Raised Catholic and went to Catholic school through grade 6. Steeped in the faith. I always had the sense that the Bible was selective history. Slowly, over a number of years, hell, decades, the nagging questions and observations got the better of my faith.
Way back as a kid, I always remembered the passionless, droning call & response from the congregation sounded just like the way brainwashed cults are portrayed in the movies and on television. What the heck is the difference between a religion and a cult? Would I know the difference if I was in one?
And how come we don’t have miracles anymore? I’m talking good ol’ water to wine and fishes and loaves magic stuff. The world I lived in sure didn’t resemble Nazareth.
I remembered a section in my Catechism that struck me as odd. It was this illustration that said Fame is not God. Money is not God. Science is not God. Et cetera. That last one really stood out to me. Science is not God? No kidding. Why would they even include that? All I knew of science was as a school subject. It was like saying “Geography isn’t God.” Why the hell is the church calling out science? It seemed out of place and very suspicious.
My sister married a Bangladeshi guy and converted to Islam and my brother later came out as gay. I was forced to confront the disconnect that here are two people I love, who are charitable, kind human beings, yet they don’t get to go to heaven? How is that fair?
I had been an avid reader of the Straight Dope column in my local weekly. When I saw the reprinted column “Why do we celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25th?” I remember thinking "What a dumb question. That’s when Jesus was born. When else would you celebrate it. After reading the column, I was dumbstruck and felt betrayed by my church. They had always said that this was when Jesus was born and always whined about how secular society was taking the Christ out of Christmas! I was just some slacker who never cared to read his Bible, but the church leaders had, and they still let me believe in this story. It made me wonder what other information they were playing fast and loose with. Fuckers.
And if it was clear that our elected leaders of government can have ulterior motives and do shady things that goes against the principles they say they stand for, whose to say church leaders don’t do that too?
The more I really tried to absorb the stories in the Old Testament, the worse it got. These stories sounded identical to the kind of stories that we dismiss as Greco-Roman or Norse mythology. A serpent spoke human language? And this didn’t seem unusual to Eve? What did all the animals talk back then? Waitwhat? Jonah in the whale? C’mon. Moses had super powers? Really? :rolleyes: Okay, maybe those are all allegory and legend. But I was Christian. Christ was where it’s at. I’ll just stick with the New Testament and forget all that Old Testament nonsense.
Except the whole reason Jesus was tortured and died is to undo the original sin from Adam & Eve. If those Old Testament stories didn’t happen, why did Jesus have to die again?
Around this time, I remember going to church one Sunday and the priest used a Jewish stereotype (those Jews sure are good with their money) which really raised my hackles. After church, I marched straight into the rectory and called him on how irresponsible it was for a faith leader to reinforce stereotypes. He claimed it replied that it was a positive thing to be good with money, missing entirely the poison any stereotype has within it. That was it! Although I would still begrudgingly go to church with my Dad when I visited home, from here on in, I was done with these institutions of man! I decided then and there to go to the source. The Bible. The only problem is that I knew there were multiple versions. I thought (don’t laugh) I better go to the original copy (I said not to laugh!)
Then I discovered the sublime 3-part SDSAB masterpiece “Who Wrote the Bible.” After reading that, it dawned on me that none of this stuff was being written down as it was happening. For all the nitpicking we do on what these words mean, we’re going from something that was written down after the fact by people we don’t know and heavily edited by other people (who probably had their own agendas) over generations upon generations.
And that was it. If the historicity and authorship of the most reliable link to God is that dubious, I couldn’t believe anymore.
It was hard at first. Real hard. Giving up on the idea of heaven filled me with sorrow. But I got over it and eventually found that life was better without being under the constant omniscient surveillance by a disapproving God whose rules seemed arbitrary at best and fucked up at worst.
