There are many choices:

Christianity
                Roman Catholic 
                Eastern Orthodox
                Protestant

Among others, like:

Islam
Judaism
Hinduism
Buddhism

Most have no choice.
They are born that way.

“Thou shalt not have no other gods before me.”

Martin Luther started The Reformation in 1517.
My mother started her Reformation in 1957
And joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Christmas vanished
No more gifts
No Halloween
No trick or treat
Thanksgiving gone
No Turkey
No pumpkin pie
No apple cider
No birthdays
Candles gathered dust

No Jesus Christ on His cross
Where He once hung on my wall.

Thou shall not make for yourself any carved image, … not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, …”

The Chinese Taiping Rebellion 
                         1851-1864
Was led by a Christian convert
Named Hong Xiuquan.
He said, “I’m the new Messiah,
The younger brother of Jesus Christ.”

Twenty to one hundred million Chinese died
Due to god’s Chinese son.

“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, …”

The founder of the Mormons said
He saw God the Father and Jesus Christ.

The Tibetian Dalai Lama is considered a living god.

When Mao Zedong died,
There were no practicing religions
In the People’s Republic of China.

There used to be.
After all,
Buddha arrived in China
On a white elephant
While Christ arrived
On cannonballs
Along with opium.

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

The Seventh-day Adventist Church,
was established in the 19th century.
To them Saturday is the Sabbath
and the second advent of
Jesus Christ is coming soon.

Probably tomorrow.

The Branch Dividians,
former Seventh-day Adventists,
were excommunicated.
Eighty-two died near Waco
With the help of BATF and FBI agents.

The People’s Temple,
A communal cult,
Settled in Jonestown in Guyana.
A thousand died
In a mass murder-and-suicide
Ordered by their leader, Jim Jones.

“Honor they father and thy mother:
that thy days may be long.”

I was five when
My mother had me baptized
Into the Roman Catholic Church.

Profanity put my quarter in the can.
“Why didn’t my mother use soap
and wash out my mouth?”

I didn’t understand
The Latin mass.
We ate fish on Friday.
The nuns whacked
My knuckles with rulers.

Why?

“Hail Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners
Now and at the hour of our
Death. Amen.”

At sixty,
I sat down to study
The Bible for the first time.

An Evangelical Christian
Told me not to bother.
Others figured it out
Hundreds of years ago.
He said, “Listen to them.
They are wise.”

“Thou shalt not murder.”

The Church taught
That going to war
Against the Infidels
Was an act of Christian penance.
If a believer was killed
During a crusade,
He bypassed purgatory;
And went to heaven.

At twenty-one, I went to Vietnam.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

When I was young,
No one talked
To me about sex.

It wasn’t divine.

My dad played the field.
My brother did too.
There were many women.

My mother lived in denial.
She cried a lot before she died.

“Thou shalt not steal.”

Columbus stumbled on
The new world.
Between 1500 and 1900
More then one hundred million Indians
Died of smallpox and
Other imported epidemics.
From Christian countries.

Another fifty million died
From violence and slavery.

“Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Fourteen women and six men died
At the Salem Witch Trials in 1692.

They missed my ‘first’ wife.

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house; …”

During the first Crusade in 1096,
300,000 Christians died
During the march
Led by Peter the Hermit.

During the second Crusade in 1147,
St. Bernard,
The abbot of Clairvaux,
Said war against the infidels
Was not only justified
But holy.

In 1204, Roman Catholic Christians,
The knights of the Fourth Crusade
Sacked and burned Constantinople,
The capital of the Byzantine Empire,
The home of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

The Children’s Crusade took place in 1212
Thirty thousand children died.
The survivors became slaves.

There were more Crusades.
Some against Christians.
They all failed.
Many died.

The Catholic Church attempted
To stamp out heresy.

There was the
Medieval Inquisition,
Spanish Inquisition,
And Portuguese Inquisition.
Many were slaughtered

There is another choice,
                               Deism.
But, that is not a religion.

Aristotle
Charles Darwin
Albert Einstein
Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Jefferson
Immanuel Kant
Abraham Lincoln
John Locke
James Madison
George Washington
Tomas Paine
Mark Twain
Plato

To name a few,
Are suspected
Of being Deists.

This may a bit of heresy
But this heretic
Considers himself
A Deist too