Religion and faith - Your story

[12th Doctor]

I went to a Catholic elementary school where religion was the first class taught each morning. But because the school bus was so slow, I was always late. So the nun who ran the school tried making me take an additional religion class outside the school.

My parents refused to go along with this, because it was the school system's fault I was late every day. The school failed to insist that the bus bring me to school on time.

Result: no First Communion for you!

Eventually I ended up completely ditching the Church anyway.

And Kentucky was stolen.  I'm sure that's exactly how it happened.

[12th Doctor]

And Kentucky was stolen.  I'm sure that's exactly how it happened.

Kentucky was stolen? That's weird, because it looks to me like Kentucky is still right here like it's always been.

In the past, I never ceased to be amazed at your lack of ability to challenge your own assumptions.  As such, I trust nothing that comes out of your mouth at face value.  Sorry if I don't buy your story 100%, especially since you were probably to young to remember any of it.

[12th Doctor]

In the past, I never ceased to be amazed at your lack of ability to challenge your own assumptions.  As such, I trust nothing that comes out of your mouth at face value.  Sorry if I don't buy your story 100%, especially since you were probably to young to remember any of it.

Pooing is cool.

OMG, school uniforms are fascist! Everyone at my school was a fascist! All the teachers hated me, and let people bully me, and that's how I learned to hate The Man.

[12th Doctor]

Anyway, the story of my spiritual convictions started about 300 years ago.  For whatever reason, my family fled Germany and came to PA.  The story is that they came over as religious refugees, which leaves only two real possibilities.  The first that they were part of some Quaker-like organization, or that they were Jews (there is some evidence for this).  Eitherway, up until the early 19th century, my family were members of Unitarian/Quaker groups.  Then, the great shift began.  Every time someone in my family was married, they married into a more theologically conservative Christian sect, so from Unitarian-Quaker-Seventh Day-Baptist-Presbyterian-Methodist-Anglican and then finally, my grandfather married my Irish Catholic grandmother.  Withing 8 generations, my family had gone hard Left to hard Right.  My mother didn't convert to anything else, and so I was born, and baptized in the Catholic Church.

We rarely went to church for the first 13 years of my life.  My family, especially my step-dad, spent alot of time talking about Catholicism, and how much they hated Protestants, alot of rosaries and prayer cards, and asking God for wealth, and such, but they really wasn't much positive reinforcement in my family.  I wasn't raised in it, and the only examples I had were negative, and hypocritical ones. 

I spent alot of time buried in science books, didn't care about God, or Catholicism and really didn't believe in it.  I wasn't familiar with the terms at the time, but I could probably have been best described as a scientific atheist. 

I started attending Catholic school when I was 13.  I was well behind the rest of the class when it came to Bible studies.  In a humorous side note, when I learned I needed a Bible for the class, my aunt bought me a KJV not knowing it wasn't a Catholic Bible.  Eitherway, I stood out like a sore thumb amongst my peers at the school, all of whom were far holier than I was.

I used to watch alot of A&E.  There was a show on there narrated by Leonard Nimoy, where they approached the Bible from a scholarly, contemporary, but albeit, liberal perspective.  That interested me and I watched every Saturday.  It helped spark my interest.  Around this time, also, my Aunt went through her second bout with cancer.  She started to have a conversion, of sorts, and started looking into her faith more.  She is still with us.

When I was around 16, I encounter the anti-Catholic attack for the first time.  I knew a couple of points, but I had no idea what to say about the more sophisticated attacks.  Already having an interest in history, I brought the things people had said to my aunt, who knew where to look.  With time, I took my studies in a number of different, and in depth directions.  For a while, I started to become a bit of an uber-Catholic... read scripture alot, had a bookmarked Catechism, taught it, prayed the rosary, had 30 prayer cards, went to mass every week, went to confession every week, went to the communion vigil once a month... but there is a key difference between myself and my parents that I maintain even now... I rarely ask for anything, and a try to follow through on my faith instead of using it as a way to feel good.  I don't do it because I expect God to put me in a mansion if I act like a decent person, I do it because its right.

One thing I can say about where I am from is that we had a great collection of priests, who really believed in the faith.  When I got up to Erie for college, the center of the diocese, I saw alot less of that.  Up there, it was treated like a business by everyone.  Though it was a "Catholic" college, the only kids who seemed interested in practicing were liberaltion theologists, who ran around, talked about "Jesus" all the time and used it to advance their liberal political views.  With time, I started to identify less and less with the Catholics I saw around me.  I discovered the Byzantine Church and went there for a while.  A few years ago, I had a serious crisis of faith... I'm sure most of you remember it... as a result of all the hypocrisy I saw around me... everyone was either a hypocrite or an ultra-liberal Jesus freak.  I couldn't find too many people who were both serious scholars and had a really mental appreciation for the faith, and who actually practiced it as well.  I had alot of other problems at that time as well... generally, I reached the lowest point of my life since being an early teen.  The sum result is that I left the Church, became a deist, asked God to either put me where I was supposed to be, or kill me, just about every night, etc.

Well, I got my life back together, and over the past year, I have started practicing again, not the "uber-Catholic" I used to be, but, as you can all see, I still care.

Both in my personal and religious life, I have learned that I need to stop being concerned with both gaining approval of others, and being affected by how others behave so much.  Yeah, alot of people are hypocrites, shouldn't allow that to affect how I behave.  And if I keep acting to either gain or reject other's approval, then who am I in the end?  No one.

If I am true to who I am and what I believe, then it doesn't matter what everyone else is doing.