I feel your pain!

That was my first thought when I ran across the Recovering Religionists website this past weekend while doing some research online.

Their home page announces:

We are Recovering Religionists™, people who have given religion our best shot but just can’t bring ourselves to believe in virgin births, resurrections, 2,000 year old miracles and the “power of prayer.” We are recovering Baptists, Mormons, Catholics, Jehovah Wittnesses [sic], Hindus, Moslems, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and more.

Just start clicking on the site's various links and you'll embark on a journey into a strange and sad universe of people who were involved in some form of religion at one time or another and later emerged from the experience embittered, disillusioned, and (very often) alone.

And yes, one of their core tenets is that religion is harmful to mental health. They say it renders us incapable of being good for its own sake (because religious people, they say, are good not just because they want to be good, but because they want to avoid the punishment for being bad). Religious people are delusional (they tend to see and hear things that other people don't see or hear) and their IQs are generally lower than their non-religious counterparts. Religion and its institutions seeks to control gullible people through guilt and manipulation. These are some of the things they say about religion.

Would it surprise you if I said they're not entirely wrong?

For instance, they say that religion is a tool for manipulation. All you have to do is take a look at church history and you'll see that religious authorities (both Catholic and Protestant) have, at various times, manipulated the masses for their own, selfish purposes. In Catholicism, for instance, when finances were tight in medieval times, "indulgences" became a common fund-raiser. Although the Catholic Church never officially said that people could pay money to be forgiven of their sins, that is nonetheless how many Catholics came to view indulgences. Pope Leo X was quick to capitalize on this trend and encouraged the selling of indulgences all across Europe to pay for a building project. A monk named Tetzel shamelessly marketed indulgences in Germany with the skill of a snake-oil salesman. The abuse of indulgences was one of Luther's main objections in his 95 Theses, in fact, and helped provide momentum for the Protestant Reformation. Even the Vatican eventually recognized the problem (better late than never, I suppose) and Pope Paul VI revised the Church's teaching in 1967 to downgrade indulgences and make them purely voluntary (Indulgentiarum Doctrina [AAS 59, 1967, nn. 5-24]).

Even today, Protestantism has its own religious con artists. Just flip through the religious channels on TV and you'll see any number of slick operators plying their trade and hawking everything from anointing oil to Jordan River water to prayer cloths. Some of them even promise a hundred-fold return on any amount of money you contribute (that is, if you send one of these guys a dollar, you'll get $100 back—such a deal!). It's pure manipulation and religious hucksterism at its worst.

No wonder some people think religion is bogus. If all you've ever been exposed to is this this superficial, self-absorbed, commercialized, slick-talking version of what passes for "Christianity" in our culture, then one logical conclusion (albeit not the only one) is that the whole thing is a fraud.

What these folks are missing, however, is that true Christianity is not so much a religion as it is a relationship. Religions are man-made—and yes, evil people have used them to manipulate the masses—or worse.

But religious abuses are not God's doing. It's sad that He often gets blamed for things He didn't do. How ironic that people end up blaming the existence of evil (and its consequences) on the most benevolent, loving, and just Being in the entire universe: Elohim (God).

It shows how inventive and self-deceived human beings can be. If we can't find a religion that suits our fancy, we just concoct one. Seriously, now—it's not that hard to do. L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer back in the 1950s, did it. He created Scientology, almost instantly gained a following of enthusiastic followers, and today it claims to be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world (although some experts insist that the list of ex-Scientologists is almost as long as the list of active Scientologists). Current followers of Scientology reportedly include Hollywood personalities like Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Anne Archer. Greta Van Susteren of Fox News is also a practitioner, along with Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley (ex-wife and daughter of the late Elvis Presley), among others.

Again, religions per se are human inventions. But the Christian faith is something entirely different. It breaks all of the rules of religion-making because on almost every meaningful level, it says just the opposite of what we instinctively want to hear. For instance, it begins by telling us that we're sinners in need of redemption. We would much rather hear something to the effect that we're fundamentally okay and just need some fine-tuning or a new perspective. Then it tells us we must die (to self) before we can truly live (Gal. 2:20). Who wants to die? And worst of all, it says the Bible is the true and authoritative Word of God and anything that contradicts it is false. How narrow-minded! Most people are more comfortable with a more enlightened, inclusive approach.

The Bible's message is radical. It goes against the grain of many of our natural inclinations and preferences. But the reason it works is that it addresses our main problem: the God-shaped vacuum in our hearts (to borrow Pascal's phrase). It explains how we can connect with the Creator of the Universe in a personal and meaningful way through His Son, Jesus the Messiah:

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved (John 3:16-17).

And guess what? Once you get a good, healthy dose of the real thing, you'll never have to "recover" from it.

I promise.