When you're growing up, you just sort of follow along with whatever your parents do. And you're quite happy about it, in a very characteristically childish way. It's all sort of goofy and enthusiastic and full of songs and pretty colours.
But then you start to actually understand what you've been repeating all your life. You start to understand the words, rather than just knowing them. And... it's never quite the same after that. No matter how long you live, you'll never again feel that dumb and utter devotion. It's not possible. Before, you charged forward in that endearing mentality of a kid, sure you were right as long as it made sense to a brain easily distracted by a brightly-coloured pencil.
But after that sickening moment of clarity, you're quiet. You're thinking. You're wondering. You go through all of the lessons drummed into a developing brain, inspecting them under this new light that you have suddenly seen. It's almost like a divine revelation, except that it has very different effects on people.
For some people, it just serves to reaffirm their belief in whatever religion they have chosen. It makes their bond stronger with their architect of the universe. They no longer have the gullible belief of a child; they have scrutinized their faith and been reassured of its plausibility.
They are the lucky ones.
For the others, the going-over of what they have been taught is alarming. A fallacy here, an impossibility here, and why not just throw in a heaping tablespoon of corruption for good measure. Once looked at with intelligent eyes, their faith doesn't make sense. Or it's impossible. Or any of the infinite objections I've heard against religion.
I, unfortunately, must count myself firmly in the latter category.
A bit of background: I am by birth and baptism a Catholic. My dad's side of the family is very, very religious, but oddly enough they've never seemed strict to me. They are just people who go about their business, but God is just niggling in the back of their mind at all times. Would God like this? Could I have done that better? My mom's side has always been fairly lackadaisical on the religion front, at least in the surviving generations. My great-grandmother died a little over a year ago and she was quite devout, but after that it just kind of sputtered out.
Me, though? I don't particularly like Catholicism. It's been the cause of much strife with my parents, and to be honest I think we may be at an eternal stalemate.
I've noticed that it's based mostly on shame.
Think about it. According to the Bible, we are inherently sinful, and the whole of the Church experience is basically talking about how flawed we are, and how damn lucky we are that God took pity on our miserable carcasses and sent his ~ONLY SON~ to rescue us from our pitiful selves.
There is an entire sacrament devoted entirely to walking into a small room and verbally listing all the things you've done wrong. A priest listens and then gives you a penance, which is basically all the things you can do to make up for your horrible negligence. It's a horrid feeling. I have it harder than most in this, because the entire room is filled with a roaring, uncomfortable silence, the sort that gets stuck in your head and rings in your ears. And I wear hearing aids, so I have to ask the priest listening to me to repeat half of what he says. So I'm already flustered by having to categorically state my flaws, and then I miss even more, and by the time I walk out of the unbelievably tiny room, I'm basically shaking with nerves and embarrassment.
A more devout person might say that I am trembling in the face of God at my sins.
A more sympathetic person might say that I am a perfectionist doomed to fail.
Which is the worst feeling.
And then, you spend all your time wondering if you've inadvertently sinned. There's a running commentary just under the thrum of your veins that just goes, "Was that a sin? It might have been a sin. Oh crap, what if it was a sin? What am I going to do if it was a sin? Do I have to do a penance for this? Is there anything that isn't sinning? Jesus, this is exhausting. Crap, that was a sin! That was definitely a sin! What do I have to do to make up for that?" and so on and so forth.
(I don't think I've ever typed the word sin that much in such a short time before.)
Anyway. Back to shame.
It seems to me that shame is a rather back-to-front way of going about religion. If you want people to believe in your god, shouldn't it stand to reason that the proper way of getting them to believe is not telling them that they are completely flawed. But wait! There's more! All you have to do is believe in this guy and suddenly you're completely forgiven for all the flaws you've ever had! But if you're ever bad again, you need to apologize to a God who has suddenly become the epitome of disapproving mothers everywhere. Twice.
Also there's a zombie son involved who told people to eat his body. All cool?
You know, it just doesn't make sense to me.
I spend far too much time going over my imperfections and failures. I'd be much more likely to follow a God that made me feel better. I would want one that liked people as they were. I don't want to have to embark on a lifelong, inevitably futile quest to improve myself when I could just be happy with who I was.
The thing about Catholicism is that, in operating on shame, it essentially makes itself immortal. By telling us all that we're messed up fucks and then setting a perfect person to be constantly compared to, it's just one big sense of insecurity. What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do? Well, given the fact that even if he did exist in the terms that everyone supposedly thinks he did, that was still over two thousand years ago. I don't have a clue what Jesus would do. I don't want to know what Jesus would do. I want to know what the right thing to do is in a difficult situation.
Jesus is, in essence, a copy of the Little Book of Calm.
Maybe he works for some people. But he's also kind of made of platitudes. You know, stuff like "visualize the ocean" and "I am the light of the world" and "don't stab people".
What people don't seem to understand is that religion is quite literally myths. What about Zeus and all that lot? Perfectly valid religion. Lasted for quite a long time. And yet people just chuckle condescendingly and dismiss them as ludicrous. Like Christianity is any less insane. They need to be considered on the same basis.
Faith is defined as the belief in something that cannot be concretely, decisively proven.
I might believe that I can fly, but until I can actually prove that I can fly, other people have the right to be skeptical. And until I get proof that Catholicism is any more real than the ancient Celtic goddess of war, then I am perfectly entitled to remain in an agnostic state of religious belief.
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