I’ve decided for now to leave the issue of cancer. I have learned that if you speak of your own cancer, the attention span is short, before it is assumed that you are just feeling sorry for yourself. This is especially true in religious circles. That stigma, ironically, is one of the cultural traits that I attempt to deconstruct in my book, How Cancer Taught Me to Swear, which I am presently writing. I may come back to cancer later, as there is a lot of interest based on visitors’ reading habits on this blog. You are certainly welcome to read the book if it ever makes it to print. But I am doing so well right now, I want to limit my thoughts about cancer to my writing of the book.

This new series, Honest to God, will be a comprehensive approach to revolutionary things I have learned over the past thirty years, since leaving evangelicalism. I have been writing about this for at least fifteen years. However, especially with so many new subscribers and followers, I want to go through this story methodically and with clarity. I realize that the majority of readers will not find this interesting, some will think I’m odd, and a few will think I’m the devil for questioning the way things are.

Before I start this series, I must emphasize once again that I am not approaching this from a religious perspective but from a philosophical one. What I mean by that is that religion is all about conformity; the priority is not truth. Therefore, religion makes everything a moral problem, coercing people into obedience via guilt manipulation.

Philosophy, on the other hand, like all the sciences, has the primary goal of seeking factual truth, with the mantra: “Where’s the evidence?” As I’ve said many times, the word philosophy means the love of wisdom (sophia), the same wisdom praised in Proverbs, which King Solomon wanted, and his desire pleased God so much that God made him wealthy.

Philosophy is sometimes wrong, but that doesn’t make the issues moral problems. So, when I deconstruct some of the present Christian culture, I am not claiming or believing that people who hold those views are somehow morally inferior to me. Never! I am simply trying to find the honest truth.

If religious people want to believe what they believe, it is none of my business, is it? I am not trying to change them. I simply want to find the truth because I think the closer we live to reality, the more honest we are factually and emotionally, the better life is. I know it has been for me, my relationship with God being the best it has ever been.

Christianity and America as a democracy are in a crisis right now, and it is not the first time in their history. Like in evolutionary history, life on Earth has had several mass extinction events, from which it has barely recovered; the church and this country have had several near-extinction periods (e.g., the Civil War, the Thirty Years’ War), from which they have barely recovered, but will they this time?

I do write for those who are disillusioned with the dishonesty that permeates religion. That’s why I left evangelicalism. I write to show them a way out of religion and into a more honest relationship with God, and a more realistic way to live, to save them not from hell but from leaving Christianity altogether. The operative words for this series are candor, honesty, and factual truth.

It is now the vogue in Christian circles not to champion the pursuit of factual truth but rather myth, transcendence, conspiracy theories, and superstition. Our government reflects that priority. The best liars are given the most power both in the church and the government. This is unsustainable. If there is a God, God lives in reality, honest reality.

I will also try to keep each post short, as I am not a reader of long posts myself, a blog-hypocrite.

In Peace and happy fourth for those in the USA,

Mike