Falling out of love with god

CCD, Catechism, or Sunday school ( depending on your particular sect ) is one of the most bizarre of Christian rituals. To be a six year old Christian is like being a six year old philosopher, or a six year old Republican. A child so young is simply not socially or mentally developed enough to comprehend religion. In hind-site, this is probably the exact reason that parents decide to "teach" religion to their children when they are this young.

At six, I believed in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. I thought "Jack in the Bean Stock" was plausible, and that Will Smith was the best musician ever. My CCD classmates shared similar world views. To be taught similar fables, like Noah's Ark, Adam and Eve, the parting of the Nile, and Moses' conversation with a burning bush at this age made perfect sense. We knew the sky was blue, a fat man came down our chimney's bearing gifts annually, and a skinny man was kind enough to die for us. That's just the way it was.

Even then, I found some of what had to be done in God's name strange. I'm not talking about kneeling on the floor and shaking hands with virtual strangers. These things seemed completely normal at the time. What bothered me were the arts and crafts.

Week after week, we worked on arts and crafts projects. Macaroni pictures or necklaces, drawings of our families, glue and glitter pictures, popcorn necklaces, biblical coloring books, the list goes on and on. Most of these things had nothing to do with God. How does Christ benefit from a popcorn necklace that I get to keep and eat?

Even the artwork that did have to do with God didn't seem to be beneficial to anyone. A colorblind six year old ( as I was ) drawing a green Moses ( as I did ) does not teach said six year old about the 10 Commandments. The language was too ambiguous for me at that age. What the fuck is a graven image anyway? I had no idea. Many practicing Catholic adults I've spoken to still don't know.

Teaching children instead about the social unrest going on in Moses' time, the reason's he went onto the mountain in the first place, what the 10 Commandments mean, the punishment for not following them ( stoning to death ) etc. would make much more sense then just teaching that “Moses was pretty awesome, color this picture of him”. Perhaps CCD teachers choose not to do this because they don't want to frighten children, but if the Bible is God's word, certainly he wants this information passed on. (On a side note, the reasoning more than likely has nothing to do with fear. I remember being told that my Protestant friends were certainly going to Hell because they are not “real Christians”. Religions seem to have no problem at all indoctrinating fear into their practitioners.) Even as a young child I seriously wondered about the dogmatic need for coloring in pictures of the Virgin Mary. Having noticed this unrest, my teacher decided maybe it would be more appropriate to show us some movies about our faith, starting with The Miracle of Our Lady Of Fatima.

For those of you lucky enough never to have seen this film, or otherwise heard the non-miracle of Fatima, I'll give you a brief synopsis. In 1917, three children were out tending their sheep one day in rural Portugal. They claim to have been contacted by the Virgin Mary, who promised to reappear to them once a month to deliver three secrets. On the 13^th day of every month, these children again saw this vision.
Eventually, seventy thousand excited Christians made the pilgrimage to the small town of Fatima and stared into the sun for hours, claiming that the sun was “dancing”. This is known by optometrists as temporary retinal distortion. This phenomena is caused by, you guessed it, staring into the sun for long periods of time!

Thirty years later, one of the three children revealed the “secrets” of Mary. These

had to do with events involving the World Wars; all events that, upon revelation, had already passed. Objectively, wasn't it possible that the girl had just stated world events that already happened, having thought to mention them after the fact? This and similar questions were in the back of my mind for quite some time. They were not central to the faith, though, having happened after Jesus' supposed death and never appearing in the Bible.

The Bible, affectionately known by many Christians as “The Good Book”, however, was supposed to be simply that: good. The perfect and inspired word of God, a moral code that would stand the test of time, given that it was taken into account when thinking about present social situations. To help aid with any moral questions we may have had, the church brought in a contemporary book by a local Bishop which used the Bible as an outline for the answers to current issues. One of the issues in the book was that of life support. The Bishop wrote that in Christianity, life support should not be used because it's a way of “playing God”.

By this logic, any form of medicine that is capable of altering the course of a life would not be in use by Christians. However, Christians share a common fear with most everyone else; they are afraid to die. That said, this alleged Biblical law ( which I have not been able to find anywhere in my bible ) is apparently altogether overlooked. The rejection of blood transfusions by Jehovah’s Witnesses, the no medicine policies of the church of Christian Science, and the anti-abortion movement are the only circumstances in which Christians seem to actually embrace this doctrine. In any other given circumstance, whether it be radiation treatment for cancer patients, in vitro fertilization for would-be mothers who cannot otherwise conceive, heart surgery, erectile disfunction medication, the death penalty, or even common antibiotics, Christian's seem to be pretty commonly aligned in the unstated and seemingly contradictory belief that “playing God” is okay.

A couple of years after this book's publication, the Pope spoke out in the highly publicized Terri Shiavo case, claiming he was harshly opposed to the removal of her feeding tube. In Catholicism, the Pope is God's earthly ambassador, his mouth piece, if you will. Therefore the Pope, speaking for God, is infallible, and the Bishop's book was wrong. This seriously got me to question all the things that I was being taught. Either way, in my skeptical opinion, belief in Papal infallibility is not just a matter of gullibility, but delusion in it's purest form.
Belief that any one man, who has a crown and his own city, does not have an agenda is absurd. For the sake of not getting off track, I will not diverge too greatly, but here are just a few examples of Papal irresponsibility and irrationality. The Crusades, the platform of non-involvement during the Holocaust, telling sinners to pay for indulgences or be sent to hell, campaigning against condom use in Africa, which has the worlds highest rates of AIDS and HIV, allowing generations of parents to think that their unbaptized stillbirth children would burn in hell (as was church doctrine from roughly the time of Saint Augustine of Hippo until 1992 ) condoning slavery based on Bible verses favoring this abomination, relocating rather than prosecuting child molesting Priests, Pope Steven VI putting his predecessor's dead body on trial, incestuous relationships, murder, the Spanish Inquisition, and, most recently, the claim that allowing females priesthood would be equivalent to child molestation. To put it rather bluntly, The Pope is human. Psychologically, sex, and violence are the most primal of human emotions. The Pope is probably not talking to God, and if he is, he's really not all that great at the game telephone.

Learning of the Pope's statement contradicting the book, learning of other contradictions, and being of an inquisitive nature, I asked CCD teachers, the church Deacon, and eventually Priest about a number of different issues before eventually being told to consult a Bishop. Often times these were met with the same generalized response; “Sometimes God just needs us to have faith in him, even when the evidence is so strong in the other direction.” I didn't know it then, but this was a speech I would encounter many times in my life, continuing to this day. It was because no one could give any substantial answers to my questions that, at the age of fifteen, I left the church. It was a tumultuous time in my life, but now, I am happy that I left. Since then, I have learned of further biblical contradictions, claims that outright contradict science, and some noticeable amounts of in-group out-group mentality which leads to hatred towards others, not just in Catholicism but in a number of the theologies I have studied since. I have noted that I don't need to pray to a man in the sky - the results always proved to be 50/50 anyway – to have a moral standard. Much like you, I believe in Peace, and Love. The Biblical Jesus' Golden Rule is a wonderful philosophy to follow, but it is not something that could not or had not been created by any other person from the time period ( in fact, similar quotes from Buddha, Zoroaster, and countless other religious icons have the same message, many of them predating Jesus). In addition, there are hundreds of religions with hundreds of Deities. To pick one, simply because it is the one you were born into, and then claim that all others are false is arrogance bordering on narcissism. I've picked rationality, and reason over superstition,and subservience and I am never looking back.

                                Chris Rice2010

Further Reading

The God Delusion

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything