I haven't been to a church in years and had to go to one a couple of weeks ago for work. [View all]

I had to see some people perform and some of the performers were very religious oriented in their performance. I was a bit surprised as this was not a religious event. One thing in common with the religious performances were that the theme was feeling alone, growing up without a father and now they found their forever father or their forever family. At that point I realized that these people really needed a therapist and that the people enabling them and supporting them did not have their best interests at heart but were using them to increase their religion. They were encouraging them that they now had found their forever father or family and instead of helping them deal with the problems they were having they were helping them cover it up. I found this very troubling and have thought on it quite a few times in the past weeks. Thinking back on my life there were two types of people who were religious. Those that grew up in religion and were kind of milquetoast about their religion and those that found god at one point or another. The ones that found god almost always had major drug problems, mental health problems they couldn't deal with or a major loss in their life. I wonder what the percentage of the latter group fell that back into their problems vs the people that got professional help who fell back into their problems would be.