more easily gulled, often alienated and lost, looking for direction and guidance. In short, an audience ripe for predation. And religions were there, at the front lines.

I did not become so simple-mindedly iconoclastic that I believed all religion was like that. I saw enough good works being done to convince me that many religious people and even some institutions did indeed mean and do well for others, and stay true to good, core principles. It just depressed me that such institutions were so clearly in the minority, and such people were hard to find in pure form, or at least as pure as you would minimally expect from a philosophy that evidently preached something so far removed from what so many of it practitioners actually practiced in real life.

This was clarified somewhat for me when I came to know a young woman I worked with at a part-time job in college. The daughter of a fundamentalist minister, she was rather enthusiastic about her faith. I have mentioned her before in my writing; she was the one who calmly informed me that she knew science, evolution, and the countless people involved were wrong because she found a flaw in radioactive dating methods, divined after hearing a short lecture on the subject in her high school science class. She did not have bad intentions–far from it. But her conclusions were indicative of so many I have witnessed since, so overwhelmingly biased by her beliefs, so empty of reason or logic–and yet she firmly believed that she had used reason to find an independent truth that informed her of the nature of the universe.

I can very much respect those who see religion as a spiritual guide, gaining strength, inspiration, and wisdom from what it offers. I may not believe in what they believe in, and I can even actively disbelieve in specific beliefs of theirs while still maintaining respect for the person overall. Like I said at the start of this tirade, I realize I could very well be wrong (and even likely am) about what I suspect is the way the universe works.

But what I cannot respect is a person who allows themselves, intentionally or not, to abandon something so clearly as important as faith: reason. I can feel compassion for such a person, I can even like them in many if not most ways. But once a person abandons any semblance of reason, and claims that the unseen trumps the seen, that the word trumps the fact (all too often followed by the claim of compassion trumping the act of compassion), I find myself getting up to leave the room. Not to be flippant, but you simply cannot reason with such people, and it is almost always a waste of time to try. It is one of the few prejudices I have which I am proud of. For as nice and deserving of love as these people may be, they are loons that should not be allowed near social administration or heavy machinery.

I am not talking only about people who think the universe is only six thousand years old when any first-year science student can prove them wrong in any number of easily demonstrable and reproducible ways. I also refer to people who answer reasonable arguments with scripture where the scripture used clearly has no relation to the discussion at hand beyond that imagined by the person delivering it. I also refer to people who faithfully believe a religious speaker when he says that the world will end tomorrow, and then believes just as much if not more two days later when the preacher comes up with some half-assed excuse as to why the universe not ending proves he was right all along–this being an extreme example of a kind of spiritual fraud that happens on a smaller scale every day. I also refer to people who do not see clear contradictions within their own beliefs and actions–not small, iffy, or difficult-to-spot contradictions that anyone could miss, but huge glaring ones, like Jesus loves you with the greatest of all joyful love, and is the ultimate epitome of forgiveness and mercy, and died for your sins and is dying for your sins all the time–but will send you to suffer unimaginable agony for a literal eternity in the fires of hell if you say his name the wrong way or pray to a different god, even if you do nothing but selfless good works every moment of your life.

You know. The obvious contradictions.

My threshold for suffering people like this is low enough when they are well-meaning. It only gets worse when they see their conclusions as not only so self-evident, but so overwhelmingly important that they feel the need to impose them on others. Fewer but more galling still are those who revel in the humble superiority all of this makes them feel, and you can see it going to their heads. Worse still are those who come from this supposedly loving state of holiness to espouse actions that will harm and even kill others. But it is difficult to judge if it is worst of all to see people who may or may not believe, but consciously use the emotional control inherent in the religious community to work believers in ways that allow for the gathering and use of influence and power, a use which seems to universally trend towards abuse as it is used in larger and larger contexts.

This is why I believe in what I call the inverse-square law of spirituality: just as the intensity of light falls off by the square of the distance, so does spirituality when removed from the individual. The farther spirituality is removed from being an individual’s journey through life and is used to influence others, the darker its effects become. I would include reason in the equation of spirituality as well: reason is not the antithesis of belief, it is integral to its healthy development.

So when I see people abandoning reason in their religion and then applying it to affect others, I start to get nervous.