In one case, the poor guy fell in with Scientology. When he ran out of money, they cut off all contact with him, and he died of exposure on a park bench in LA.

I right now have two friends who are homeless — one in Seattle and one in New York City. I have put one of them up — he was actually a perfect houseguest and left before we thought he was ready, because he had some idealistic plan that we knew wouldn’t work. Both of them have received considerable money from me — money I begrudge not one bit.

One of them has had increasing mental health issues — a series of diagnoses, seeming a different one each time he gets committed, some ludicrous (ADHD — for a guy who has active hallucinations at times). My guess is it’s acute bipolarity, because I’ve seen the mania, and I’ve seen him at the start of a depressive episode several times (he tends to vanish then, and my belief is he gets incarcerated and doesn’t remember).

The other one is a older man who lost one of his legs in his twenties and the pain has caught up with him over the years. He progressed through alcoholism, which he fought against for years but never made progress, to opiates.

I suspect he at least would have tried to get help from Abrahamic religious groups, because he’s at least somewhat rational — but my belief is that any such organizations in Seattle are overwhelmed.

Sorry for my immoderate words before, but I still believe that these religions are not the solution. In particular, all of them teach the same wrong message — the world is for humans to consume, and there is nothing morally wrong in doing so, because “fairly soon now” God will come and wrap things up.

What we need today is a religion that teaches us not to destroy our planet.