I was reared Presbyterian. I drifted away, then gave it a final try back in the early 90s. There was a mega-church near where I lived. I went and was predictably electrified by the fiery oratory of Bishop John Gimenez, the prototype (at least so he claimed) for The Cross and the Switchblade. But he was constantly pandering for money. One of his favorite refrains was to cook up some worthy cause, then ask for the congregation (several thousand strong) to stand if they would be willing to give $500. After he’d shamed everyone able into standing and tossing 5 C-notes into the offering plate, he’d hit those that could do, $100, $50, and on down. The guy lived in a mansion and rolled around in chauffeur-driven limousines. It was pretty darned clear where the money was actually going.
Before I saw through the thin veil of piety masking his true greed, I signed up for the church’s bible college. The BS there was so thick a moron should be able to detect it even if he had no sense of smell.
That’s when I started thinking it through. I began looking at all the absurd contradictions and inconsistencies the God of Abraham, supposedly Omnipotent and Omniscient, had “caused” humans to write in the Torah. Then I started delving into all the other religions and what they had donated to the religions of the God of the Desert.
The emerging picture was abundantly clear. Humankind has invented at least 3,000 supreme beings. Almost all are mutually exclusive, which means at the very least that 2,999 of those supreme beings are false gods invented by men to enrich the priestly set and maintain dominance over all others. Given the absurdities of every one of the 3,000 postulated gods, I reckoned that it was highly likely all 3,000 were false gods, not just 2,999.