₦airaland Forum

Taking it to the streets

Moses Kamya, headteacher of the Mustard Seed Secular School in Uganda, reports on the rise of the preacher on the streets of the capital

Source: http://newhumanist.org.uk/1803

Moses Kamya

The traditional Christian denominations have long been influential in Uganda, but since the 1990s a competitor has spread in the form of Pentecostalism – so-called because of the emphasis on the power of the Holy Spirit that supposedly descended on the apostles on the day of Pentecost. These churches differ from traditional ones not only in name. Their leaders prefer titles like pastor or apostle, and they seldom undergo formal leadership training, preferring to claim religious authority on the basis of an alleged meeting with Christ or an assumed anointing by the Holy Sprit. Their mode of preaching is anything but humble; they shout on loud speakers messages of prosperity, and no prayer session can be concluded without a Holy Spirit experience, where believers are compelled to receive the Holy Ghost, which is allegedly manifested by the speaking of strange tongues. The use of traditional African music, accompanied by singing and dancing, draws in the younger generation and believers are taught to give generously to the church in the form of a tithe (a tenth of their income) and free-will offerings, which reinforces the widespread poverty among the flock and the obscene wealth of the church leadership. In the Ugandan capital, Kampala, these churches can be easily identified by their gaudy names – Miracle Centre, Christian Life Church, New LifeTabernacle Church, Holy Fire Ministries – although Pentecostal churches are springing up so quickly many still lack a name of any kind.

Strolling through Kampala one has to battle with the heavy traffic and air pollution, but this quagmire has of late been compounded by the increasing numbers of Pentecostal evangelists working the streets, especially in busy spots like the Jinja Road roundabout, Queen’s clock tower and St Balikuddembe market. Men and women, young and old, parade the street armed with the Bible, appealing to pedestrians and motorists to be born-again. They are sometimes accompanied by interpreters in case somebody does not understand their language.

One wonders how such people earn their living since for them it is their divine duty to preach, be it dawn, noon or dusk. I approached one lady at the clock tower to ask how she earns her keep given that most of her time is spent in street evangelism. She told me her subsistence and rent are met by her mother church, the Divine Church of Christ near Entebbe airport. In many Pentecostal churches young people are paid to preach on the streets, stressing the imminent second coming and the necessity to repent.

Pierre Rukundo, associate professor of philosophy at Makerere University, believes the rise of Pentecostal evangelism in Kampala is due to a culture of religious extremism, which he stresses is not just a preserve of Islam. But Islam’s recent high profile has introduced a new competitiveness in the market for salvation, and it is the Pentecostals who have risen to the new challenge. The Pentecostal movement is bent on converting as many as possible by any means necessary, which includes shouting on the streets.

Pastor Royer, a missionary at Kampala Central Church, supports the idea of street evangelism; it is a practice used in his own church. Visiting him at his office, I asked why there seems to have been a visible increase in street evangelism in recent years. He says Pentecostal churches in the United States provide funds for ministering in the developing world, which enables churches in Uganda to fund street evangelism and door-to-door missions. You can see the evidence of this funding in the expensive amplification equipment and numerous glassy flyers with which the pavement-bashers are armed.

Moreover, for churches to receive more funding they have to convince their benefactors of the numbers of fresh converts they have registered. As religion in the West gradually loses its appeal the Pentecostal movement has turned to the third world, where more expressive, and exploitative, forms of Christianity are finding a foothold.

In a developing city like Kampala, the majority of people are preoccupied with making a living for their families. Uganda is joining a capitalist world where people have little or no time for church, so the extremist Pentecostal movement has resorted to street evangelism to aid their recruitment drive. However, these activities may be proving counterproductive. Peter Walubiri, a humanist from Kampala, believes many people are becoming less religious in the face of religious exploitation, turned off by the churches that are so demanding under the guise of giving to the Lord.

Those who do believe are convinced that they are impoverished simply because they do not give enough to God. Poor adherents are especially vulnerable, and are being convinced that they must contribute a portion of their meagre wages to the church, that it is holy to go hungry. Needless to say this is not the fate of the church leaders. In May this year the Kampala newspaper New Vision told of one Pentecostal pastor, William Muwanguzi (http://allafrica.com/stories/200805140649.html) , who operated a church in a corrugated iron shack yet lived a life of extreme luxury. He faked miracles by hiring people to give false testimonies in order to attract large crowds and asked for gifts from his flock in return for God’s blessings, using those contributions to bestow upon himself a top-of-the-range Hummer 4x4 rumoured to have cost more than £180,000. Muwanguzi was later arrested in relation to a car theft scandal, but his is just one example of the widespread, but under-investigated, exploitation of the credulous population of Kampala.

Thursday, 3 July 2008
Stephen Green asks BBC to pay his costs after losing Jerry Springer blasphemy case

Source: http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2008/07/stephen-green-asks-bbc-to-pay-his-costs.html

Stephen Green of Christian Voice – who claims to be facing bankruptcy after losing his bid to bring blasphemy charges against the BBC over the screening of Jerry Springer the Opera – has launched a desperate bid to avoid financial ruin by suggesting that licence-payers should pay his costs.

He was due to pay a total of £90,000 to the BBC and TV producers Avalon this week, but failed to deliver, adding that he would have to go bankrupt if he paid up. He's even written to BBC director-general Mark Thompson and John Thoday of Avalon asking them to waive the costs, and set up an online petition in the hope of encouraging them to do so.

Christian Voice feel that since Mark Thompson earns £750,000 a year, and the "BBC spends millions on inflated salaries for celebrities, rebranding logos and the news and on channels hardly anyone watches" then it would be perfectly fine to let Green off paying costs he was ordered to pay by the High Court after attempting a challenge to free speech under an archaic blasphemy law which, thankfully, has since ceased to exist.

Needless to say lots of people would quite like to see Green pay up, and a counter-petition has been launched to try and make sure he does. There's also a Facebook group.

I wouldn't want to publicly encourage a campaign to ensure a man goes bankrupt, but I can't stop you visiting those links,

Esss:
Are you serious?? was it the real hinn??

Oh, yes. I saw the video many times and showed it other people. Unfortunately Hinn co-operation has claimed copyright violation and it has been taken off. It is so hard to come by a copy now. If I should I shall post the link here.

There was a video on YouTube featuring a British comedian called Ali G and the evangelical preacher Benny Hinn, in which Hinn tried to slay Ali G in the spirit right on stage in front of thousands ( now millions) . Everyone around Ali G fell to the ground except Ali G, who stood his ground. Hinn walked up to him and put his hand on G's forehead and push hard but G did not move. They were caught in a duel, with Hinn pushing and G resisting for about a minute. In the end Hinn gave up and walked away.

This was such bad publicity for the Hinn co-operation that he has had it censored from Youtube. But this was really good comedy.

The venality and callousness of some of today's Christian churches have their roots in the early churches. Take for example the story narrated in Acts 4: 32 - Acts 5- 11;



Acts 4:

32 And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.

33 And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all.

34 Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold,

35 And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.

36 And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation,) a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus,

37 Having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet.

Acts 5:

1 But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession,

2 And kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles' feet.

3 But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?

4 Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.

5 And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things.

6 And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him.

7 And it was about the space of three hours after, when his wife, not knowing what was done, came in.

8 And Peter answered unto her, Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much? And she said, Yea, for so much.

9 Then Peter said unto her, How is it that ye have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out.

10 Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.

11 And great fear came upon all the church, and upon as many as heard these things.



Can Peter's behaviour here be described as anything near compassionate? He seemed to be only concerned for the money from this couple. Many pastors in today's churches are behaving like Peter in Acts. They are only concerned about the money the congregations brings in and are lacking in the brotherly/sisterly compassion you would expect them to have. So beware which church you patronise.

Pastor AIO:
Not a human Cognitive experience, no. that won't be possible. I think I've explain why I make the distinction above. I don't know to what extent I can be a spiritual experience into words.

So is there such a thing as a spiritual experience then? If it is not "experience" with our cognitive faculties, with what is it experience then.?

Can a dead person have spiritual experience?

Can a tree have spiritual experience?

Can a horse have a spiritual experience?

Have you had a spiritual experience? If so, can you describe it for us? And how were you able to tell that this was a spiritual experience?

Pastor AIO:
Bits. but the video is rather long and there are soo many points at which I disagree but to comment would involve going back and finding each point before commenting. The video is much too long for me to be bothered.

For the reasons why I said what I said check out my last post in the thread 'Only a christian can be logical'.

I deliberately avoided that post as it was devoid of logic. The least said about that one, the better.

abasifo:
i mean my dream ,dream partner
opportunity comes only once

I know what you mean. But don't you think expressions like "dream partner" are over-rated by popular culture. I am not saying that there is no such think, but i for one would only use that description on someone with whom I have already dated, share time with, had sexual relations with etc, etc. Otherwise, how would you know you would be mutually compatible?

Anyway, I understand your point and it was not meant to be taken seriously ( something in philosophy called a thought experiment). My questions are just a digression.

Pastor AIO:
Please don't call these guys intellectuals. They are not using the Intellect. Call him the great Conjecturer.

Did you watch the video. How did you come about to your conclusion? Was is from a balanced perspective arrived at by having evaluated the content of the material and/or the output of Kurtz's work?


I would really like to know which aspect of his philosopher you disagree with?

BTW, how do you know she is the partner of your dream? A woman you have never met before?

Would offering the old lady a ride in the car save her life?

What if you stop at the bus stop and attend to the old lady, then talk with your friend and then introduce yourself to the other lady?

Pastor AIO:
@Sisikill

But what you highlighted above is not a spiritual effect but a psychological one. You'll get the same if you joined the army and observed yourself slowly become a soldier. The same if you went to a new school. The changing of identity is slow and scary if you think about it. It makes a sensitive person think about what the identity actually is. Who are you? What are you?

Is it possible for an human cognitive experience to not be psychological? What is the difference between a spiritual and a psychological experience?

Listen to this great man speak:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDBLY7y2FxM&feature=user

Enjoy

@Sisikill,

I agree with you that this view is necessarily biased and am glad you made that point. In fact, this is a very important point and I would like to add that while I have posted a lot of lift&post material on this forum, it does not mean that I agree with every aspect of the post. The hallmark of intellectual maturity is the ability to discern the beef from the slag.

Check this out: http://www.alternet.org/rights/84043/?page=entire&ses=983180032aaa5d5d4c492c499f0f0930

The following is an excerpt from Matt Taibbi's new book, The Great Derangement" (Spiegel and Grau, 2008). Update: Matt Taibbi has responded to readers concerns about a passage in this excerpt. Response pasted at the bottom.

I pulled into the church parking lot a little after 6:00 p.m., at more or less the last possible minute. The previous half hour or so I'd spent dawdling in my car outside a Goodwill department store off Route 410 in San Antonio, clinging to some inane sports talk show piping over my car radio -- anything to hold off my plunge into Religion.

There was an old-fashioned white school bus in front of the church entrance, with a puddle of heavyset people milling around its swinging door. Some of these were carrying blankets and sleeping bags. My heart, already pounding, skipped a few extra beats. The church circulars had said nothing about bringing bedding. Why did I need bedding? What else had I missed?

"Excuse me," I said, walking up to an in-charge-looking man with a name tag who was standing near the front of the bus. "I see everyone has blankets. I didn't bring any. Is this going to be a problem?"

The man was about five feet one and had glassy eyes. He looked up at me and smiled queerly.

"Name?" he said.

"Collins," I said. "Matthew Collins."

He scanned his clipboard, found my name on the appropriate sheet of paper, and X-ed me out with a highlighter. "Don't worry, Matthew," he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. "A wonderful woman named Martha is going to take care of you at the ranch. You just tell her what you need when you get there."

I nodded, glancing at his hand, which was still on my shoulder. He waved me into the bus.

I had been attending the Cornerstone Church for weeks, but this was really my first day of school. I had joined Cornerstone -- a megachurch in the Texas Hill Country -- to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush. The church's pastor, John Hagee, is one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country -- not because his ministry is so very large (although he claims up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons) but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.

The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God up" in his efforts to bring about Armageddon. As Hagee tells it, only after Israel is involved in a final showdown involving a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russians) will Christ reappear. On that happy day, Hagee and his True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the rest of us nonbelievers are left behind on Earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures.

So here I was, standing in the church parking lot, having responded to church advertisements hawking an "Encounter Weekend" -- three solid days of sleep-away Christian fellowship that would teach me the "joy" of "knowing the truth" and "being set free." That had sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I was nervous. When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television -- great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair. We don't get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there's a ready-for-prime-time stage act -- toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won't scare the advertisers -- and then there's the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church. Waiting to board the bus for the Encounter Weekend, I had visions of some charismatic ranch-land Jesus, stoned on beer and the Caligula director's cut and too drunk late at night to chase after the minor children, hauling me into a barn for an in-the-hay shortcut to truth and freedom. Ridiculous, of course, but I really was afraid, mostly of my own ignorance and prejudices. I had never been to something like this before, and I didn't know how to act. I badly wanted to be invisible.

The bus was nearly full, and mostly quiet. Here and there a few people sitting together or near each other huddled and chatted, but I could see right away that a great many people on the trip had come alone, like me. They were people of all sorts: younger white men in neat middle-class haircuts, a matronly Mexican woman quietly reading a romance novel, a few scattered weather-beaten black folk in secondhand clothing whom I immediately pegged as in-recovery addicts, a couple of ten-alarm soccer moms who would prove the loudest people on the bus by far, a few quiet older men of military bearing.

The one obvious conclusion anyone making a demographic study of the Cornerstone Church population would come to would be that it's a solidly middle-class crowd. These are folks who are comfortable eating off paper plates and drinking out of gallon jugs of Country Time iced tea over noisy dinners with their kids. They're people who grew up in houses with back yards and fences, people with families. This particular journey to God is not a pastime for the idle rich or the urban obnoxious.

I sat down next to a frankly obese Hispanic woman who was carrying what both looked and smelled like a paper bag full of cheeseburgers.

"Some weather we're having, with this rain," I said.

"Tell me about it!" she said, introducing herself as Maria. "It truly is an act of God that I even made it here today." She told a story about having to drive down from Austin in bad weather. God had helped her four or five steps along the way. "It just seems like God really wants me to come on this trip," she said. "Otherwise, I would never have made it."

"It looks like God is going to give us a rainstorm all the way to Tarpley," I heard a voice behind me say.

This oddly uniform style of dialogue ringing all around me made me shift in my seat. I felt nervous and unpleasantly certain that I was about to be found out. When Maria asked me why I'd come on the retreat, I bit my lip. When in Rome, I thought.

"Well," I said, "since the new year, I've just been feeling like God has been telling me that I need to get right spiritually. So here I am."

I paused, wincing inwardly. An outsider coming into this world will feel sure that the moment he coughs up one of those "God told me to put more English on my tee shot" lines, his dark game will be instantly visible to all, and he'll be made the target of one of those Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style point-and-screech mob scenes. But nothing could be further from the truth. You simply cannot go wrong praising God in this world; overdoing it is literally impossible. I would understand this better by the end of the weekend.

Maria smiled. "I feel the same way. Have you ever been to one of these Encounters?"

"No, I haven't," I said.

"Me neither," she said. "I'm really excited."

"They're wonderful," said the matronly Mexican woman in front of me, turning around. "They really change you forever."

I slunk in my seat, trying to look inconspicuous. My disguise was modeled on other men I'd seen in church -- pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I'd been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! -- so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-privates look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.

One of the implicit promises of the church is that following its program will restore to you your vigor, confidence and assertiveness, effecting, among other things, a marked and obvious physical transformation from crippled lost soul to hearty vessel of God. That's one of the reasons that it's so important for the pastors to look healthy, lusty and lustrous -- they're appearing as the "after" photo in the ongoing advertisement for the church wellness cure.

In these Southern churches there are few wizened old sages such as one might find among Catholic bishops or Russian startsi. Here your church leader is an athlete, a business dynamo, a champion eater with a bull's belly, outwardly a tireless heterosexual -- and if you want to know what a church beginner is supposed to look like, just make it the opposite of that. Show weakness, financial trouble, frustration with the opposite sex, and if you're overweight, be so unhealthily, and in a way that you're ashamed of. The fundamentalist formula is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is from weakness to strength. They don't want a near-complete personality that needs fine-tuning -- they want a human jellyfish, raw clay they can transform into a vigorous instrument of God.

I was very, very, very good -- at everything!" shouted our hulking ex-paratrooper pastor, Philip Fortenberry, into the barely visible mouth mike that curled around his ruddy face. "I was a Green Beret -- top of the class. Six feet four, 225 pounds. A star athlete, basketball player. Starting outside linebacker on the varsity football team, "

The crowd cooed as our spiritual leader rattled off his macho credentials. Our supercowboy pastor was the perfect foil for the Revenge of the Nerds-style crowd of fatties, addicts, loners and broken-home survivors populating the warehouse-size building where we were all destined to spend the next three days together. In his introductory speech, Fortenberry did everything but tape-measure his biceps. His autobiographical tale of an angry overachieving youth who fell into a young adulthood of false pride, only to rebound and be reborn as a turbocharged, Army-trained enemy of Satan ("A friend of mine once joked that he saw my picture hung up in a post office in Hell," he quipped), was to serve as the first chapter of our collective transformation -- and to work it had to impress the hell out of us scraggly want to-be's.

It did. "I'm going to start tonight by telling y'all two stories," he began.

The first was a story from his Army days, about having to take a training flight in the Pacific Northwest as a young man and being trapped in the back of the transport plane when the landing went wrong and the plane ended up crash-bouncing along the runway. "If you've ever been in the back of a C-130, you know what I mean," he said, and I saw nodding heads all through the audience. The pastor subsequently would not miss a single chance to drop the name of a piece of military equipment.

The second story was more personal. It was about being a little boy in a small Southern town whose father ran around on his mom with a local barmaid. Dad used to bring little Junior to play golf with him, keeping his arm around the barmaid in the golf cart for the entire eighteen holes; finally Dad left Mom to shack up with the barmaid in a house down the road. Dad was so busy with the barmaid that he never came to see Junior's ballgames. But from time to time he would come back home to Mom, moving back into Junior's world, turning his life upside down.

"And every time he came back," the pastor said, waving his hand up and down and his voice fairly breaking with tears, "it was like one more bounce along that runway, bouncing in that C-130, tearing my little boy's world apart."

The pastor fell silent, still using his hands to demonstrate that bouncing transport plane of fate, as he surveyed his hushed audience. Fortenberry then stood staring at his audience in full pre-weep, his eyes wrinkling with incipient tears. The grown macho man unashamedly breaking into boyish tears in public is one of the weirder features of the post-Promise Keeper Christian generation, and Fortenberry -- himself a Promise Keeper, incidentally -- had it down to a science. "You never came to my ballgames, Dad," he'd screech, his face wrinkling like a raisin with grief at the word "ballgames."

I heard sniffles coming from the audience.

Sensing he had his crowd in an emotionally vulnerable state, the pastor then plunged into a story about how his bitterness at his father's abandonment had pushed him, in high school, to become just about the best basketball player you could imagine. Young Fortenberry, we learned, had scored lots and lots of points in high school and had many great games.

How great were those games? Well, he told us, they were really great. Some of the stories wandered irrelevantly into the specific stats of some of those games; he also punctuated his storytelling with oddly vigorous and adept pantomimes of jumpers and hook shots. It was a weird scene, like listening to a married man wax poetic to a mistress in a roadside motel room. "But after a while I realized that all those thousands of jump shots" -- here he mimicked a jump shot -- "and all those thousands of moves" -- he ducked his head back and forth, Tim Hardaway-style -- "hadn't brought me any closer to Dad."

The program revolved around a theory that Fortenberry quickly introduced us to called "the wound." The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.

In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry's tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father's abandonment had crushed his "normal."

"And I was wounded," he whispered dramatically. "My dad had ruined my normal!"

The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal.

After introducing us to the concept of wounds and normals, Fortenberry told us one last cautionary tale before sending us to our first group session. It was about a paratrooper who had done a tandem jump with a training dummy for some Army exercise or other, only to have the dummy's chute fail to open. The dummy had plunged to the ground, crashing through the trees and landing with a thud in a bush. Fortenberry's Army buddy had taken advantage of the situation to have a little joke at the expense of some other exercising soldiers on the ground who weren't privy to the fact that the troopers were jumping with dummies. The Army buddy had cried and wailed in asking where the "body" had fallen, leaving the soldiers on the ground to think that someone had just been killed.

The soldiers had felt guilty, Fortenberry explained, because they'd failed to help what they thought was a fallen comrade. Why? Because they'd been afraid to look behind the bush.

"So I'm telling you now, as you go into your groups," the pastor explained, "don't be afraid to look behind the bush."

I wrote in my binder: "LOOK BEHIND THE BUSH." Then I waited as my name was called out for group study.

The groups were segregated. Men with men, women with women. Each group was led by a life coach, who was actually a recent graduate of the program. At the beginning of the group stage, the coaches were all called up to the front of the chapel, and Fortenberry would call out the coach's name first, then the names of his group members.

My coach's name was Morgan. Morgan was a big man, ex-military, with curly black hair, a black mustache and a softening middle. He looked a little like a post-rehab version of Keith Hernandez -- soft-spoken, deferential, all nose and mustache.

There were four other men in our group. Besides myself, there was Jos, a huge Mexican with a sheepish expression and a steam-boiler body; Aaron, a squat and alert Pennsylvanian with a clean-and-jerker's build; and Dennis, a somewhat vacant and medicated-looking man pushing forty with a bald head and stubbly beard. Dennis looked like a distantly menacing version of Homer Simpson after electroshock therapy. Seated just a few feet away from us in our tight circle, he gazed out at us like he could barely make out our faces.

Once Morgan had us all gathered together, we looked for table space in the cafeteria area of the main building. Ominously, each of the cafeteria tables had a fresh box of Kleenex resting on top of it.

"Well," Morgan said, "I think what we're going to do to start is this. I'm going to tell you my story about my wound, and then we're going to go around in a circle, and each of us is going to just tell his story. Is that OK?"

Everyone nodded. I noted with displeasure that I was seated first after Morgan in clockwise order. Already I was panicking; what kind of wound could a human cipher like myself possibly confess to?

Morgan told his story. Even a perfunctory look at my fellow group members told me that we had people here with some very serious problems, and yet Morgan's wound was a tale that wouldn't have even ruined a week of my relatively privileged childhood, much less my whole life -- something about being yelled at by his dad while he was out playing with remote-controlled airplanes with his friends as a thirteen-year-old. He hammed up his trauma over the incident in classically lachrymose Iron John-in-touch-with-his-inner-boy fashion (again, there is something very odd about modern Christian men -- although fiercely pro-military in their politics and prehistorically macho in their attitudes toward women's roles, on the level of day-to-day behavior they seem constantly ready to break out weeping like menopausal housewives), but his words were bouncing off a wall of unimpressed silence radiating from the group.

Blank stares. This was a tough crowd. Five minutes into our group acquaintance, we were at a full 9.5 out of 10 on the International Uncomfortable Silence scale.

Morgan turned, glanced again at my name tag and sighed.

"Well, uh, OK, then," he said. "Matthew, do you want to tell your story?"

My heart was pounding. I obviously couldn't use my real past -- not only would it threaten my cover, but I was somewhat reluctant to expose anything like my real inner self to this ideologically unsettling process -- but neither did I want to be trapped in a story too far from my own experience. What I settled on eventually was something that I thought was metaphorically similar to the truth about myself.

"Hello," I said, taking a deep breath. "My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes."

The group twittered noticeably. Morgan's eyes opened to tea-saucer size.

I closed my own eyes and kept going, immediately realizing what a mistake I'd made. There was no way this story was going to fly. But there was no turning back.

"He'd be sitting there in his costume, sucking down a beer and watching television," I heard myself saying. "And then sometimes, even if I just walked in front of the TV, he'd pull off one of those big shoes and just, you know -- whap!"

I looked around the table and saw three flatlined, plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved Morgan staring back at me. I could tell that my coach and former soldier had been briefly possessed by the fear that a terrible joke was being played on his group. But then I actually saw him dismissing the thought -- after all, who would do such a thing? I managed to tie up my confession with a tale about turning into a drug addict in my mid-twenties -- at least that much was true -- and being startled into sobriety and religion after learning of my estranged clown father's passing from cirrhosis.

It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was that my story flew more or less without comment.

So it began. Our meetings were a prolonged, cyclical course of group-directed confession and healing that began on Friday evening and continued almost without interruption through Sunday afternoon. The basic gist of our group exercises was this: We were each supposed to reveal to one another what our great childhood wounds were, then write a series of essays and letters on the wound theme, taking time after the writing of each to read our work aloud. The written assignments began with an autobiography, then moved on to a letter written to our "offenders" (i.e., those who had caused our wounds), then a letter written to Jesus confessing our failure to forgive our tormentors.

Unfortunately, my one fleeting error of judgment about my circus-clown dad had left me shackled to a rank character absurdity for the rest of my stay in Texas. I soon found myself reading aloud a passage from my "autobiography" describing a period of my father's life when he quit clowning to hand out fliers in a Fudgie the Whale costume outside a Carvel ice cream store:

I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man's hands.

Again no reaction from the group, aside from an affirming nod from Jos at the last part -- his eyes said to me, I know what you mean about those fins.

After each of these grueling exercises we would have lengthy, fifteen-to-twenty-minute sessions singing unbearably atonal Christian hymns. Then we would have teaching/Bible-study sessions led by Fortenberry on the theme of the moment (e.g., "Admit the Truth About Our Wounds" that lasted an hour or so. Then, after Fortenberry would waste at least half the session giving us the Marlboro Man highlights of his professional resume ("I was the manager of the second-largest ranch in America, 825,000 acres, " and bragging about his physical prowess ("If someone was to slug me, I could whip just about anyone here", we would go back to the group session and confess some more. Then we would sing some more, receive more of Fortenberry's hairy lessons, and then the cycle would start all over again. There were almost no breaks or interruptions; it was a physically exhausting schedule of confession, catharsis, bad music and relentless, muscular instruction. The Saturday program began at 7:45 a.m. and did not end until ten at night; we went around the confess-sing-learn cycle five full times in one day.

We were about a third of the way through the process when I began to wonder what the hell was going on. Fortenberry's blowhard-on-crack-act/wound gobbledygook were all suspiciously secular in tone and approach. I had been hearing whispers throughout the first day or so to the effect that there was some kind of incredible supernatural religious ceremony that was going to take place at the end of the retreat ("Tighten your saddle, he's fixin' ta buck" was how "cowboy" Fortenberry put it), when we would experience "Victory and Deliverance." But as far as I could see, in the early going, most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to "find your wounds" ("My husband hid my Saks card!" at a chic resort in Miami Beach or the Hamptons.

True, I could see some other angles to what was going on as well. Virtually all of the participants of the Encounter identified either one or both of their parents as their "offender," and much of what Fortenberry was talking about in his instructional sessions was how to replace the godless atmosphere of abuse or neglect that the offenders had provided us with God and the church. He was taking broken people and giving them a road map to a new set of parents, a new family -- your basic cultist bait-and-switch formula for cutting old emotional ties and redirecting that psychic energy toward the desired new destination. That connection would become more overt later in the weekend, but early on, this your-father propaganda was the only thing I could see that separated Encounter Weekend from the typical self-help dreck of the secular world.

But then, midway through Saturday, Fortenberry and the coaches started to show us glimpses of the program's end game. The wound, it turned out, was something that was inflicted upon us because of a curse, a curse that perhaps spanned generations in each of our families. Alcoholic parents abused their children, who in turn carried their parents' curse to their adult lives and became alcoholics themselves -- only to have children and continue the pattern again. Now, why was that curse there to begin with? Here was where we could get into religious explanations, see the footprint of Satan, etc. We were unhappy because of earthly troubles from our childhoods, but those troubles were the work of a generational curse, inflicted upon us by devils and demons -- probably for unbelief, bad behavior, disobedience, worship of the wrong gods and so on.

This little bit of semantic gymnastics helped transform all of us at the retreat from being merely bleeped up to being accursed carriers of demons. Having ridden an almost entirely secular program to get our biographies out in the open in a group setting, Fortenberry could now switch his focus to the real meat and potatoes of the weekend: Satan and the devils inside us.

He started off slowly, invoking the godly curses of Genesis -- the sweat on Adam's brow, the pain of Eve's childbirth, etc. -- the punishments for eating of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. "How many of you women out there have had babies?" Fortenberry asked. "Can I see some hands?"

A dozen or so hands raised.

"Now, did it hurt?" he asked.

Laughter. Of course it hurt.

"Let me ask you a question," he said. "Why do alcoholics give birth to alcoholics? Why do the fatherless give birth to the fatherless?" He paused. "There are some people out there who will tell you it's genetics. It's in our genes, they say. Well, I tell you, it's not genetics. It's a generational curse!"

Fortenberry then started in on a rant against science and against scientific explanations for cycles of sin. "Take homosexuals," he said. "Every single homosexual is a sexual-abuse victim. They are not born. They are created -- by pedophiles."

The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about this world: Once a preacher says it, it's true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a "rod of iron" to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in Ezekiel he was citing -- but the audience ate it up anyway. When they're away from the cameras, the preachers feel even less obligated to shackle themselves to facts of any kind. That's because they know that their audience doesn't give a shit. So long as you're telling them what they want to hear, there's no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.

A team of twenty of the world's leading scientists wouldn't be able to convince so much as one person in this crowd that homosexuals are not created by pedophiles.

Fortenberry told a story about a nephew of his who called him up one night. "Both of his kids had fallen on the ground in respiratory distress, half-conscious, writhing around, gasping for air," Fortenberry said. "And I said to my nephew, I said, 'It isn't something they've done. It's something you've done.' "

The crowd murmured in assent.

"I told my nephew to look around the house," Fortenberry continued. "I said, 'Do you have a copy of Harry Potter?' And he said yes. And I said, 'That's your problem.' So I told him to go get that copy of that book, tear it in half and throw it out the window. So he does it, and guess what? Both of those kids stood up completely recovered, just like that."

He snapped his fingers, indicating the speed with which the kids had jumped up in recovery. The crowd cooed and applauded. I frowned, wondering for a minute what life must be like for a person mortally afraid of toothless commercial fairy tales. It struck me that Phil Fortenberry's nephew was probably more afraid of Harry Potter than Macbeth, which to me said a lot about this religion and about America in general.

Here I have a confession to make. It's not something that's easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship and praise -- two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses -- a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you're a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene -- even if you're intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry -- outwardly you're swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that "inner you" begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest -- in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the "work" of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

On the final morning of the weekend, we gathered in the chapel for the Deliverance. Fortenberry, dressed in his standard Western shirt and hiked-up jeans, sauntered up to the lectern wearing a solemn and dramatic expression. "This is fixing to be the biggest spiritual battle that ninety-nine percent of you will ever face," he said. "But let me tell you something. It's already been won. It was won 2,000 years ago."

The crowd cheered. As the applause tailed, he held his hands up Mussolini-fashion, asking for quiet. The crowd complied. It was quite dramatically done, this whole business, whatever we were working toward. And at that moment, I spotted a younger kid who had been at the retreat all weekend working a soundboard for the musical parts zipping behind the crowd to some kind of dimmer panel. He turned a switch and the lights dimmed slightly; though it was morning, the light in the building suddenly turned unnatural, like the light during a partial eclipse.

Throughout the whole weekend, Fortenberry had been setting himself up as an athletic conqueror of demons. Now, on the final morning, he looked like a quarterback about to take the field before a big game. The life coaches assembled around the edges of the chapel, carrying anointing oil and bundles of small paper bags.

Fortenberry began to issue instructions. He told us that under no circumstances should we pray during the Deliverance.

"When the word of God is in your mouth," he said, "the demons can't come out of your body. You have to keep a path clear for the demon to come up through your throat. So under no circumstances pray to God. You can't have God in your mouth. You can cough, you might even want to vomit, but don't pray."

The crowd nodded along solemnly. Fortenberry then explained that he was going to read from an extremely long list of demons and cast them out individually. As he did so, we were supposed to breathe out, keep our mouths open and let the demons out.

And he began.

At first, the whole scene was pure comedy. Fortenberry was standing up at the front of the chapel, reading off a list, and the room was loudly chirping crickets back at him.

"In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of incest! In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of sexual abuse! In the name of Jesus, "

After a few minutes, there was a little twittering here and there. Nothing serious. I was beginning to think the Deliverance was going to be a bust.

But then it started. Wails and cries from the audience. To my left, a young black man started writhing around in his seat. In front of me and to my right, another young black man with Coke-bottle glasses and a shock of nerdly jheri curl -- a dead ringer for a young Wayne Williams -- started wailing and clutching his head.

"In the name of Jesus," continued Fortenberry, "I cast out the demon of astrology!"

Coughing and spitting noises. Behind me, a bald white man started to wheeze and gurgle, like he was about to puke. Fortenberry, still reading from his list, pointed at the man. On cue, a pair of life coaches raced over to him and began to minister. One dabbed his forehead with oil and fiercely clutched his cranium; the other held a paper bag in front of his mouth.

"In the name of Jesus Christ," said Fortenberry, more loudly now, "I cast out the demon of lust!"

And the man began power-puking into his paper baggie. I couldn't see if any actual vomitus came out, but he made real hurling and retching noises.

Now the women began to pipe in. On the women's side of the chapel the noises began, and it is not hard to explain what these noises sounded like. If you've ever watched The Houston 560 or any other Group Intimacy porn movie, that's what it sounded like, only the sounds were far more intense.

It was not difficult to figure out where the energy was coming from on that side of the room. Some of the husbands glanced nervously over in the direction of their wives.

"In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of cancer!" said Fortenberry.

"Oooh! Unnh! Unnnnnh!" wailed a woman in the front row.

"Bleeech!" puked the bald man behind me.

Within about a minute after that, the whole chapel erupted in pandemonium. About half the men and three-fourths of the women were writhing around and either play-puking or screaming. Not wanting to be a bad sport, I raised my hand for one of the life coaches to see.

"Need , a , bag," I said as he came over.

He handed me a bag.

"In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of handwriting analysis!" shouted Fortenberry.

Handwriting analysis? I jammed the bag over my mouth and started coughing, then went into a very real convulsion of disbelief as I listened to this astounding list, half-laughing and half-retching.

"In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the demon of the intellect!" Fortenberry continued. "In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of anal fissures!"

Cough, cough!

The minutes raced by. Wayne Williams was now fully prostrate, held up only by a trio of coaches, each of whom took part of his writhing body and propped it up. Another bald man in the front of the chapel was now freaking out in Linda Blair fashion, roaring and making horrific demon noises.

"Rum-balakasha-oom!" shouted Fortenberry in tongues, waving a hand in front of Linda Blair Man. "Cooom-balakasha-froom! In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of philosophy!"

Philosophy?

It was obvious that virtually everyone in the crowd was playacting to some degree or another. I was reminded of the Tolstoy story "The Kreutzer Sonata," when the male narrator described marriage as being like the bearded-lady tent in a French circus he'd seen. You pay a few francs to go in, and when you come out, and the carnival barker shouts at you, "Was that not the most amazing thing you've ever seen, monsieur?" -- well, you're too ashamed to admit that you've been had, and so you nod your head and agree: Oui, monsieur, it was really something! That's how people come to say marriage is a blessing, and that's how you can get fifty-odd high school graduates puking demons into three-cent paper bags for a Deliverance.

The whole thing -- the demonic expulsions, the trading of miraculous wives' tales, the crazy End Times theology based on dire predictions that come and go uneventfully once a year or so -- it's all a con that is done with the consent of the conned. Which is what gives it strength. If everybody agrees to believe, it is real.

The hooting and howling went on seemingly forever. It was nearly an hour and a half before Fortenberry was done. He had cast out the demons of every ailment, crime, domestic problem and intellectual discipline on the face of the Earth. He cast out horoscopes, false gods, witches, intellectual pride, nearsightedness, everything, it seemed to me, except maybe E. coli and John Updike novels. At least four of the men and about six of the women writhed and screamed and fussed themselves into sheer physical exhaustion, collapsing in chairs by the time it was over. Several of the coaches actually had to bring Wayne Williams and the other young black man behind the chapel to subdue their demons. By then most of us men were just sitting there mute, looking around absent-mindedly, waiting for it to end. I was sitting there, clutching my demon vomit bag -- perhaps the single greatest souvenir of my journalistic career -- when I made the mistake of closing my mouth. A coach rushed over to me.

"Matthew!" he snapped. "Keep your mouth open! Let the demons out!"

"Oh, right!" I said. I straightened up and opened my mouth in the shape of a letter O.

Meanwhile, Fortenberry was tiring.

"I cast out , uh , In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of pornography. I cast out, in the name of Jesus, the demon of disconnect."

Fortenberry shook his head as though trying to revive himself. He had been at this for a long time. His stamina really was astounding, a testament to his military training.

Afterward, a frightening thought shot through my head. It occurred to me that over the past decades, any number of our prominent political leaders (from Jimmy Carter to Chuck Colson to W himself) had boasted publicly of their born-again experiences, broadcasting to Middle America an understanding of their personal relationships with God. But whereas once these conversions were humble things -- Billy Graham whispering and putting his hand on W's shoulder in Kennebunkport, or even (in the case of Tom DeLay) a flash of recognition while watching a televangelist program -- the modern version might very easily be this completely batshit holy-vomitus/demon-exorcism deal. The thought that any politician could claim this kind of experience and not be immediately disqualified from public service seemed utterly terrifying.

We were called back to chapel, and this time the drill was speaking in tongues. We were asked to come up to the front of the chapel and let a life coach anoint us with oil, hold our heads and speak to us in tongues. Fortenberry instructed us to "just let it out. Just let it out and it'll come out."

He didn't come right out and say, "Just act like you're speaking in tongues." But it was damned close. Once again, Fortenberry greased the process by telling us a story about how he'd once been at a service where folks were speaking in tongues, and he was skeptical, but it had just flown right out of him -- and now it just shoots right out of him, almost on command.

I went to the front. One of the coaches grabbed me by the shoulder and sploshed a big puddle of oil on my forehead. Then he began to speak in tongues:

"Gam-bakakasha. Hoo-raaa-balalakasha, Come on, Matthew, let it out."

American Christians who speak in tongues basically all try to sound like extras from the underworld set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If you want to pull it off and sound like a natural, just imagine you're holding a rubber replica of Harrison Ford's heart in your hands: Umm-harakashaka! Loo-pa-wanneee-rakakakasha, Meester Jones!

But I didn't think of this at the time and just went another route.

"Let it out, Matthew," the coach repeated, clutching my forehead. "Just open your mouth."

I shrugged and rattled off the lyrics to the song "What is Autumn?" by the Russian rock band DDT:

What is autumn? It's the sky The crying sky below your feet. Flying about in puddles are the birds and clouds. Autumn I've not been with you for so long!

It's actually a beautiful song, but with my eyes rolled back in my head and recited in Russian it sounded demonic enough.

"Hmm, very good," my coach said. "Good job, Matthew."

I kept going, on to the next verse. "What is autumn? It's a stone, "

"OK, that's good," the coach said, annoyed, moving on to the next guy.

"It's important that you practice," said Pastor Fortenberry. "It sounds silly, but when you're at home, when you have a little time, just try to let it out. You'll get used to it, and soon you'll be speaking in tongues like nobody's business!"

He then pronounced us baptized in the Holy Spirit and fully qualified now to cast out demons.

He held up his hands in triumph.

"Hallelujah!" he shouted.

The crowd jumped up, and we all threw up our hands.

"Hallelujah!"

He called out Hallelujah! again. We repeated after him. And we repeated after him again. Arms in the air. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

I felt a twinge of recognition from somewhere as I threw my arms up over and over again.

We had graduated.

By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this -- once you've gone this far -- you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.

By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you've gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no "anything else." All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this "our thing," a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that's all.

Adapted from the forthcoming book, "The Great Derangement" by Matt Taibbi. Copyright 2008 by Matt Taibbi. Published by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House Inc. Reprinted with permission. Names of Encounter Weekend participants have been changed to protect their privacy.

Response to readers from Matt Taibbi:

Dear Readers,

I've received a number of letters complaining about the scene in which I saw some "weatherbeaten black folk" whom "I immediately pegged as in-recovery addicts." Perhaps understandably some, minus the context, saw in this a racist attitude. To clarify why I was able to make that judgment:

1) I myself am an in-recovery addict, and as such I generally know one when I see one. I do mention this later in the piece, and in my other writings, but the point isn't made during that specific passage, so I can understand the confusion.

2) I also happened to know, as a member of the church, that the church sought out converts among homeless drug addicts. Most of the churchgoers at Cornerstone were middle-class, healthy, and white. Whenever I saw people who looked like they hadn't eaten a good meal in a year, wore clothes with holes in them, and perhaps additionally were not white, it was logical to make assumptions about how these people and this predominantly white suburban church found each other. I was correct about those people on the bus, incidentally.

Minus this context, I can see how some people reached the conclusions that they did. I apologize for the misunderstanding and certainly don't mean to imply that all black people are drug addicts. That would be outrageous and absurd, given my own situation.

Sincerely

Matt Taibbi

Interesting site:

http://www.blackwomanthinks..com/

Enjoy

Enjoy this video:

http://www.revver.com/video/223973/landoverbaptistchurch-pastor-deacon-fred-speaks-to-atheist-crowd/


ta

Check this out: http://www.alternet.org/rights/84043/?page=entire&ses=983180032aaa5d5d4c492c499f0f0930

The following is an excerpt from Matt Taibbi's new book, The Great Derangement" (Spiegel and Grau, 2008). Update: Matt Taibbi has responded to readers concerns about a passage in this excerpt. Response pasted at the bottom.

I pulled into the church parking lot a little after 6:00 p.m., at more or less the last possible minute. The previous half hour or so I'd spent dawdling in my car outside a Goodwill department store off Route 410 in San Antonio, clinging to some inane sports talk show piping over my car radio -- anything to hold off my plunge into Religion.

There was an old-fashioned white school bus in front of the church entrance, with a puddle of heavyset people milling around its swinging door. Some of these were carrying blankets and sleeping bags. My heart, already pounding, skipped a few extra beats. The church circulars had said nothing about bringing bedding. Why did I need bedding? What else had I missed?

"Excuse me," I said, walking up to an in-charge-looking man with a name tag who was standing near the front of the bus. "I see everyone has blankets. I didn't bring any. Is this going to be a problem?"

The man was about five feet one and had glassy eyes. He looked up at me and smiled queerly.

"Name?" he said.

"Collins," I said. "Matthew Collins."

He scanned his clipboard, found my name on the appropriate sheet of paper, and X-ed me out with a highlighter. "Don't worry, Matthew," he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. "A wonderful woman named Martha is going to take care of you at the ranch. You just tell her what you need when you get there."

I nodded, glancing at his hand, which was still on my shoulder. He waved me into the bus.

I had been attending the Cornerstone Church for weeks, but this was really my first day of school. I had joined Cornerstone -- a megachurch in the Texas Hill Country -- to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush. The church's pastor, John Hagee, is one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country -- not because his ministry is so very large (although he claims up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons) but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.

The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God up" in his efforts to bring about Armageddon. As Hagee tells it, only after Israel is involved in a final showdown involving a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russians) will Christ reappear. On that happy day, Hagee and his True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the rest of us nonbelievers are left behind on Earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures.

So here I was, standing in the church parking lot, having responded to church advertisements hawking an "Encounter Weekend" -- three solid days of sleep-away Christian fellowship that would teach me the "joy" of "knowing the truth" and "being set free." That had sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I was nervous. When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television -- great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair. We don't get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there's a ready-for-prime-time stage act -- toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won't scare the advertisers -- and then there's the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church. Waiting to board the bus for the Encounter Weekend, I had visions of some charismatic ranch-land Jesus, stoned on beer and the Caligula director's cut and too drunk late at night to chase after the minor children, hauling me into a barn for an in-the-hay shortcut to truth and freedom. Ridiculous, of course, but I really was afraid, mostly of my own ignorance and prejudices. I had never been to something like this before, and I didn't know how to act. I badly wanted to be invisible.

The bus was nearly full, and mostly quiet. Here and there a few people sitting together or near each other huddled and chatted, but I could see right away that a great many people on the trip had come alone, like me. They were people of all sorts: younger white men in neat middle-class haircuts, a matronly Mexican woman quietly reading a romance novel, a few scattered weather-beaten black folk in secondhand clothing whom I immediately pegged as in-recovery addicts, a couple of ten-alarm soccer moms who would prove the loudest people on the bus by far, a few quiet older men of military bearing.

The one obvious conclusion anyone making a demographic study of the Cornerstone Church population would come to would be that it's a solidly middle-class crowd. These are folks who are comfortable eating off paper plates and drinking out of gallon jugs of Country Time iced tea over noisy dinners with their kids. They're people who grew up in houses with back yards and fences, people with families. This particular journey to God is not a pastime for the idle rich or the urban obnoxious.

I sat down next to a frankly obese Hispanic woman who was carrying what both looked and smelled like a paper bag full of cheeseburgers.

"Some weather we're having, with this rain," I said.

"Tell me about it!" she said, introducing herself as Maria. "It truly is an act of God that I even made it here today." She told a story about having to drive down from Austin in bad weather. God had helped her four or five steps along the way. "It just seems like God really wants me to come on this trip," she said. "Otherwise, I would never have made it."

"It looks like God is going to give us a rainstorm all the way to Tarpley," I heard a voice behind me say.

This oddly uniform style of dialogue ringing all around me made me shift in my seat. I felt nervous and unpleasantly certain that I was about to be found out. When Maria asked me why I'd come on the retreat, I bit my lip. When in Rome, I thought.

"Well," I said, "since the new year, I've just been feeling like God has been telling me that I need to get right spiritually. So here I am."

I paused, wincing inwardly. An outsider coming into this world will feel sure that the moment he coughs up one of those "God told me to put more English on my tee shot" lines, his dark game will be instantly visible to all, and he'll be made the target of one of those Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style point-and-screech mob scenes. But nothing could be further from the truth. You simply cannot go wrong praising God in this world; overdoing it is literally impossible. I would understand this better by the end of the weekend.

Maria smiled. "I feel the same way. Have you ever been to one of these Encounters?"

"No, I haven't," I said.

"Me neither," she said. "I'm really excited."

"They're wonderful," said the matronly Mexican woman in front of me, turning around. "They really change you forever."

I slunk in my seat, trying to look inconspicuous. My disguise was modeled on other men I'd seen in church -- pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I'd been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! -- so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.

One of the implicit promises of the church is that following its program will restore to you your vigor, confidence and assertiveness, effecting, among other things, a marked and obvious physical transformation from crippled lost soul to hearty vessel of God. That's one of the reasons that it's so important for the pastors to look healthy, lusty and lustrous -- they're appearing as the "after" photo in the ongoing advertisement for the church wellness cure.

In these Southern churches there are few wizened old sages such as one might find among Catholic bishops or Russian startsi. Here your church leader is an athlete, a business dynamo, a champion eater with a bull's belly, outwardly a tireless heterosexual -- and if you want to know what a church beginner is supposed to look like, just make it the opposite of that. Show weakness, financial trouble, frustration with the opposite sex, and if you're overweight, be so unhealthily, and in a way that you're ashamed of. The fundamentalist formula is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is from weakness to strength. They don't want a near-complete personality that needs fine-tuning -- they want a human jellyfish, raw clay they can transform into a vigorous instrument of God.

I was very, very, very good -- at everything!" shouted our hulking ex-paratrooper pastor, Philip Fortenberry, into the barely visible mouth mike that curled around his ruddy face. "I was a Green Beret -- top of the class. Six feet four, 225 pounds. A star athlete, basketball player. Starting outside linebacker on the varsity football team, "

The crowd cooed as our spiritual leader rattled off his macho credentials. Our supercowboy pastor was the perfect foil for the Revenge of the Nerds-style crowd of fatties, addicts, loners and broken-home survivors populating the warehouse-size building where we were all destined to spend the next three days together. In his introductory speech, Fortenberry did everything but tape-measure his biceps. His autobiographical tale of an angry overachieving youth who fell into a young adulthood of false pride, only to rebound and be reborn as a turbocharged, Army-trained enemy of Satan ("A friend of mine once joked that he saw my picture hung up in a post office in Hell," he quipped), was to serve as the first chapter of our collective transformation -- and to work it had to impress the hell out of us scraggly wanna-be's.

It did. "I'm going to start tonight by telling y'all two stories," he began.

The first was a story from his Army days, about having to take a training flight in the Pacific Northwest as a young man and being trapped in the back of the transport plane when the landing went wrong and the plane ended up crash-bouncing along the runway. "If you've ever been in the back of a C-130, you know what I mean," he said, and I saw nodding heads all through the audience. The pastor subsequently would not miss a single chance to drop the name of a piece of military equipment.

The second story was more personal. It was about being a little boy in a small Southern town whose father ran around on his mom with a local barmaid. Dad used to bring little Junior to play golf with him, keeping his arm around the barmaid in the golf cart for the entire eighteen holes; finally Dad left Mom to shack up with the barmaid in a house down the road. Dad was so busy with the barmaid that he never came to see Junior's ballgames. But from time to time he would come back home to Mom, moving back into Junior's world, turning his life upside down.

"And every time he came back," the pastor said, waving his hand up and down and his voice fairly breaking with tears, "it was like one more bounce along that runway, bouncing in that C-130, tearing my little boy's world apart."

The pastor fell silent, still using his hands to demonstrate that bouncing transport plane of fate, as he surveyed his hushed audience. Fortenberry then stood staring at his audience in full pre-weep, his eyes wrinkling with incipient tears. The grown macho man unashamedly breaking into boyish tears in public is one of the weirder features of the post-Promise Keeper Christian generation, and Fortenberry -- himself a Promise Keeper, incidentally -- had it down to a science. "You never came to my ballgames, Dad," he'd screech, his face wrinkling like a raisin with grief at the word "ballgames."

I heard sniffles coming from the audience.

Sensing he had his crowd in an emotionally vulnerable state, the pastor then plunged into a story about how his bitterness at his father's abandonment had pushed him, in high school, to become just about the best basketball player you could imagine. Young Fortenberry, we learned, had scored lots and lots of points in high school and had many great games.

How great were those games? Well, he told us, they were really great. Some of the stories wandered irrelevantly into the specific stats of some of those games; he also punctuated his storytelling with oddly vigorous and adept pantomimes of jumpers and hook shots. It was a weird scene, like listening to a married man wax poetic to a mistress in a roadside motel room. "But after a while I realized that all those thousands of jump shots" -- here he mimicked a jump shot -- "and all those thousands of moves" -- he ducked his head back and forth, Tim Hardaway-style -- "hadn't brought me any closer to Dad."

The program revolved around a theory that Fortenberry quickly introduced us to called "the wound." The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.

In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry's tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father's abandonment had crushed his "normal."

"And I was wounded," he whispered dramatically. "My dad had ruined my normal!"

The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal.

After introducing us to the concept of wounds and normals, Fortenberry told us one last cautionary tale before sending us to our first group session. It was about a paratrooper who had done a tandem jump with a training dummy for some Army exercise or other, only to have the dummy's chute fail to open. The dummy had plunged to the ground, crashing through the trees and landing with a thud in a bush. Fortenberry's Army buddy had taken advantage of the situation to have a little joke at the expense of some other exercising soldiers on the ground who weren't privy to the fact that the troopers were jumping with dummies. The Army buddy had cried and wailed in asking where the "body" had fallen, leaving the soldiers on the ground to think that someone had just been killed.

The soldiers had felt guilty, Fortenberry explained, because they'd failed to help what they thought was a fallen comrade. Why? Because they'd been afraid to look behind the bush.

"So I'm telling you now, as you go into your groups," the pastor explained, "don't be afraid to look behind the bush."

I wrote in my binder: "LOOK BEHIND THE BUSH." Then I waited as my name was called out for group study.

The groups were segregated. Men with men, women with women. Each group was led by a life coach, who was actually a recent graduate of the program. At the beginning of the group stage, the coaches were all called up to the front of the chapel, and Fortenberry would call out the coach's name first, then the names of his group members.

My coach's name was Morgan. Morgan was a big man, ex-military, with curly black hair, a black mustache and a softening middle. He looked a little like a post-rehab version of Keith Hernandez -- soft-spoken, deferential, all nose and mustache.

There were four other men in our group. Besides myself, there was Jos, a huge Mexican with a sheepish expression and a steam-boiler body; Aaron, a squat and alert Pennsylvanian with a clean-and-jerker's build; and Dennis, a somewhat vacant and medicated-looking man pushing forty with a bald head and stubbly beard. Dennis looked like a distantly menacing version of Homer Simpson after electroshock therapy. Seated just a few feet away from us in our tight circle, he gazed out at us like he could barely make out our faces.

Once Morgan had us all gathered together, we looked for table space in the cafeteria area of the main building. Ominously, each of the cafeteria tables had a fresh box of Kleenex resting on top of it.

"Well," Morgan said, "I think what we're going to do to start is this. I'm going to tell you my story about my wound, and then we're going to go around in a circle, and each of us is going to just tell his story. Is that OK?"

Everyone nodded. I noted with displeasure that I was seated first after Morgan in clockwise order. Already I was panicking; what kind of wound could a human cipher like myself possibly confess to?

Morgan told his story. Even a perfunctory look at my fellow group members told me that we had people here with some very serious problems, and yet Morgan's wound was a tale that wouldn't have even ruined a week of my relatively privileged childhood, much less my whole life -- something about being yelled at by his dad while he was out playing with remote-controlled airplanes with his friends as a thirteen-year-old. He hammed up his trauma over the incident in classically lachrymose Iron John-in-touch-with-his-inner-boy fashion (again, there is something very odd about modern Christian men -- although fiercely pro-military in their politics and prehistorically macho in their attitudes toward women's roles, on the level of day-to-day behavior they seem constantly ready to break out weeping like menopausal housewives), but his words were bouncing off a wall of unimpressed silence radiating from the group.

Blank stares. This was a tough crowd. Five minutes into our group acquaintance, we were at a full 9.5 out of 10 on the International Uncomfortable Silence scale.

Morgan turned, glanced again at my name tag and sighed.

"Well, uh, OK, then," he said. "Matthew, do you want to tell your story?"

My heart was pounding. I obviously couldn't use my real past -- not only would it threaten my cover, but I was somewhat reluctant to expose anything like my real inner self to this ideologically unsettling process -- but neither did I want to be trapped in a story too far from my own experience. What I settled on eventually was something that I thought was metaphorically similar to the truth about myself.

"Hello," I said, taking a deep breath. "My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes."

The group twittered noticeably. Morgan's eyes opened to tea-saucer size.

I closed my own eyes and kept going, immediately realizing what a mistake I'd made. There was no way this story was going to fly. But there was no turning back.

"He'd be sitting there in his costume, sucking down a beer and watching television," I heard myself saying. "And then sometimes, even if I just walked in front of the TV, he'd pull off one of those big shoes and just, you know -- whap!"

I looked around the table and saw three flatlined, plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved Morgan staring back at me. I could tell that my coach and former soldier had been briefly possessed by the fear that a terrible joke was being played on his group. But then I actually saw him dismissing the thought -- after all, who would do such a thing? I managed to tie up my confession with a tale about turning into a drug addict in my mid-twenties -- at least that much was true -- and being startled into sobriety and religion after learning of my estranged clown father's passing from cirrhosis.

It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was that my story flew more or less without comment.

So it began. Our meetings were a prolonged, cyclical course of group-directed confession and healing that began on Friday evening and continued almost without interruption through Sunday afternoon. The basic gist of our group exercises was this: We were each supposed to reveal to one another what our great childhood wounds were, then write a series of essays and letters on the wound theme, taking time after the writing of each to read our work aloud. The written assignments began with an autobiography, then moved on to a letter written to our "offenders" (i.e., those who had caused our wounds), then a letter written to Jesus confessing our failure to forgive our tormentors.

Unfortunately, my one fleeting error of judgment about my circus-clown dad had left me shackled to a rank character absurdity for the rest of my stay in Texas. I soon found myself reading aloud a passage from my "autobiography" describing a period of my father's life when he quit clowning to hand out fliers in a Fudgie the Whale costume outside a Carvel ice cream store:

I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man's hands.

Again no reaction from the group, aside from an affirming nod from Jos at the last part -- his eyes said to me, I know what you mean about those fins.

After each of these grueling exercises we would have lengthy, fifteen-to-twenty-minute sessions singing unbearably atonal Christian hymns. Then we would have teaching/Bible-study sessions led by Fortenberry on the theme of the moment (e.g., "Admit the Truth About Our Wounds" that lasted an hour or so. Then, after Fortenberry would waste at least half the session giving us the Marlboro Man highlights of his professional resume ("I was the manager of the second-largest ranch in America, 825,000 acres, " and bragging about his physical prowess ("If someone was to slug me, I could whip just about anyone here", we would go back to the group session and confess some more. Then we would sing some more, receive more of Fortenberry's hairy lessons, and then the cycle would start all over again. There were almost no breaks or interruptions; it was a physically exhausting schedule of confession, catharsis, bad music and relentless, muscular instruction. The Saturday program began at 7:45 a.m. and did not end until ten at night; we went around the confess-sing-learn cycle five full times in one day.

We were about a third of the way through the process when I began to wonder what the hell was going on. Fortenberry's blowhard-on-crack-act/wound gobbledygook were all suspiciously secular in tone and approach. I had been hearing whispers throughout the first day or so to the effect that there was some kind of incredible supernatural religious ceremony that was going to take place at the end of the retreat ("Tighten your saddle, he's fixin' ta buck" was how "cowboy" Fortenberry put it), when we would experience "Victory and Deliverance." But as far as I could see, in the early going, most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to "find your wounds" ("My husband hid my Saks card!" at a chic resort in Miami Beach or the Hamptons.

True, I could see some other angles to what was going on as well. Virtually all of the participants of the Encounter identified either one or both of their parents as their "offender," and much of what Fortenberry was talking about in his instructional sessions was how to replace the godless atmosphere of abuse or neglect that the offenders had provided us with God and the church. He was taking broken people and giving them a road map to a new set of parents, a new family -- your basic cultist bait-and-switch formula for cutting old emotional ties and redirecting that psychic energy toward the desired new destination. That connection would become more overt later in the weekend, but early on, this ur-father propaganda was the only thing I could see that separated Encounter Weekend from the typical self-help dreck of the secular world.

But then, midway through Saturday, Fortenberry and the coaches started to show us glimpses of the program's end game. The wound, it turned out, was something that was inflicted upon us because of a curse, a curse that perhaps spanned generations in each of our families. Alcoholic parents abused their children, who in turn carried their parents' curse to their adult lives and became alcoholics themselves -- only to have children and continue the pattern again. Now, why was that curse there to begin with? Here was where we could get into religious explanations, see the footprint of Satan, etc. We were unhappy because of earthly troubles from our childhoods, but those troubles were the work of a generational curse, inflicted upon us by devils and demons -- probably for unbelief, bad behavior, disobedience, worship of the wrong gods and so on.

This little bit of semantic gymnastics helped transform all of us at the retreat from being merely bleeped up to being accursed carriers of demons. Having ridden an almost entirely secular program to get our biographies out in the open in a group setting, Fortenberry could now switch his focus to the real meat and potatoes of the weekend: Satan and the devils inside us.

He started off slowly, invoking the godly curses of Genesis -- the sweat on Adam's brow, the pain of Eve's childbirth, etc. -- the punishments for eating of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. "How many of you women out there have had babies?" Fortenberry asked. "Can I see some hands?"

A dozen or so hands raised.

"Now, did it hurt?" he asked.

Laughter. Of course it hurt.

"Let me ask you a question," he said. "Why do alcoholics give birth to alcoholics? Why do the fatherless give birth to the fatherless?" He paused. "There are some people out there who will tell you it's genetics. It's in our genes, they say. Well, I tell you, it's not genetics. It's a generational curse!"

Fortenberry then started in on a rant against science and against scientific explanations for cycles of sin. "Take homosexuals," he said. "Every single homosexual is a sexual-abuse victim. They are not born. They are created -- by pedophiles."

The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about this world: Once a preacher says it, it's true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a "rod of iron" to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in Ezekiel he was citing -- but the audience ate it up anyway. When they're away from the cameras, the preachers feel even less obligated to shackle themselves to facts of any kind. That's because they know that their audience doesn't give a shit. So long as you're telling them what they want to hear, there's no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.

A team of twenty of the world's leading scientists wouldn't be able to convince so much as one person in this crowd that homosexuals are not created by pedophiles.

Fortenberry told a story about a nephew of his who called him up one night. "Both of his kids had fallen on the ground in respiratory distress, half-conscious, writhing around, gasping for air," Fortenberry said. "And I said to my nephew, I said, 'It isn't something they've done. It's something you've done.' "

The crowd murmured in assent.

"I told my nephew to look around the house," Fortenberry continued. "I said, 'Do you have a copy of Harry Potter?' And he said yes. And I said, 'That's your problem.' So I told him to go get that copy of that book, tear it in half and throw it out the window. So he does it, and guess what? Both of those kids stood up completely recovered, just like that."

He snapped his fingers, indicating the speed with which the kids had jumped up in recovery. The crowd cooed and applauded. I frowned, wondering for a minute what life must be like for a person mortally afraid of toothless commercial fairy tales. It struck me that Phil Fortenberry's nephew was probably more afraid of Harry Potter than Macbeth, which to me said a lot about this religion and about America in general.

Here I have a confession to make. It's not something that's easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship and praise -- two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses -- a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you're a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene -- even if you're intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry -- outwardly you're swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that "inner you" begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest -- in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the "work" of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

On the final morning of the weekend, we gathered in the chapel for the Deliverance. Fortenberry, dressed in his standard Western shirt and hiked-up jeans, sauntered up to the lectern wearing a solemn and dramatic expression. "This is fixing to be the biggest spiritual battle that ninety-nine percent of you will ever face," he said. "But let me tell you something. It's already been won. It was won 2,000 years ago."

The crowd cheered. As the applause tailed, he held his hands up Mussolini-fashion, asking for quiet. The crowd complied. It was quite dramatically done, this whole business, whatever we were working toward. And at that moment, I spotted a younger kid who had been at the retreat all weekend working a soundboard for the musical parts zipping behind the crowd to some kind of dimmer panel. He turned a switch and the lights dimmed slightly; though it was morning, the light in the building suddenly turned unnatural, like the light during a partial eclipse.

Throughout the whole weekend, Fortenberry had been setting himself up as an athletic conqueror of demons. Now, on the final morning, he looked like a quarterback about to take the field before a big game. The life coaches assembled around the edges of the chapel, carrying anointing oil and bundles of small paper bags.

Fortenberry began to issue instructions. He told us that under no circumstances should we pray during the Deliverance.

"When the word of God is in your mouth," he said, "the demons can't come out of your body. You have to keep a path clear for the demon to come up through your throat. So under no circumstances pray to God. You can't have God in your mouth. You can cough, you might even want to vomit, but don't pray."

The crowd nodded along solemnly. Fortenberry then explained that he was going to read from an extremely long list of demons and cast them out individually. As he did so, we were supposed to breathe out, keep our mouths open and let the demons out.

And he began.

At first, the whole scene was pure comedy. Fortenberry was standing up at the front of the chapel, reading off a list, and the room was loudly chirping crickets back at him.

"In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of incest! In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of sexual abuse! In the name of Jesus, "

After a few minutes, there was a little twittering here and there. Nothing serious. I was beginning to think the Deliverance was going to be a bust.

But then it started. Wails and cries from the audience. To my left, a young black man started writhing around in his seat. In front of me and to my right, another young black man with Coke-bottle glasses and a shock of nerdly jheri curl -- a dead ringer for a young Wayne Williams -- started wailing and clutching his head.

"In the name of Jesus," continued Fortenberry, "I cast out the demon of astrology!"

Coughing and spitting noises. Behind me, a bald white man started to wheeze and gurgle, like he was about to puke. Fortenberry, still reading from his list, pointed at the man. On cue, a pair of life coaches raced over to him and began to minister. One dabbed his forehead with oil and fiercely clutched his cranium; the other held a paper bag in front of his mouth.

"In the name of Jesus Christ," said Fortenberry, more loudly now, "I cast out the demon of lust!"

And the man began power-puking into his paper baggie. I couldn't see if any actual vomitus came out, but he made real hurling and retching noises.

Now the women began to pipe in. On the women's side of the chapel the noises began, and it is not hard to explain what these noises sounded like. If you've ever watched The Houston 560 or any other Group Intimacy porn movie, that's what it sounded like, only the sounds were far more intense.

It was not difficult to figure out where the energy was coming from on that side of the room. Some of the husbands glanced nervously over in the direction of their wives.

"In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of cancer!" said Fortenberry.

"Oooh! Unnh! Unnnnnh!" wailed a woman in the front row.

"Bleeech!" puked the bald man behind me.

Within about a minute after that, the whole chapel erupted in pandemonium. About half the men and three-fourths of the women were writhing around and either play-puking or screaming. Not wanting to be a bad sport, I raised my hand for one of the life coaches to see.

"Need , a , bag," I said as he came over.

He handed me a bag.

"In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of handwriting analysis!" shouted Fortenberry.

Handwriting analysis? I jammed the bag over my mouth and started coughing, then went into a very real convulsion of disbelief as I listened to this astounding list, half-laughing and half-retching.

"In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the demon of the intellect!" Fortenberry continued. "In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of anal fissures!"

Cough, cough!

The minutes raced by. Wayne Williams was now fully prostrate, held up only by a trio of coaches, each of whom took part of his writhing body and propped it up. Another bald man in the front of the chapel was now freaking out in Linda Blair fashion, roaring and making horrific demon noises.

"Rum-balakasha-oom!" shouted Fortenberry in tongues, waving a hand in front of Linda Blair Man. "Cooom-balakasha-froom! In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of philosophy!"

Philosophy?

It was obvious that virtually everyone in the crowd was playacting to some degree or another. I was reminded of the Tolstoy story "The Kreutzer Sonata," when the male narrator described marriage as being like the bearded-lady tent in a French circus he'd seen. You pay a few francs to go in, and when you come out, and the carnival barker shouts at you, "Was that not the most amazing thing you've ever seen, monsieur?" -- well, you're too ashamed to admit that you've been had, and so you nod your head and agree: Oui, monsieur, it was really something! That's how people come to say marriage is a blessing, and that's how you can get fifty-odd high school graduates puking demons into three-cent paper bags for a Deliverance.

The whole thing -- the demonic expulsions, the trading of miraculous wives' tales, the crazy End Times theology based on dire predictions that come and go uneventfully once a year or so -- it's all a con that is done with the consent of the conned. Which is what gives it strength. If everybody agrees to believe, it is real.

The hooting and howling went on seemingly forever. It was nearly an hour and a half before Fortenberry was done. He had cast out the demons of every ailment, crime, domestic problem and intellectual discipline on the face of the Earth. He cast out horoscopes, false gods, witches, intellectual pride, nearsightedness, everything, it seemed to me, except maybe E. coli and John Updike novels. At least four of the men and about six of the women writhed and screamed and fussed themselves into sheer physical exhaustion, collapsing in chairs by the time it was over. Several of the coaches actually had to bring Wayne Williams and the other young black man behind the chapel to subdue their demons. By then most of us men were just sitting there mute, looking around absent-mindedly, waiting for it to end. I was sitting there, clutching my demon vomit bag -- perhaps the single greatest souvenir of my journalistic career -- when I made the mistake of closing my mouth. A coach rushed over to me.

"Matthew!" he snapped. "Keep your mouth open! Let the demons out!"

"Oh, right!" I said. I straightened up and opened my mouth in the shape of a letter O.

Meanwhile, Fortenberry was tiring.

"I cast out , uh , In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of pornography. I cast out, in the name of Jesus, the demon of disconnect."

Fortenberry shook his head as though trying to revive himself. He had been at this for a long time. His stamina really was astounding, a testament to his military training.

Afterward, a frightening thought shot through my head. It occurred to me that over the past decades, any number of our prominent political leaders (from Jimmy Carter to Chuck Colson to W himself) had boasted publicly of their born-again experiences, broadcasting to Middle America an understanding of their personal relationships with God. But whereas once these conversions were humble things -- Billy Graham whispering and putting his hand on W's shoulder in Kennebunkport, or even (in the case of Tom DeLay) a flash of recognition while watching a televangelist program -- the modern version might very easily be this completely batshit holy-vomitus/demon-exorcism deal. The thought that any politician could claim this kind of experience and not be immediately disqualified from public service seemed utterly terrifying.

We were called back to chapel, and this time the drill was speaking in tongues. We were asked to come up to the front of the chapel and let a life coach anoint us with oil, hold our heads and speak to us in tongues. Fortenberry instructed us to "just let it out. Just let it out and it'll come out."

He didn't come right out and say, "Just act like you're speaking in tongues." But it was damned close. Once again, Fortenberry greased the process by telling us a story about how he'd once been at a service where folks were speaking in tongues, and he was skeptical, but it had just flown right out of him -- and now it just shoots right out of him, almost on command.

I went to the front. One of the coaches grabbed me by the shoulder and sploshed a big puddle of oil on my forehead. Then he began to speak in tongues:

"Gam-bakakasha. Hoo-raaa-balalakasha, Come on, Matthew, let it out."

American Christians who speak in tongues basically all try to sound like extras from the underworld set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If you want to pull it off and sound like a natural, just imagine you're holding a rubber replica of Harrison Ford's heart in your hands: Umm-harakashaka! Loo-pa-wanneee-rakakakasha, Meester Jones!

But I didn't think of this at the time and just went another route.

"Let it out, Matthew," the coach repeated, clutching my forehead. "Just open your mouth."

I shrugged and rattled off the lyrics to the song "What is Autumn?" by the Russian rock band DDT:

What is autumn? It's the sky The crying sky below your feet. Flying about in puddles are the birds and clouds. Autumn I've not been with you for so long!

It's actually a beautiful song, but with my eyes rolled back in my head and recited in Russian it sounded demonic enough.

"Hmm, very good," my coach said. "Good job, Matthew."

I kept going, on to the next verse. "What is autumn? It's a stone, "

"OK, that's good," the coach said, annoyed, moving on to the next guy.

"It's important that you practice," said Pastor Fortenberry. "It sounds silly, but when you're at home, when you have a little time, just try to let it out. You'll get used to it, and soon you'll be speaking in tongues like nobody's business!"

He then pronounced us baptized in the Holy Spirit and fully qualified now to cast out demons.

He held up his hands in triumph.

"Hallelujah!" he shouted.

The crowd jumped up, and we all threw up our hands.

"Hallelujah!"

He called out Hallelujah! again. We repeated after him. And we repeated after him again. Arms in the air. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

I felt a twinge of recognition from somewhere as I threw my arms up over and over again.

We had graduated.

By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this -- once you've gone this far -- you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.

By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you've gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no "anything else." All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this "our thing," a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that's all.

Adapted from the forthcoming book, "The Great Derangement" by Matt Taibbi. Copyright 2008 by Matt Taibbi. Published by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House Inc. Reprinted with permission. Names of Encounter Weekend participants have been changed to protect their privacy.

Response to readers from Matt Taibbi:

Dear Readers,

I've received a number of letters complaining about the scene in which I saw some "weatherbeaten black folk" whom "I immediately pegged as in-recovery addicts." Perhaps understandably some, minus the context, saw in this a racist attitude. To clarify why I was able to make that judgment:

1) I myself am an in-recovery addict, and as such I generally know one when I see one. I do mention this later in the piece, and in my other writings, but the point isn't made during that specific passage, so I can understand the confusion.

2) I also happened to know, as a member of the church, that the church sought out converts among homeless drug addicts. Most of the churchgoers at Cornerstone were middle-class, healthy, and white. Whenever I saw people who looked like they hadn't eaten a good meal in a year, wore clothes with holes in them, and perhaps additionally were not white, it was logical to make assumptions about how these people and this predominantly white suburban church found each other. I was correct about those people on the bus, incidentally.

Minus this context, I can see how some people reached the conclusions that they did. I apologize for the misunderstanding and certainly don't mean to imply that all black people are drug addicts. That would be outrageous and absurd, given my own situation.

Sincerely

Matt Taibbi

Pastor AIO:
Okay, let us say that I buy into the Humanism project. Here we are, I am a humanist. Hypothetically, that is. I want to make a better world based on Human compassion. My first step I believe is to assess the present situation. How did things get to such a pass? What is it about humans that make them cock up so much? I have already talked about the basic psychological fact that we are walking about as egunguns.

Another trait I notice is the human instinct of distinguishing a certain element of any experience or set of events and imbuing it with greater import than the other elements of the experience. Let me give an example from the psychology of music. I hope we all know what a metronome is. This is a gadget that musicians use to keep in time when they are practicing. It just goes click click click evenly at a steady beat. Now there are things called auditory illusions. An example of one is observed in an experiment where someone is played the even clicking of a metronome and asked to identify the strong beat. In music there are strong beats and weak beats, for example the One is usually the strongest. True enough, everybody that listens to a metronome will hear some of the clicks louder than others. Usually people exposed to western music with it's basic four four structure will hear the strong beat every fourth click.

Like this: ONE two three four ONE two three four ONE two three four.

But the clicks are even, non is louder than the other. Why does the human ear hear one louder than the others. This is an auditory illusion based on the brain imposing structure on something that is essentially musically structureless. The most common example of this is the tick tocking of a clock. Clocks don't go Tick tock. They go tick tick tick. But we hears some as ticks and others as tocks. The effect is created in the brain, it makes the ticking of the clock more musical.
Please bear with me. There is a reason for all this. This argument is going somewhere but it's just taking a while to get there.

My point is that it is a human instinct to impose structure and order on an experience whether or not that event actually has an intrinsic structure or not. It is called making sense of something. It is an active process that the brain does. This leaves us with 3 options when someone is talking to us. first is to get the meaning that the person intends. the second is to get a meaning that however was not the intended meaning. and third is to get no meaning from it at all. But the creation of meaning (or structure) is a spontaneous instinct that might or might not tally with the intended meaning of the person speaking.
Meaning is created, as in the metronome experiment, by the elevation of certain elements of the event to a position of greater import. This distinguishing of some elements from others is at the core of structure creation. or meaning creation. Take for example the events of a man's day. Ask your friend to tell you what happened to him today. Bearing in mind that in the course of the day so many different random events occur and really a day is just a chaos of events, is it not interesting that when your friend tells his story the story is themed. There will be one specific event in the course of the day that will be given greater import than all the other events. This event could be whether he asks his girlfriend to marry him or not. That event is the ONE of the musical beat to which everything now relates and derives its meaning and relevance. All other events are now judged in their relevance to the theme of his story. This is the difference between a story and a recounting of random events. Stories have a theme and meaning and they can engage you while a random recounting of facts will bore you to death.
Now the fact that your friend misses the early bus in the morning has significance/meaning in his story. That means that he will be late to see his girlfriend who might be upset and thus spoil the opportunity for a proposal. The fact that he bumps into another friend who gives him a lift becomes relevant in that it helps him to meet his girlfriend on time. Yet the fact that this other friend wanted to first drop something off at his aunt's house is also relevant because of it's relation to the theme. That could make him late to see his girlfriend.
Once a theme (or what I call the principle) has been established then everything in the course of the day derives it's VALUE from it's relation to the theme. Schopenhauer wrote an interesting essay on this phenomenon that I will seek out and post later.

The point I am trying to make involves these three terms. 1)Meaning. 2)Structure. 3)And Value. They are all instinctively created effects of the brain. Structure is created by elevating one element above all others. Then everything derives it's Meaning and it's Value from it's relationship with the Principle(or theme).

If you have kept reading and have made it thus far then I must congratulate you. But there is more.

'What does all this have to do with my Humanism experiment?', I hear you ask. I am trying to understand human psychology. This instinctive creation of a principle out of any experience is totally arbitrary. What one person hears as the principle (or musically as the strong beat) is not what another person will hear. It thereby follows that the structure created will differ and also the Values perceived will be totally arbitrary too. In other words Meaning and Value are a function of Context. You will share a table of values and meanings with someone that shares the same context as you. If the other persons head is in a different space then you can't. the Yoruba have a proverb: Ija li o de, li orin di owe. This meanings that when something is afoot that is when meaningless ditties become heavy proverbs.

Let me explain. Imagine you have a friend that has done something terrible to you that you are as yet unaware off. In his head he is wracked with guilt. When you meet up and you are in a cheery mood you might start whistling a tune that means absolutely nothing, yet your friend will start trying to decode and make exegesis on the implications of your whistling. You see, due to his head being in a different context from yours your meaningless whistling has become a powerful proverb for him.

Now to arrive at my point. The table of values adopted by a people determines the culture of the people. These values being arbitrary are also different from culture to culture. The other thing about values is that though they are arbitrary they feel absolute. It seems obvious to each person that his values and his ideals are universal. 'well everybody that's sane thinks the way I do, don't they'. Well the answer is no. And also it is inevitable that the interaction of different value codes will result in conflict.
Example. two people with two different mindsets live on a mountain. The mountain is full of diamonds and it is very green full of all sorts of trees and nature. One of the people highly appreciate calm and clean environment while the other's highest good is the making of money. They both want to put the mountain to it's best use. Tell me will there not be conflict. The Money man wants to dig mines and sees the Ecology guy as a nuisance and a retard who does not appreciate the opportunity presented to them. The Ecology guy sees the Money guy as an evil capitalist who wants to destroy the environment. How do we avoid Conflict of this sort in a Humanist world?

Pastor AIO, to be honest, it was really hard to following the thrust of your argument. You seem to go round and round only to settle on the point right on our noses " How do we avoid Conflict of this sort in a Humanist world?". What happened to the terseness you displayed in you other posts?

Allow me to make the following comments:

You seem to be making a fundamental mistake of understanding. You are taking the ideas of humanism in a very presciptive sense, much like a religionist sees their set of laws, rules or commandments as absolutes.

To go from the supernatural world to the naturalistic world is to go from a prescriptive world (with the rules defined by a super-being) to a self-defining world (can't think of a better word). So together as a society, we define what is good for us and our environment using the means of scientific rationalism SR (I use SR here in a very broad sense as to include also aspects of existence that contribute to well-being)

Bear in mind that the challenge you identify is a challenge in any worldview you care to mention - whether you are theistic or non-theistic, you shall have to find a balance between achieving material progress, human well-being and preservation of the environment.

Humanism does not claim to offer a solution to all of human ills, but it clearly recognises that some of the solution being tauted today are ineffective at best and delusionary at worst.

Check out the site: http://reasonworks.com/BS%20Your%20Parents%20Never%20Taught%20You.html

reindeer:
@huxley
just for the records, are you against RELIGION as a whole or just simply against christianity, i hardly see anything from you against any other religion or can that be taken to mean that you are only familiar with christianity and ignorant of other relgious beliefs?
Nevertheless your arguments almost always have cogent points and you are almost making Humanist out of me.just that i don't fancy your being strictly anti-christian, i think your rationality should take you beyond partisanism.
keep the posts coming though,they are quite enlightening.

Yes, you are right. I am not so much against Christianity as am against religion. Basically, I am against any form of superstitious and authoritarian thinking. This elements feature greatly in all religions. Am an advocate for rationalism through science and critical inquiry.

I am more familiar with the Christian tradition, having been brought up in that culture. But my the thrust of my criticism should go equally well to all religions.

I am glad to learn you find my post enlightening and to be sure you will certainly be seeing some more.

imhotep:
Humanism is grossly incorrect.

If humanism was right in holding that man is born to be happy; he would not be born to die.

Having a discussion with you is like talking with an automoton trained to spout out scripted text. For example, you make the statement "Humanism is grossly incorrect." but you provide no arguments for why it is incorrect. IS there anything to be learned from such a statement?

Where are your arguments for advancing these views. Your immersion in the religions culture has taught you to accepts dogma and facts without questioning and argument and this is becoming very obvious in your post.

Please, try and do better. You are letting your side down.

mayorwa:
mightydick,

Your attitude is wrong. It's wrong to be critical to change or help someone. The poor lady needs help not criticism.

And the fact that she messed up with her fiancee does not mean they should break off. That is not necessarily the solution, except the guy insists on sex after the initial act.

Please let us know how to help people without condemning them.

Do you really think that the poster does not know the solution to her own problem? Or is it the case that people of such disposition are incapable of thinking out things for themselves but need to come to a forum such as this to appeal for help?

Too much spoon-feeding of this kind causes the child not to learn to feed herself.

Pastor AIO:
Fair enough but I don't think that anything short of a Lobotomy is going to change basic human characteristics. Perhaps one day Humanism might be developed into something that I could take seriously but at present it has a hell of a long way to go before it can come close to proposing an alternative way of life.

ps. Did you check Storyofstuff.com

Please do because I want to know what you think, especially in view of the fact that you are working for some global financial institutions.

I agree. The most difficult challenge in "human engineering" is changing peoples' minds, but I believe the goals of humanism are achieveable. Just look at how minds have been (and are being) changed about slavery, discrimination on race, gender and sex. The Zeitgeist of enlightened contemporary societies and communities will drive this change.

I also to agree with your opinion about the word "humanist". I am not a great fan of the word, although I subscribe to the philosophy. MAny a would-be humanist shy from describing themselves as such for the same reason.

Yes, I did check out that site. I like it a lot and it puts into context the wasteful of the modern technological age. We got into this mess due to greed and environmental shortsightedness. The irony is that, the so-called underdeveloped world is aspiring the standard of living of the rich world with little attention paid to the side-effects of such development.


One other point I was going to make earlier but forgot is this. You have too appreciate that as humans, we are at the infancy of our development. It is not long ago that we enslaved our neighbours, fought bitters wars with other nations/tribes, left twins out in the wild to die, practised human sacrifices, hunted other animals to extinction, etc, etc. As we develop better understanding of ourselves, these hideous acts are being consigned into history. As Christopher Hitchens would say, "We are still animals with large adrenal gland"

Pastor AIO:
Hi Huxley, I was going to take my time and properly respond to your above posts but it might take some time for me to compose myself properly so I'll just go ahead and give a cursory explanation of what I think and may the spirit guide me, as always.
First the basis of my saying that it is baseless and delusional is because based on my understanding of human psychology and motivations, compassion is but one of our faculties and one that does not play a big part in the character of most adults. Please excuse the Vitriol. I do have a loathing for ideologies that claim to be panaceas of all human ills and yet do not have any solid basis or foundation. This includes religious ideologies as well as secular ones. However I admit that I probably should have responded less aggressive afterall I do like you and I very much appreciate a lot of your posts and I've certainly learnt a lot from reading your posts and following your links.

Now you might say that it is my christian indoctrination that leads me to believe that wickedness in at the very core of man's being, but this is a belief that has been constantly demonstrated and still is being demonstrated before my eyes every day when I walk the streets. Perhaps your experience is different but me I don see with my koro koro eye say man no be better creature. And the last thing in the world that I want to subscribe to is an ideology based on Human-ism. You might as well called it Evil-ism.
As regards that stuff about technology, I don't see what difference that makes. What would you rather face? A caveman with a club or A cave man with a kalashnikov rifle. Oh yeah! there is no difference between that grunting growling caveman and modern man. There hasn't been much evolution since then and it is the same brain (go check the fossil records). Me, I don't think that learning technology is going to change the basic nature of man.

There are many other points that you are making that I don't agree with but I won't address because I want this to be as brief as possible.
Humanism proposes a type of human society does it not? There is nothing in humanism that suggests (from what I can tell) that a proper appraisal of humans and their motivations has been made. Let me give you an example. One key element of the human psyche is the need to achieve distinction and be regarded as different. We all need attention. Even if it is only from a few select people ( our closest friends and family), we need to know that other people are thinking of us and have us in their regard. There is even a special regard that we expect from at least one person (usually our spouse). When a child realises that he can get more of mom's good regard by doing something clever this motivates him to do more and more clever things. Everybody seeks to distinguish themselves in one way or the other in order to get some good regard from the public. When people fail to achieve this good regard the motivation gets twisted. The next best thing is Bad regard. They do something wicked just to get people's attention. I don't know if you've ever had a younger sibling. If you remember around that adolescent period of their lives they start trying harder and harder to be noticed by adults. They want to hang out with you and sit with you and your friends. The worst thing you could do at that point is to tell them to get lost. That is asking for trouble. "Ehn hen! Me! Get Lost!!" If you recall it is at the point that your little brother turns into the most obnoxious beast you can ever imagine. And you won't ever hear the end of it. You would have saved yourself a lot of trouble if you had just invited him out one night with your friends and allowed him to sit with you till he got bored and retired back to riding his bicycle. This urge to seek regard of any sort is often seen in some criminals who are often concerned with what impact their crimes made on society and if they made it onto the news. Often they show signs of pride with this occurs. All these people ever wanted was to be noticed and respected and as they realised that they couldn't get any good regard they went for the next best thing.
Now the other thing about regard is that from childhood you learn that certain aspects will get you good attention and others will draw bad attention such as a flogging. Since we all want to be held in high regard we learn very quickly to hide those aspects of our being that draw negative attention or even no attention at all and to display those things that draw a high regard. This means that falsity and mendacity have to be introduced into the human psyche at a very early stage. Psychologists have termed this display the Persona. I call it the egungun, or rather the Masquerade. We are all masquerading (don't deny it!). This mask and such devices that we use to attain social status is a great obstacle in spiritual development, but that is another subject. The real point that I want to make is that Humanity is by necessity Mendacious and rotten. This is a more accurate appraisal of a human being and his ability to create a fair and just society on the basis of the qualities found in him.
Perhaps I'm just stupid then. Ah, you must be talking about the fact that we are much happier than we were in the past and that the air is much cleaner and we have more leisure time. NOT!!! those that have leisure time are starving because of it. A thousand and one technological inventions are not going to change anything. If a country(say the EC in the 1970s and 1980s) produce any surplus they just hoard it while people starve or they throw it away. Remember the milk lakes and the food mountains. Plus when a scientists invents a better crop or whatever, he is not thinking let me do this so that I can feed the world. His thoughts are usually much darker. But I don't want to make a sweeping indictment of all scientists, maybe there are some altruistic ones but most of them are thinking of the money they will make if they can find a cure for something or the nobel prize etc. And if the people who need the drug most cannot afford it then that is tough blockis. Please check out this site:http://www.storyofstuff.com/ I would like to know what you think.

The fact is the Power corrupts and Absolute Power corrupts Absolutely. Not to mention money being the root of all evil. Combine these two and you have double wahala for deady body. Andy owner of deady body.
Fact is Religion is powerful for changing lives. The Romans noticed that and that is why they used it to rebuild their empire. However coming into contact with that money and power has a detrimental effect on anything and everything religion included. And Science included. Yes, science included.

Most scientific surveys are costly. Experiments costs millions sometimes billions. The days of an eccentric scientist discovering cures in his bicycle shed as long gone. Scientists need funding. He who pays the piper calls the tune. A scientist can never make a report that a drug has harmful side effects when the person paying for his research is the pharmaceutical company producing the drug. Today scientific discoveries are too influenced by the concerns of multinationals, Political correctness, and making sure not to step on the toes of big political powers. Like I said, anything that comes into contact with power and money gets twisted. But to be really honest, It is anything that comes into contact with humanity in this wicked base state that is corrupted even the Power and the Money.

Like I said, technology does not answer all of human problems. The tools we have are science, technology, philosophy.

Would these feed into the humanist agenda. You bet.

On the question of the basic human need of self-esteem, yes, the science of psychology would identify such need and develop rational ways of deal with this need. In fact, there is a body of work by the eminent psychologist Albert Ellis, that deals with such things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Ellis).

Worth noting that science by itself has no agenda, but the practice of science can be perverted by all sort of egotistical, political, percuniary agendas.

I was so taken aback my your first post that I had to make this strong appeal to your "rational and sensible" side. You are one of the most level-headed people on this forum but the tenor of your first response really surprised me. I must say, my estimation of you went down a bit (that is not to say I am something ) but you have restored it.

My greatest fear was that, if I could not reason things out with you, then I stood no chance of reaching the sort of audience I want to reach.

Thankx for the post. You have got some good points. Was a bit long and have just finished reading it. Will respond in a moment.

imhotep:
And why the crazy Nazi's were defeated. Such a civilization will not be allowed to subsist.

If euthanasia was good enough for JC, why is it not good for mere mortals?

imhotep:
Yes, when He chooses to unite Himself with mortal men.

That explains why he was euthanased.

imhotep:
Matthew 25 : 42-43 =>

43 I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, [b]sick [/b]and in prison and you did not visit

Can a god become sick?

imhotep:
The British developed fast trains, so did the Americans, and Chinese. We are not impressed by the venal Nazis.

Oh my dear. The British, Americans and Chinese have done a naughty act as they have implemented a Nazi idea. I must not use a British train again, oh my dear.

imhotep:
They also developed jackets for fighter pilots who might be shot down in frozen waters -> by freezing many human 'lab rats' to death in the process of testing the effectiveness of the jackets
You can say this because none of your relatives were murdered by them.
Yes, like killing all the mentally retarded -> for they know not what they do!!!

Should trains be made to run on time? Or no, no, no. That was a Nazi idea and objective.