Reddit mentions of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

One of my wife's books (I haven't read it) might be of interest to you.

Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

Oh, man, GEB changed my life in a way that many people might not appreciate. Here's a copy of a post I made before

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Whereas my upbringing was not like yours (my parents raised me to be open-minded and inquisitive), my sunday-school teachings sunk into me in a way that made me a true believer, without my own knowledge of it.

In many ways, it was like Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God.

I just knew it was right, and I would read into things... the Gulf War, to me, was the first sign of apocalypse, that kind of stuff.

I told my girlfriend how I got out of it, and she wanted me to share this with people:
I had gone through some truly horrible experiences in college and dropped out for a few years. The whole time, I wondered, "why, God, I have been a good person, why is this happening to me, I have done everything you have wanted me to do."

The problem of theodicy... why do bad things happen to good people?

I started searching for answers, and eventually came across Godel, Escher, Bach. In digesting and reasoning through it, I realized the following:

Within any formal system sufficient for arithmetic, there are truths that cannot be proved within that system, that are nonetheless still true.

I had a rigid belief system that I felt was analogous to a formal system, in its rigidity, requirements for self-consistency, and stricture. I could finally acknowledge it, but couldn't, for the life of me, get out of it. It may not have been formal system in the strictest sense, but it had many of the same properties.

However, I also knew I was missing something, some higher truth that I couldn't perceive within the system. I realized I needed to Jump Out Of the System.

That is to say, I knew there was a larger truth (or truths) out there, beyond my reach, but I could not grasp it within the language of the system I was stuck in. That did not deny the greater truth of that "out there", but rather highlighted my limitations due to the strictures of my belief system at the time. Nonetheless, my rational abilities let me take the leap of reasoned faith that my instincts couldn't allow.

So I took the leap, around 1998, methinks. Explored alternate belief systems, altered states of consciousness, and have come to see that small opening outside my boundaries in much the same way as the simple jump the robot Moe does when he first walks outside the lines in the movie Wall-E.

I really do feel for people indoctrinated in any belief system that claims exclusive privilege on truth. As Shakespeare writes in Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt in your philosophy.

Shaeffer's book, "Crazy For God" is a MUST read:


http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-God-Helped-Religious-Almost/dp/0786718919


If that book is tl;dr, he deals with a lot of the same material in the very short and entertaining book called "Portofino":


http://www.amazon.com/Portofino-Novel-Calvin-Becker-Trilogy/dp/0786713755/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253216591&sr=1-1

Seriously; this guy is awesome.