"My Own Mind is My Own Church." ~Thomas Paine

There are some very good reasons to use this thought to remedy the damage done by the rise of evangelicals in the United States over the past decade. When God Inc. came to town independent-thought, skepticism, and the scientific method were put in the closet while the shepherds were welcomed into the living room and fed the grapes of leisure. But as their corruption spills into the pews their grip around the brain stems of the masses diminish. It appears that in the information age, paying people to keep the truth under wraps just does not work the way it did back in the glory days of the Vatican.

The first time I saw Ted Haggard was in the following interview with Richard Dawkins.



Now, three years later, his prolonged fall from grace is doing some public good. The bureaucracy of his church actually paid a 20 year-old man thousands of dollars not to go to the press with his story of sexual encounters with Mr. Haggard. While attempting to salvage their public image by suppressing the truth the church has in effect repulsed the public even further. It is refreshing to see the power of a free-market of information self-correct itself and force some well-deserved critical analysis of at least one mega-church. I hope this incident sparks a new revolution of faith: the rise of the micro-church, the church of reason that exists within every persons mind.