Being Shuffled From One Sermon to Another

I was forced to wake up at 9:00 this Sunday morning, way too early, to go to a Center for Spiritual Living (CSL) sermon that is nondenominational at 10:15. I have gone to church about twice in my life, so clearly I don't like it. I don't like people infiltrating my life. I don't believe in any of the ideas of any of the religions. I don't want to alienate the people of another religion. All religions are right in my mind. I am, in short, a deist. Anyway, the sermon was held at an elementary school, and I suppose it was nice to hear the live music and to feel the energy, but the name God was still mentioned a few times. My dad said that it was referring to God as if God encompassed everything; as if God referred to all Gods. But then I said, "Yes, but a Muslim might be mad that you don't use Allah to describe all Gods, or Allahs, as it were." So this sermon was a deist sermon with a Christian slant. You can see how I have very little faith that religion accomplishes any good, as sects and denominations make themselves apparent even in the most well-meaning terms. As somebody once said, "The only good thing ever to come out of religion was the music," or something like that. Anyway, I think I may have to start going every Sunday, as my parents are making me. I did see an old friend from a show I did at that same storefront theater I talked about earlier, so that was nice. I hadn't seen her in almost two years. Anyway, after the CSL sermon, my mom, my dad, and I headed down to Green Fest, which turned out to be basically just a bunch of vendors selling stuff. The relationship between the product they were selling and actually being green can be summed up in my earlier blog entry, that described the green festival at my future school. There was a hybrid there (Prius), and a vendor selling solar panels ($14k for an installation!), and a police car with flowers in it (it was fun just to look at the police car), but those were really the only interesting exhibits. On the main stage at 1, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a presidential candidate, spoke about being green, and he even mentioned the Department of Peace, a Cabinet-level Department that I have been advocating the creation of with the Peace Alliance. After Kucinich's talk, we went and heard David Wolfe, the founder of Sunfood Nutrition and a raw food advocate. By the time all this was over, I was definitely ready to get out of there. We went to a South Side restaurant, "Nueva Leone," or something like that, and had a really good Mexican dinner. Once my dad and I got home (my mom had stayed at Green Fest), I did my homework and then, at 7:30, we went and got a movie: "The road to Guantanamo," or something like that. It was really good, but really sad and embarrassing. Seeing five armed SWAT military policemen beat up a mentally ill, helpless, innocent civilian until he's so covered in blood you can't recognize him is never something that invokes pride in your country. (By the way, it was a true story.) Anyway, I'm not going to get into that because I could go on forever, but I'm tired and must be off to bed.