Bruce Gerencser has posted a long piece describing himself during the years when he was an active minister.
This would be the first and last vacation I would take until the late 1990s. While I “heard” what Bruce [another pastor] was trying to tell me, his voice was drowned out by what I perceived to be the Holy Spirit telling me to give my all to Jesus; telling me that if I was a true disciple of Christ I must be willing to forsake all attachments to this world; telling me that my wife and children were not as important as following Jesus and preaching the gospel; telling me that Jesus was coming soon that I must be about my father’s business, for the night is coming when no man can work.
Even as a child, I thought the Creation and Fall stories were highly implausible, but otherwise paid no attention to religion; to each his own, right?
Then I moved to a seminary-dominated town in the Bible Belt, where exactly the outlook that Gerencser describes is a commonplace, and learned my lesson: Religion is a sickness that exploits insecurities and soils whatever, whomever, it touches. Avoid preachers and the Godly the same way you’d avoid somebody with the measles.