I think maybe I'm just stupid. I'm slow. It took me a long time. I had to go thru everything. I was trying to make it work. But it didn't work. Religion doesn't work. I don't know how some people believe in it. That always fascinated me. What makes them tick
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(1) I confess here that I used to associate with Jehovah's Witnesses at the age of 18. It was only for several months, maybe five. I was on the verge of being baptized. My whole family, together with my relatives, opposed my faith and stopped me.
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(2) I realized that if I wanted to pursue my faith, I would have to abandon my whole family. I couldn't have done that. I didn't want my little brother and sister to suffer on account of me after I left the rest of my family. So I gave up on my faith.
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(3) Then I went into existentialism. As I grew older, I attempted to get back to my old faith but I couldn't. I gradually realized that when I pursued Christian faith at that time when I was 18, it was not that I truly believed in God or any other part of Christianity.
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(4) I pursued Christianity precisely because the Jehovah's Witnesses, at least back in the 1970s, strongly believed that the world would come to an end very, very soon, perhaps several years from then. That news brought me to ecstasy.
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I make another confession: at least back when I was in my high teens, I was the kind of guy that never hesitated to die as a martyr, just like a kamikaze soldier who invaded the Pearl Harbor or as one of the hizbollah or any extremist or a terrorist.
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Wow. What a contrast. When I was in my high teens, all I wanted to do was get stoned & have sex with hippy girls. Haha. I had no desire to die & did not believe in any religion.
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I wish I had had even the slightest share of the joy of sex and drugs like you or like Jack Kerouac. I was much too strict to myself, exactly like the most extreme kind of Buddhist bonze or Christian monk from the Middle Ages.
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I partied like a mofo when I finally got out & away from my family. There were hippy chicks still around & I fell in with them with ease as I was a beatnik/bohemian if ever there was one. The drugs were cool. But alcohol would make me self destructive.
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But that was only because I was binge drinking. Once I learned, in later years, to moderate it, I was okay.
The 70s were the best time to be alive. Everything was wide open & cheap. The good ol days, for sure.
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(1) In Japan, too, the 70s must have been the best time to be alive -- for most people other than myself anyway. Most people around me were constantly talking about having a good time, never having to work or study too hard, saying that everything will be all right.
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(2) And the 70s were precisely the time I was strictest and most stoic to myself in my life, perhaps. I never let myself have a good time with others. I never thought I deserved to. Before winning the right to enjoy my life, do what I wanted to do, love the woman of my dreams, ..
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