I did not want to reject religion as nonsense because life seemed to have no ultimate purpose without it, and most of the good people I knew were Christians.
I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life which in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way that I wanted.
At the time I perceived most religious men, particularly the pastors with all their talk about love, faith and relationship, as effeminate.
In my right-wing politics of the time, I held that unemployment was usually the fault of the unemployed.
Acting in anger and hatred throughout my life, I frequently precipitated what I feared most, the loss of friendships and the need to rely upon the very people I’d abused.
Judaism is much more communal, and partly as a consequence of my religious switch, I am increasingly more suspicous of my previous view that what people do in the privacy of their own home is their business alone.