HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGIONStep Four: Ritual Sacrifice for Dummies—So Easy, Anyone Can
Do It!
Growing up in Texas, Jesus and football were the only gods that mattered.
And while I learned to enjoy football despite being terrible at it, the whole
Jesus thing never made a lot of sense to me. Jesus was alive, but then he died,
but then he was alive again, then he died again. And he was a man, but he was
also God, and now he’s a kind of man-god-spirit-thing that loves everyone
eternally (except maybe gay people, depending on whom you ask). It all
struck me as kind of arbitrary, and I felt—how do I say this?—like people
were just making shit up.
Don’t get me wrong: I could get behind most of the moral teachings of
Christ: be nice and love your neighbor and all that stuff. Youth groups were
actually a ton of fun. (Jesus camp is maybe the most underrated summer
activity of all time.) And the church usually had free cookies hiding
somewhere, in some room, every Sunday morning, which, when you’re a kid,
is exciting.
But if I’m being totally honest, I didn’t like being a Christian, and I didn’t
like it for a really dumb reason: my parents made me wear lame dress clothes.
That’s right. I questioned my family’s faith and went atheist at age twelve
over kiddie suspenders and bow ties.
I remember asking my dad, “If God already knows everything and loves
me no matter what, why does he care what I wear on Sundays?” Dad would
shush me. “But Dad, if God will forgive us our sins no matter what, why not
just lie and cheat and steal all the time?” Another shush. “But, Dad—”
The church thing never really panned out for me. I was sneaking Nine
Inch Nails T-shirts into Sunday school before my balls had completely
dropped, and a couple of years later, I struggled my way through my first
Nietzsche book. From there, it was all downhill. I started acting out. I bailed
on Sunday school to go smoke cigarettes in the adjoining parking lot. It was
over; I was a little heathen.
The open questioning and skepticism eventually got so bad that my
Sunday school teacher took me aside one morning and made me a deal: he’d
give me perfect marks in our confirmation class and tell my parents I was a
model student as long as I stopped questioning the logical inconsistencies of