Memoir Addendum – Current Insights

I was able to climb out of the chrysalis of my early conditioning (religious and cultural mythologies) in my teen years and early adulthood. But I was usually filled with indecision and could easily fall back into it with the right incentives, like my first wife.

She gave me no indication that she had any religious interest at all. But shortly after we were married, she fell into a ‘Born Again’ cult, called The Way Ministry. Wanting to have a good and productive marriage, I allowed myself to be dragged in along with her, which explains the 5 years I spent reading the King James Bible cover to cover several times, plus collateral materials. The problem was that my readings and research led to very different conclusions than those espoused by ‘the ministry’. That brought me into conflict with their hierarchy and caused a split with my wife, her closest friends, and me, eventually resulting in our divorce.

Then I stepped back into my former worldview, rejecting all that mythology. Unfortunately, my second wife was also a strong myth believer, just not the same myths. Hers were in a particular proselytizing cult of Buddhism, Nichiren Shoshu. Even though I liked many Buddhist principles, I detested their self righteousness and constant proselytizing.

After all, the religions, philosophies, and cultures of the world were and are all inventions of human minds, fictions. Powerful fictions to be sure, but fictions none the less.

I’ve spent the intervening years since my marriages seeking reality and truth, while seeing the fictions for what they truly are, a person’s or group’s attempt to control other persons and/or groups.

The truth: I don’t have the brainpower to understand ‘reality’, and I doubt that anyone does. But, I also recognize that my basic emotional and physical motivations are very simple, to increase pleasure and decrease pain where and whenever possible.

Does that make me a ‘hedonist? Perhaps, but I rather feel like a ‘realist’.

–LE – 8/19/25