Around the year 2003, I corresponded with a pastor in Texas. According to what I’d read on his webpage, he had more compassion for emotionally hurt people than most Christians I knew. I liked his ideas, so I wrote to him and ended up doing some Spanish translations for him.

But when I told him that I sometimes received psychological counseling, he hit the roof. Jesus was enough, he said. The Bible, prayer, and Jesus should solve all my problems.

He recommended a method of behaviour modification that included memorizing Colosians, Effesians, and the other Pauline letters. The recovery method, he said, had been successfully used by recovering alcoholics, drug addicts, and sufferers of depression, such as me.

In addition to reading the New Testament compulsively, the individual was to pray a few times a day and to fast every once in a while. That, he assured me, was going to lift my depression.

I was mad when I received his e-mail. Because that’s exactly what I had been doing, so loyally, that I didn’t have time to have fun or to upgrade my skills to keep my career on track. I expressed my disappointment to him, and he ended up apologizing. I never wrote to him again.

In fact, I had started to suspect that reading the Bible was the cause of my ongoing depression. So I stopped cold turkey. Ever since then, I’ve only had a few relapses due to very real difficulties including, of course, the no-small matter of completely leaving the faith.

I was thinking about the Texan Pastor’s behaviour-modification method the other day, and I realized that more than just brainwashing the subject, the technique was aimed at replacing one addiction with another.

If you are always in church praying and reading your Bible, you are less likely to run to your friends and get drunk, or to call your drug dealer to get high, or, in my particular case, to get depressed or angry (BTW, depression is self-directed anger).

To be fair, I have read that, during recovery, that’s exactly what you are supposed to do: get busy, find other interests, find something healthy that tickles your fancy and get involved.

But going back to the Christian technique, its advocates will have me believe that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are the ones doing the healing! You are healed, they say, supernaturally. God shows up in your life with all his power and cures your disease.

You don’t say!

Well, that reminds me of a TV show I watched a while ago—can’t remember which. It portrayed a recovery counselor who helped people find their passion. A female patient remembered how much she loved riding horses as a child, and going back to riding helped her dry up and stay sober. According to the Texan pastor’s logic, then, horses have power to heal substance abusers. They’re on par with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

The truth is that recovering from any addiction requires toughness that few have in them. Many say that it has much to do with a person’s sense of self-worth. Others believe that addicts are self-medicated mentally ill individuals.

If we knew the deep causes of substance abuse, perhaps the problem wouldn’t be as huge as it is. Some people do recover and most don’t. All techniques, including religion, have a fairly large rate of relapse. I doubt it that any Jesus method has a greater rate of success than horses do.

And yes, religion is a very serious, destroying addiction. If it weren’t so, this blog—and others of its king—wouldn’t exist. It is pretty tough to recover from having believed in imaginary gods. So anybody who recovers from addictions using Bible God and Jesus is now hooked on another fix that sooner or later will turn on them, unfortunately.

¶ 8:13 PM