| I've heard of those sorts of places for the "cure gay" camps, and know that they also supposedly "cure" drug dependencies, alcoholism, and probably "liberal bias" or whatever. I'unno; I'm about as anti-religious as you can get. I think that established religion is a joke, that most religion folks are hypocrites who like to pick and choose which parts of their faith they follow, and that the ones who follow every part of their faith are generally disgusting, bigoted, red-neck freaks.
As someone who was raised Lutheran, I think it's pretty sick to teach religion to little kids period. I mean, I was sane enough to take a step back and question my faith, mostly due to circumstances. Most kids aren't. The fact of the matter is that if you tell a kid to believe something from when they're young, they'll keep believing it when they're an adult no matter how stupid it sounds.
If I were to raise my child to think that red was blue and blue was red, they would never be convinced otherwise. And most people would probably think that they were stupid for it. And yet, raising my kid to believe that there's a mystical being who created everything around us and punishes us for not believing in it, but at the same time allows us to suffer from disease, hunger, and war, is normal?
Honestly, most religion (especially Christianity) is asking you to believe in the most extreme thing. A metaphor to help me illustrate this:
Suppose that someone is pointing a gun at me. I have a few options here.
1) I can believe that the bullet will tear through my fragile body and kill me, and thus jump out of the way.
2) I can believe that Boogalaboo the Mighty Spirit will rip a hole in the ground and rise up, protecting me from the bullet and punishing my worldly foes.
Which is more rational? Obviously, option 1.
So now with religion.
I can choose:
1) ...to believe that when I die, it's over and I'm gone. Therefore, I can live my life to the fullest and make the most of my time spent living.
2) ...to believe that an all powerful god created everything, and that when I die my spirit will come out of my body and either rise up to heaven to go down to a hell of eternal torture, and thus spend my life fearing this god and worshiping him rather than enjoying my life.
Which is more rational? | 
