Home-town hypocrisy, within my Hoosier state, daily reaches ever higher levels so severe as to be indigestible.  Folks impersonate soldiers renamed oxymoronic “prayer warriors”.  When refraining from pretentious extolling of mysterious galaxies of heavens or hells as well as of famed halls of gods or goddesses, consider yourself outside the loop or sphere of influence.  An individual thinker is either misunderstood or downright condemned.

Third world, primitive ostracism’s occurrence on Main Street boggles the mind or what remains of a mind.  Is plastic religious fervor a momentary trend or a movement toward something much more sinister?

Climbing aboard some church-home ship to embark upon a forced voyage of group-think falls into mandated territory.  Nausea strikes.  This murky allegiance to a particular god is pathetically shallow and cannot be substantiated by reasoning, knowledge of history or science, understanding and acceptance of human nature, or anything tangible or sensible.

The race is on to generate massive revenues to pay the mortgages on aluminum-sided behemoths, those monster pole barn churches constructed along heavily-traveled, tax-payer supported highways.  Competition for members heats up.  “In My Father’s house are many mansions.” (John 14:2)–basketball courts, conference rooms, theaters, state of the art play-grounds, kitchens Martha Stewart would die for, and massive parking lots.

This mania evokes a metaphorical peer-pressured prom season gone ape-sh*t all of the time–an artificial social construct which precipitates more harm than good.

Once proud of my Southern roots and those “old time religion”-soaked Democrats, I barely recognize my fundamentalist, conservative, smug, narrow-minded, hog-barbecuing, beer-guzzling, conflicted, rationalizing, selectively prudish kin.  Thus, to be brutally honest, no place is sane.  America, yes, America has lost its collective mind.

Progressive thinking is a thing of the past.  As Hillary Clinton lamented, “I’m afraid that we’re going backwards”, and, I regret to add, doing so in a tragic, damaging quantum retro-leap of misguided faith.