There are so many lives negatively impacted by religious training! I was recalling today how many well-known, talented people’s lives were destroyed and/or cut short by their religious backgrounds.

Karen Carpenter was raised by religious parents who apparently instilled an unrealistic prudery in their offspring. This became apparent when precious Karen, while recording Paul Simon’s song, “Still Crazy After All These Years”, just couldn’t bring herself to sing the words, “crapped out”. She reportedly then asked Mr. Simon for permission to change the song's lyric to “crashed out”. I mean, really! Result of religion’s tampering with her psyche: Karen slowly killed herself by way of a severe eating disorder.

Then we have the example of Whitney Houston, whose hyper-religiou, ignorant, narrow minded mother said in an interview that she would “not have tolerated it” if Whitney were a lesbian (which she very well may have been, given the rumor that she was romantically involved with her personal assistant, Robyn Crawford). Result of religion’s tampering with her psyche: Whitney descended into an abusive relationship with a man, quickly got addicted to drugs, and effectively managed to slowly kill herself, just like Karen before her.

These are just two high profile examples of how religion warps young people and causes them to deviate from their authentic selves and commit self-destructive acts.
In the regular population, suicide is now the second leading cause of death among people aged ten to twenty-four, with LGBTQ young people five times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual counterparts. The main reason for these astronomical rates of self-destructiveness among our young: religious training and the bullying that results from it.

I therefore bristle at the suggestion that we “respect” someone’s religious beliefs. I cannot and will not respect anyone who is willfully ignorant, irrational and cruelly judgmental. I’ve recently lost six religious “friends” because I finally had the guts to tell them they’ve abdicated reason and, as a result, are complicit in much of the bigotry, division, denial of reality and the deadly conflicts that plague humanity.