Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled.
Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.
“Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.
I suppose. I don’t really even believe in a literal heaven or hell. I think it’s more that every religion lays out some ideas of things you can/should do which will be a net positive to yourself and the world around you. If you do those things, you’ll generally be happy with happy people around you… which can be akin to heaven. Do a bunch of bad stuff and don’t take care of yourself and turn the world around you into a mess… you’re basically living in hell. Heaven and hell both exist simultaneously on Earth, and you can live in either one depending on how you go about living your life. The biblical heaven and hell are just extreme versions, spoken about metaphorically, to help illustrate the ideas through stories before things could be written down.
From that perspective, all 4,000 are right, and the non-believers can be right too.