About Marc Perkel
Founder of the Church of Reality
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Hello Everyone,
I am Marc Perkel, founder of the Church of Reality. Originally I wasn't going to write this section because the Church of Reality is about reality and not about Marc Perkel. I thought I could passively deemphasize myself but I think I should actively do so. And - there seems to be curiosity about who started this and how I came to be in the position that I am in. So I will try to address all that so that we can get past it and back to reality.
It would be easier if I were a God or a prophet of some omnipotent all wise invisible cloud being who spoke pure wisdom through me but I'm not. I'm just a guy with an idea and doing a lot of hard work in the real world to try to solve a big problem. I have no special powers. I am not the smartest person on the planet and even if I were - that's not saying much.
Most other religions have their pitfalls and I look around at Scientology and Objectivism for example and it's clear that I don't want to see the Church of Reality end up like them. Consequently, I'm trying to take every step I can to point the CoR in the right direction so that after I'm gone this religion doesn't degenerate into some awful cult that has nothing to do with it's original purpose.
Scientology was started by a science fiction writer as a scam to sucker people into giving him money in the name of religion and hasn't changed even though the original scammer is dead. Objectivism was started by Ayn Rand who got it right about objective reality and then went off track in proclaiming the virtues of democracy and the virtues of greed. She had a huge ego and if you didn't agree with her she considered you mentally impaired. Ayn Rand is dead now, but her inflated ego lives on in her followers, who accurately mimic the worst aspects of her personality. And that's something that scares me because I have several personality disorders myself. I am not a role model and there are some things worth learning about me but for the most part, don't imitate me. Don't turn me into an Ayn Rand!
The Church of Reality is about Reality - not Marc Perkel. There is nothing special about Marc Perkel.
I am not a religious leader because it's something I want to do. Like many of you, I don't like religion. It scares me for all the same reasons that it scares you. I started doing this because the religious insanity scares me even more. I don't want to be marched into church at gun point and forced to pray to a fictional deity as some people on the planet would like if they get control. I want to live in a sane world where I can spend my time contemplating string theory and building a better world than having to constantly fight off power grabs by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cults. In fact I think my disdain for religion in general is a good sign because it makes me less interested in religious abuse. I'm not interested in doing your thinking for you. I just want you all to take care of yourselves so that someday I can live a peaceful quiet life.
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I was born in 1955 of two weakly Jewish parents. At the age of five I was forced to endure religious training, something I hated. I already resented having to go to public school, and now they wanted to take away the weekends too. So as a Jew I learned about the Old Testament and this funny language called Hebrew. Before that I had been exposed to the idea of God, but not enough to give it a lot of thought.
But now I was supposed to learn this stuff instead of spending time with my grandmother who was teaching me mathematics which I really loved. I remember these stories about animal sacrifices and God calling on people to sacrifice their children, but calling it off at the last minute. I saw people worshiping and praying. I was told that God got angry, destroyed the world with a great flood, then promised never to do that again. Being a logical person this guy God seemed to have some real problems with his emotions.
But then they got to the Exodus story and it came to the point where God killed the first born son of all the Egyptians. Being a first born son myself this was getting personal. That this God who was all wise and all knowing would kill someone like me because of my parents' behavior? No! I'm not buying this story. I rebelled. I decided this was all stupid and that I wasn't going to participate. I started skipping out and pocketing the 15 cents of charity money that I was given to throw into the till and going up on the hills to play with things that really interested me. Things like fire.
Fortunately my parents rarely showed up at Temple themselves so they had no idea that I wasn't going. Eventually word would get back to them and there would be punishment, but I endured it and when forced to attend I made sure they regretted every moment of it. So eventually they figured out that if they didn't report to my parents that I wasn't there, they didn't have to endure my presence when I was forced to come. Jews fortunately don't take their religion as seriously as Christians so if I missed out it wasn't as big of a deal.
I also lived a block away from St. Michael's, a large catholic church and school and several of the kids in the neighborhood we Catholic and had to attend both church and school there. The Catholic religion was a lot scarier than being Jewish because it was clear that had I been Catholic I wouldn't have been able to get away with the things I got away with as a Jew. So - even though I thought it was bullshit, I stuck with the Jewish identity because it wasn't nearly as bad as being Catholic or Christian which other kids were and I saw as something separate from being Catholic at the time.
One thing the Catholics had that the Jews didn't was that their church was open most all the time and anyone could wander in to this huge space that was mostly empty. And they had all these prayer candles there that you were supposed to drop in a dime and light one. So I'd go in and light them all sometimes and it became a source for matches which allowed me to start campfires and find old lead pipes to melt down and pour into molds for fishing sinkers. But while inside the catholic church I noticed the big Jesus hanging on the cross. As a Jew I identified this as "Idol Worship". They were worshiping a stone image. So I thought of Catholics as the primitive heathens who didn't realize that God wasn't a graven image, but the invisible cloud being. Later in school I would not say the pledge to the flag for the same reason. It was idol worship.
Although I wasn't as fortunate as people who are raised as Atheists I managed to resist being forced to become a theist. I never really bought into the God thing although if you had asked me when I was under 12 if I believed in God I would have hesitantly said yes, I never really got to the point where I actually owned the belief. It was in the world of adult superstition and adults were not to be trusted, which is another story in itself.
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From an early age, as far back as I can remember, I seemed to be aware that I was in a fight to keep from being brainwashed. Somehow the idea that adults would break the spirits of children was something that I found horrifying. I can't tell you where it came from but it was a time when World War II had been recently won and the Nazis and the Communists were very much on the minds of everyone. It was the evil threat where we had freedom and they didn't and if they won we would become the slaves of the evil government and forced to become part of something terrible. Being raised Jewish I heard about the concentration camps and I saw Jewish adults with numbers tattooed on their arms who were in Hitler's camps. So it was Freedom vs. Communism and that was something I could relate to and I was clearly on the side of freedom.
But the way my desire for freedom manifested itself was not what most people would have predicted. I remember seeing children on television of communist countries and they were wearing uniforms and they were told what to think and forced to do state ordered rituals like marching and saluting and it was all depicted as the form of ultimate oppression. I understood that they were being brainwashed from childhood so that their humanity would be suppressed and they would become mindless drones who would do evil things because there are ordered to do it. So I knew I must never allow adults to do anything like that to me.
Then I would see the Catholic kids and like the Communists they were wearing uniforms, lined up and marching into class, and forced to perform mind altering rituals which included worshiping idols. So in my mind being Catholic was half way to being a Communist. So since the Jews were the victims of the Holocaust, the Jews had to be the good guys. But anything that looked like forced mind control was the roots of becoming a Nazi. And I would die before I became one of those!
My family was "different" from all other "normal" families in the neighborhood. In comparison we had a lot less money than people around us. So we couldn't afford the stuff other kids had like baseball and football equipment. So if you didn't have a glove you couldn't play baseball. So although I still did a lot of other things I was a semi-outcast. My parents fought a lot, screaming to the point where neighbors were calling the cops, and we were occasionally beaten, but never disciplined. I was sort of left out in the wild to raise myself and spent as much time outside as possible to avoid home life. And since other kids had to be home on a schedule I spent a lot of time alone which allowed me to spend a lot more time thinking than most kids did. And I had a lot more freedom than anyone else. Not that I was granted freedom, but my parents were to preoccupied to take freedom away from me.
Sunday mornings were especially interesting times for me. Everyone would go to church except for me. It was like I had the whole world to myself. Yes it was awkward for me to be "different" like I was out of place and that I somehow should be doing something like everyone else did, but it was a time of absolute freedom and meditation where I could wonder around and explore the world. I think this transformed me in a way that allowed me to form patterns of thought and an appreciation for independent thinking that most people never learn. It's something that I consider to be extremely valuable and defines who I am as a person. It forms what I would call the spiritual basis for what I envision for the Church of Reality. |
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About the Founder 