On Religion
I never know how to explain how I feel about religion, how I’ve come to the conclusions I’ve come to, why I believe what I believe to people who ask me. It isn’t that I don’t know what I believe, or that I believe something illogical, or that I have been brain washed or something. I logically have come to every conclusion that I have come to, and every single one has matched up perfectly with things I already believed.
Learning about Catholicism was like learning to speak a new language, and like learning that people had spent thousands of years making words for concepts that I had inside me but struggled to be able to describe. To everyone who thinks Catholicism is about pure illogical faith, it isn’t. We don’t just like … decide to go with whatever they’ve already decided and believe it. It’s more like understanding “Oh, that is what they’re talking about, that is why they think that, is that something I agree with? yes/no,” and I found the answers, after months and months of deliberation, prayer, and feeling things out, to be yes.
On that note, the Church challenges us to philosophically and spiritually explore and challenge their theology. WE ARE ALL LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH! If none of the schisms had happened, if Protestants or Quakers or anyone else had just not branched off, and just stayed and worked to CHANGE what already existed, it could’ve been so more unified and beautiful.They wanted something perfect and unflawed and that was not the Church back then, it is not the Church now, there are always going to be flaws as there are in humans and the question then becomes do you stay with faith that humanity can change in good ways, and try to achieve those changes at all odds, or do you give up and go start your own thing? I say, it is always better to stay, it is our responsibility to stick to it and fight and work with our peers and our neighbors to discover truth and how to love. If all those Protestants had spent the energy trying to change things, there would’ve been no schism, no breaking away, and we could’ve skipped right to the counter reformation without all the heartache, death and war.
Yeah, we were wrong about the earth not revolving around the sun, and yeah, a lot of HUMANS did a lot of bad things. The Church is flawed because human is full of good and evil and we are not pure being made of one or the other, we are both and that is how we are supposed to be! And that doesn’t mean we should reject it, turn away, decide nothing means anything, it means we should WORK to understand, fight for truth and for love, fight to show our family, our friends, our neighbors that we are for love and that love is the answer.
In the past two days, at least three people have asked me to tell them how I can believe what I believe. I can’t tell you in a sentence. I would be glad to talk with you for weeks, for months about how I’ve come to where I’ve come, but that’s like asking someone the entire history of their genetics and how they have the DNA that they have. It’s been embedded in them since the beginning, because of all these things that happened throughout time, and its personal and unique and amazing.
My message to you all is this: please don’t reject morality or goodness or love or hope just because the answers are hard to find. Even though we can never with purely our minds be 100% sure about anything, that doesn’t mean we should reject things that we can be sure of when we use both our minds and our hearts. When we use only our minds or only our hearts, we hurt ourselves, we hurt those we love, we hurt humanity. We are made with the gift of a mind and of emotions and of a body. Lets please not reject any part of that gift, and work together to understand truth and love and what is right.
