Sunday, September 09, 2007

Why I'm Not Attached to Any Religion

Why I’m Not Attached to Any Religion

By Kerry Walker—This June 27, 2005

Okay, as much as I would rather not have to do this, I will explain my feelings about religion, or “Christianity”. The difficulty is going to be for you to listen to what I have to say. The power of conditioning is very strong, and let me say that I may be wrong and you may be right, so just listen and then maybe you can accept me for what I am. I can promise you that I will accept you for what you are, as long as you bring no harm to me or to others. To listen we must put aside our conditioning, our prejudice, our daily activities and just listen. This is going to be one of our difficulties.

I was brought up in a “Christian” family that was loving but very dysfunctional, and my uncle was a preacher and his wife, my Aunt, was very fanatically religious. My family life would involve going to church and to an occasional bible study, quoting scriptures, getting preached to, and all the rest of it. My father was a member of a Masonic Lodge, and he was a good man, but he had a very difficult time coping, and I believe this was because of the trauma of WWII and the injuries he suffered in that war, both physical and psychological, fighting for our freedom.

My dad stayed sick most of his life and had some bad luck with hospitals and doctors. He caught staff infection at Grady Hospital after being wheeled out into the hall during surgery in order for a trauma patient to come in, and later in life he underwent seven surgeries in failed attempts to reconnect his intestines after surgically removing part of them. They finally succeeded hooking him back up and got things working again.

My father taught me to question things, to doubt, in order to come upon the truth. My mother would say she was a Christian only if asked, but she would never quote scripture or impose her beliefs on anyone. My mother is probably the perfect example of a “deeply religious” woman, because I have never known her to lie, and she will take the food out of her mouth to feed a hungry stranger, and she has never brought harm to anyone, and she would never turn her back on someone just because they were not “Christian.” My mother is the most honest and sweetest human being I have ever known and she too came to understand me and to accept my concept of this mysterious and unknown cosmic energy behind creation.

When I became a “Jesus Freak” in my early teens, no one seemed to understand me, and I was really in my own little world. I did not make a big deal of it and I remember walking barefooted down the road and looking down at my feet and I really believed that I was looking at the feet of man like Jesus. I tried to accept people that seemed a bit odd and I would befriend people that others did not seem to like.

When my parents moved across the river into another county, they yanked me out of North Springs High and put me in Wheeler High. I was on the Gymnastic teem at North Springs High and it was a “high class” school, and Wheeler was…, well it was like being in the early 60’s, it was full of a bunch of hell raising rednecks, and there was no Gymnastic team. When my parents jumped the river, my older brother was a senior and I was in tenth grade, so they used a neighbor’s address to keep him at North Springs for his senior year. I was very resentful to my parents for doing this to me (although, of course, they had really done nothing to me). I got involved with smoking dope and then the use of other drugs, on rare occasions, crept into my life. My life was like a roller coaster ride of being “saved” and “clean as a whistle”, to being “saved” and indulging in drugs, and at times drinking alcoholic beverages, usually in excess. My relationship with “God” and drugs began to go hand and hand. I loved to ride my dirt bikes and my street bikes and I loved to cliff dive and water ski, and I did many adventurous things in my life.

One time, when I was seventeen, a friend and I were riding our motorcycles down by the Chattahoochee River on a Sunday afternoon, and we parked our bikes in this area where a huge sewer line was being put in. We looked at this large ditch and climbed around on the dirt a little while, and then we walked down by the river’s edge and skipped rocks across the water. When we walked back to get our motorcycles, a man had drove up and as we got closer we realized he had a gun pointed at us. He told us that we had done thousands of dollars worth of damage to the heavy equipment. We were scared to death and told him that we had not touched this machinery and had not been there long. We were arrested for damaging this heavy equipment and my father fought hard and spent thousands of dollars to fly the owner of this company from California and to finally get the charges dropped.

This was my first introduction to how easily a person could be arrested for something they did not do. This unpleasant experience of being arrested falsely came about a few more times during the early years of my life. Then I was arrested when I was nineteen and just before the start of my second year in college for a small amount of marijuana found in my friends car in New Jersey. At this time any amount of marijuana, even a seed, was a felony. The good news was my date that night was the daughter of the mayor of the town, and they eventually dropped her charges, so they had to drop ours. (We were told that the arrest would not be on our record, but this was a big lie.)

It was not until I was 22 years old and I had just graduated from college with a degree in Architectural Engineering, that my friends bought a couple of kegs of beer and gave me a graduation party at my apartment. I had been offered cocaine many times over the last few years, but I always refused to do it. My family came a watched me graduate and then I went to my party around 2:00 o’clock and started drinking beer and smoking pot. Sometime around midnight a friend of mine that had offered me cocaine many times over the years, came over. I was drunk and probably in a near blackout and somehow I ended up in the bathroom with this guy and I did my first line of cocaine. I remember coming out of this drunken stupor and into a state of clarity and boy did I feel good. This was the beginning of a long love affair that turned into a very serious addiction. During the onset of my addiction I was constantly with my belief in bible and the “Christian God” and my life revolved around this drug and the beliefs of the Christian religion.

Then one day I borrowed my next door neighbor’s living bible and began to read it from the very beginning. As I read through the bible I began to question it and I began to realize that this book might not be true. Because of my drug use and the confusion in my life, I would accept this religion at one point and then at another I would question it or reject it entirely. It was a very scary ride. In fact, it was often after a cocaine binge that I would believe that I became more conscious of God and would try to get even closer to God.

I continued on this roller coaster ride until the beginning of 1984, when I finally decided that I needed to change my ways. I went straight and started taking very good care of my girlfriend and myself. We got a house together I began remodeling this house and fixing it up. We became vegetarians and she worked at Life Grocery, a health food store, and I ran a successful home improvement business.

I was clean for over a year and a half and then an old acquaintance stopped by while I was working on a set of drawings for a custom home for my older brother. I had run into this old acquaintance about a week earlier while I was in town paying some bills. This guy had ripped me off of a thousand bucks about fifteen years earlier and I had traveled to Montezuma, Georgia, way back then in an unsuccessful attempt to collect my money. I told him that I was busy and that I did not drink or do drugs, and that I was not involved with them anymore, and I ran him off. He was persistent about talking to me, and on another visit he mentioned setting me straight on this money he owed me. I declined to talk with him further, and he left.

He began to come by our house almost every week and he continued to bring beer by and to force his way into my life. After having an argument with my girlfriend and finding out that she was having an affair, and after she had left in anger, he came by once again. I finally broke down and let him into my home, and we talked and he mentioned about getting me the thousand dollars he owed me and a lot more money on top of that. I ended up having a beer with him, and this led to another beer and then we smoked some pot and finally he brought out some cocaine and we did several lines of coke. Before he left I told him that I would like to buy some coke. He explained to me that he had brought that with him from South Georgia and that he did not know where to get it around this area, and that is what he wanted to talk to me about. I told him that I have not fooled with drugs in a long time and that I had no idea where to get them.

This marry-go-round went on for several months and I had gotten back into my addiction. My girlfriend left me and I continue down a spiraling hill of addiction and confusion. This fellow, Jerry Law (and this is his real name), had asked me again and again to get him large amount of drugs. I suspected that he was an informant and I even asked him if he was a nark, and his uneasy response to this question made me even more suspicious.

I finally broke down and got him a measly half a gram of coke and met him and another fellow at Applebee’s for the sell. After this he continued to bug me for large amount of drugs. He wanted me to get him fifty pounds of pot and some kilos of cocaine. After more weeks went by, I finally told him that I would get him a half of an ounce of coke if he would give me the thousand dollars up front to go get it. I knew that if this buddy of his was a narcotics agent he would not front me the money. We met several times after agreeing to this, but they refused to give me the money to go get the drugs. Finally, after I refused to do the deal any other way, this narcotics agent fronted me the money, and gave me $1000.00 to go buy drugs. I got him a half of an ounce and stomped on it really hard, to get a bunch of coke for me to do. (For those that have never been involved with drugs this simply means that I took out about half the cocaine and replaced it with an inert white powder.)

After a binge on the nearly a quarter ounce of cocaine I took from them, and nearly dying, I never had anything else to do with this guy again. I attempted to stay straight but I continued to relapse, and after loosing my home and most everything else, I was arrested about six months latter while staying at a friend’s house in another town. Right after my arrest, they wanted me to work with them and they were going to go easy on me, but I refused to do it and took the consequences. I ended up taking a plea in 1988 and getting a 10 serve 5 do 3 sentence. I did 6 months 11 days of confined hell and I was placed in a cell with “lifers” and one attempted to kill me when I let everyone know that I was getting out on early release. I later learned that this was a big mistake in a lifer prison.

After my release I was not the same person that I was before. I was very confused and I would have nightmares and anxiety attacks. I would stay clean for long periods of time and then I would drink again and sometime use cocaine. When I was called in for urine test, I would drink mass quantities of water to flush my system. It was something I did on several occasions. The lab test came back and they indicated that my system had been flushed. My parole officer warned me about this and she told me in no uncertain terms that I better not have another test come back like these.

The last drinking and drug binge I went on a bizarre event occurred. I started seeing myself as if I was looking down from above. It was the strangest thing to experience. I then saw how messed up my life had become and when I lay down early that morning it was like a bolt of lightening hitting me that this energy behind all creation was real, but it had nothing to do with any religion!

The next day, the 12th day of April 1992, I went to my father and told him about my experience and that I needed help and wanted to go to treatment. Having heard this treatment crap several times before and having me always change my mind, he blew up and began yelling at me and swinging his arms as he came at me. My father was a high-strung diabetic, and I began blocking his swings and my open hand hit him on the side of his face by his left eye. We continued to argue as I began leaving and my father followed me outside. We both are very loud when we yell and the next-door neighbor heard us yelling and called the police. My father, being a twice a day, or more, insulin dependant diabetic, had very tender skin, and I had made a small mark on the side of his face. This was enough for me to go to jail, even though my mother cried and begged the officer not to take me.

I ended up going to jail for several weeks and then to a military style boot camp of Zell Miller’s and then to a 21-day treatment center. I got out of this treatment center with a bag of cloths to my name, and I went from there working landscaping for a buddy of mine long enough to buy a vehicle. From there I went on to build a home improvement business and to stay sober for the rest of my life. I worked through all twelve steps of the Twelve Step program. I met a few others that had gotten rid of this punishing and vengeful God and who had found a loving energy as I had found. The neatest thing about what happened to me was that this insight that I had about this energy behind creation, never left me and I decided to read the bible again from cover to cover. I spent years doing scriptural analysis and uncovered contradictions in scripture and between the books of the bible. From there I realized what this creative energy was relating to me was true. This book was NOT the word of God and I would have to be a little bit odd and a little bit stupid to believe it was!

I then studied the bible like I had never done before. I did in depth scriptural analysis and wrote down detailed accounts of all kinds of blatant contradictions in scripture and in the books of the bible. I studied six different translations of the bible and wrote down the many contradictions between them. I realized that this energy behind all creation was outside of all this thought created and invented nonsense, and that this creative energy had made this very clear to me.

I saw how people that believed in this “religion” were often confused and unwilling to stand up for the truth, and were very fast to judge others. I saw how “religion” was destroying mankind and this marvelous earth and how those with “religion” were so superficial and fed off the misfortunes of others, and often claiming that everything was God’s will. I saw how these people with “religion” could never agree on anything and were so caught up in a world of their own making, and in a world in their own minds.

There’s no one on this earth that wishes the bible was the literal word of God and that this religion were true more than I do, after what I have been through, but unfortunately it is not. Over the years I have seen and studied how the mind becomes conditioned and how this conditioning is so difficult to understand. In fact there is no such thing as a completely unconditioned mind. There is only the mind that has come to understand conditioning, and can, for the most part, go beyond it.

I have had so much harm brought to me by “Christians”, and the oddest thing is that the legal system we have in place today has evolved from and is run by these Corporate “Christians”. It is a mutation of the very system, and a product of the very religion that we hoped to leave behind when we came to this new world. The even more bizarre aspect of all this is the fact that those that fight the wrongs in this Christian run system are also professed Christians. It is Christians against Christians! And even more bizarre than that is the fact that anytime you point out any discrepancy from honesty or integrity in those that make up both sides of this fight, the other side will simply say, “Well they’re not really a Christian.” Then when you point out this to the other side the answer is redundant and again the statement, “Well they’re not really a Christian.” My question is, who really is a Christian?!

The simple fact is that most so-called Christians only want harm to come to me or they will justify the harm that I am brought to bear if I do not believe and accept this bizarre religion just as they do.

Judge for yourself if belief has made you a threat to everything that is non-essential and if you accept and love others unconditionally. If it has done this, then you are a deeply religious person, and that is what our creator expects us to be. There is nothing in the Old English translation that says anything about being a “Christian”--- and Jesus was not a “Christian”. Of course the reality is that Jesus, as depicted in religion, never exised.

Our founding fathers were not Christians, but were, for the most part, Deist, and they believed in a Creator and not in “religion”. The Declaration of Independence makes it clear that our Creator endowed us with natural rights.

My God, why don’t you people study what Christianity has really done to mankind! Open your hearts to the truth, because it is this truth that will set you free.

Look at what we did to the natives and the American Indians! According to the bible Jesus tells us to be as harmless as doves but as wise as serpents. Yet most “Christians” will refuse to look at anything that questions the validity of their belief. Contempt prior to investigation is the highest form of ignorance! What happened to this open mind?!

I accept everything in the world to be perfect just the way it is. This allows me to face the reality of the wrongs directly and not to escape from “what is”. I also accept everyone for what they are, and that includes you. Many have told me just to “act like I am a Christian and play the game”; but I refuse in the name of truth to do that. I will not lie just to have you accept me, just like I will not lie and admit to something I did not do just to get two years of probation instead of a possible twenty-year sentence, or more for a crime I did not commit. Where I was the victim!

That’s right. I was the victim of a violent crime and then I was arrested as the perpetrator! And some crooked cop named Preston Peavy commits felony crimes in every attempt to manufacture my guilt and others officers cover for their own! It’s like a band of thieves! What kind of country is this?!

All I ask of you is to accept me for what I am, and not to impose the very belief system on me that I am convinced has created the neurotic and confused society we live in today. Some eighty percent of the people in the legal system are so-called “Christians,” and these are the very people that are bringing this nightmare to me and to your loved ones. This is a fact whether you accept it or not. Christians can bring harm to others or do anything, because they can justify their wrongs because they are “not perfect” and they are “forgiven”, and Jesus died for their sins!!

I wish people could see the evil of religion and how it brings about separation and not brotherhood. If I say that I am a Christian, have I not separated myself from the non-Christians? All religions are based on separation, though they may preach brotherhood. And as soon as a “Christian” finds out where I stand, they want nothing more to do with me. How is this different for the Islam’s and their cynical beliefs?! Where is the love and compassion in this?!

In fact the nightmare I am going through now has it basis in the fact that this woman told Investigator Massey that I did not believe in the bible, and he even asked if I was “atheist”, and I have this on tape (and now in a transcript)! So the entire legal community and the sheriff’s department were out to destroy the “atheist” that had brought harm to the so-called “Christian girl”! When, in truth, it was the “Christian girl” who had brutally beaten the “Deist” and now the State of Georgia is following in her footsteps! Thomas Paine suffered a similar tragedy because he questioned the divinity of Christianity, and thus he was labeled an atheist and destroyed by the ruthlessness of misinformed Christians. The pages of history have been stained blood red in the name of religion!!

Why are we so afraid to look into history and into the truth about religion and the neurosis and even psychosis it has brought to our world? I have studied with an open mind everything there is to learn about religion. Belief is a denial of truth— belief hinders truth. The man who has separated himself from the world of the homemade and the world of reality, is a man with none of these bizarre beliefs.

Truth is a pathless land, and cannot be approached by any path whatsoever. The truth is we are human beings, and not one of us is perfect and we are all fallible and we all have made mistakes and will continue to make mistakes. But why don’t we die to our little mistakes and to the trivial mistakes of others and get on with our lives?! Every minute of our life is precious, so why do we carry over the stupid mistakes of the past and hold them in memory?

The simple truth is that thought has created and invented all the religions throughout the world, and this energy behind creation is unknown and mysterious, and has nothing to do with what thought had conditioned our minds to think. Your effort to be free through the stranglehold of religion will never bring you freedom. It is only when we get past the conditioning of religion that we can absolve the self completely and become part of the very energy that created us. This energy is unknown, and the name is not the thing—the description is not the described.

I have learned how important it is to live like we are dying. It’s like putting our hands together in prayer, and one hand is life and the other is death, and life walks with death. It has been written, “I say unto you, there are none righteous, no not one, except he who has died to self.” If we could all understand this, there would be no war and this world would be a nice place to live. Living a life of truth and goodness and walking with this energy behind all creation has nothing to do with the religions that have been created by man. This energy behind all creation has not written any books.

I have done the most miraculous things in my life after getting rid of religion, and I have lived a life of integrity, with goodness, and respect for others. I designed a physically constructed a beautiful home from the ground up on the most awesome lot in a place that I have loved all my life, and I have helped others along the way. I have gone on to achieve difficult ratings with the United States Parachute Association, and have earned my Accelerated Freefall Instructor and my Pro-demonstration Ratings.

I lost my home and everything else, and had to move into a shed on my property in order fight this battle that should have never been waged. The insanity of this tragedy that ruined my life should tell us that something is wrong. But nothing is done! Most people are too fearful of their own government to stand up against the injustices they often bring to good people. Others are too indifferent to even care.

Some people just live a life of goodness, and my dear sweet, and talented mother is one of those people. The District Attorney, Garry Moss, and all those involved in this nightmare, should realize what they are doing to my mother. My mother has Lupus and this stress is killing her! You people are killing one of the sweetest, honest, and most gentle “Christian” women that ever lived!

The deeply religious are those with goodness and love. Without goodness and love we are not educated human beings, and with love anything is possible.

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