One of my friends used to be a hardcore Christian. She was involved in a Pentacostal-like church - the whole speaking in tongues and convulsions. She actually led some of the prayer meetings. I was talking to her after she had tried ectasy for the first time and curious, I naturally asked her what it was like.

She paused and said, "It was like leading the revivals again."

I couldn't sleep last night so I decided to just forge on through the day with some help. Bored, I flipped through the glass nipple until I stopped, struck by a stage full of people undergoing seizures. A man with silver preacher hair spoke of God and then reached out and touched the two men his security guards had just picked out of the audience - they fell back as soon as the preacher made contact and convulsed on the floor. Even the preacher was taken aback by the responses on stage. This continued for a while and the struck twitched for a long time.

God is a drug.

Religion has always been a route to ecstatic experience. Drugs are another, and in mind, inferior, route to the same gaol. Sex can be a route as well, which is why it is incorporated into many ancient and mystery/occult religions. Mainstream suburban Christianity has forgotten about ecstatic experience -- that's why it's so dishwater dull. People are flocking to religions that still offer that ecstasis. Paganism offers it; Pentacostalism offers it; traditional inner-city black churches offer it; even pre-Vatican II Catholicism offered it to some extent. Without ecstasis, the ecstatic experience, religion becomes simply a community glue.

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