>>That's beautiful. There is an Etrade commercial, with the baby buying stock, and he says when he made money he rented a clown - "I underestimated the creepiness". My grand daughter since about the age of 4 has declared herself creeped out by "clowns, mimes and angels".
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>Our third daughter learned to say "angel!", at the age of 2 or 3, whenever she saw a naked baby butt - on a TV commercial or anywhere. She was smart enough to know when the joke has worn out.
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>Much later, however, this got me thinking - how many people got mentally screwed by this churchly-condoned-child-porn imagery? In all of my 45 years of watching TV and/or movies, I don't remember a single case of a loony pedophile/serial/cereal/rapist who wasn't religious. All those guys with a mission got their ideas from their (mis?)understanding whatever they were served during the sermon and around it.
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>OK, this is fiction, but don't tell me the script writers are going way out of their way to create impossible scenarios. They want to look plausible, life-based. So I guess there's a lot of fire behind this smoke.
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>>Religious sects of any kind are always a source of wonderment to me. Maybe it comes from being raised as a Methodist,
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>...which is probably the best OOP religion out there, they got methods, they organize events, they got lots of property and they keep stuff encapsulated and inheritance passed on, albeit overloaded at times. Fully OOP.
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>> migrating to a sort of Masonic Unitarianism
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>...IOW, one builder for all the classes, neat idea.
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>> Didn't seem much crazier than EST, Scientology, or Fundamentalist anything but demonstrated pretty dramatically what happens when one gives up one's spiritual responsibility to gurus or dogmas.
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>Exactly. Only I'd apply it much wider ;).

Being pretty much immune to the idea of anthropomorphic deity, I am not really eligible to be a believer in any "religion" (though the Unitarians pretty much don't require anything like that)

Being a historian, I don't see text as a likely source for literal truth.

But I have to say, beliefs that I find extremely strange can lead to behavior that is demonstrably not crazy - or at least not self destructive. My mother was a Methodist and a believer though hardly a zealot of any kind and had integrated the belief into living life in a very joyful way and making other people's lives better as well.

Mormons fascinate me, as I find their history and their beliefs extremely strange and yet would probably feel safer in their midst than living among a comparable number of atheists.