Bruce Baugh comments:
Y'know, a non-trivial number of believers don't get anything like simple serenity from their faith. Experiences that people find make most sense interpreted as encounters with the numinous are often scary, weird, and troubling. Jonah tried to run as far from an assigned mission as he could, and went through a lot of misery, and didn't have fun when he finally did surrender and fulfill his calling. Jesus shouted in agony at his crucifixion and died without any obvious answers coming in, and his disciples ended up martyred. Philip Dick was unusually articulate about his years of struggle to make sense of his experiences in early 1974, but in the years I was active in one church or another, I ran into quite a few members who were going through something very similar with a less elaborate verbal apparatus.
For that matter, thoroughly flaunted religiosity of the evangelical or fundamentalist style seems not to bring much comfort to many of the most prominent flaunters, from Aimee Semple Macpherson to Ted Haggard.
