Evangelicals are a big part of the problem.

[hunter]

68. All the door-to-door religious folks have quit coming to my house.

I'm always friendly, and I never point out exactly where they've got it wrong, but eventually they decide I'm the devil.

I don't have any degree in Divinity Studies but I did grow up in a family where bloody religious warfare was the favorite sport. It was like an expanded version of the Irish Troubles and every European religious war and persecution.

Christmas and Easter Holidays would always be ruined by fighting, yet year after year everyone kept coming back for more.

I'm still a little PTSD about Christmas.

My mom was a Jehovah's Witness when I was a kid until they kicked her out. As a young woman my mom had dreamed of being a nun, a creature of purity, until she met a leering, smoking, hard drinking Priest who made her very uncomfortable. Then she went to work in Hollywood for a prominent Catholic, met my dad on a television set, and they got married and had lots of babies.

She might have kept working when she got married and pregnant, but that was socially unacceptable in the 'fifties. She was pressured to be a housewife. That's when the Witnesses hooked her.

The only religion anyone in my Wild West family agreed upon was that they were not Mormon.

After my mom was booted out of the Witnesses we were Quaker. That also fit in with my heritage. A few of my ancestors fled Europe as Pacifists.

As a young adult I suffered a David Lynch version of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." Fortunately we broke up before any wedding when I jumped out of her moving car after we'd committed a felony assault rescuing her girlfriend. She later married this girlfriend. I know she loved me in a way, but I was also the guy who proved to her young uncertain self and her parents she wasn't a lesbian. I never introduced her to my parents, maybe because they would have told me that.

I'm generally a Catholic heretic following after some of my ancestors. My wife and I had a Big Catholic Wedding and we raised our kids Catholic in the liberal intellectual tradition.