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EvenBob
EvenBob
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Joined: Jul 18, 2010
September 1st, 2012 at 6:13:10 PM permalink
Quote: FleaStiff

Gee, I guess them Priests are similar to Doctors who move medical personnel around but don't want to make waves... .



Thats pretty much it. Priests don't grow on tree's,
they're far too valuable to the Church to just get
rid of because they traumatized some kid for life.
The Church realizes this is a centuries old problem for
them and they have the centuries old solution:
cover it up, pretend it never happened.
"It's not called gambling if the math is on your side."
24Bingo
24Bingo
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Joined: Jul 4, 2012
September 2nd, 2012 at 3:28:03 PM permalink
I remember when I was a child, when the prayer for the departed came, I suddenly realized how little there was separating the Catholic conception of the afterlife from all the others I'd heard of, and thought of all the smiling faces "waiting in joyful hope" snatched away into the abyss... like Release in The Giver. It terrified me, and I had to be escorted out of the Mass crying. My parents set me up to speak with "the monsignor," (I didn't actually know until I left the Church that you're not really supposed to call them that - my parents I think still do - but never mind), and all he said was that "other people believe you can go no further" (which seemed such a tame picture of oblivion), "but we believe..." and he showed me a garden (which at that age seemed quite an ill picture of heaven), but I couldn't shake the unease of that opening clause, "we believe." You shall believe, because you are one of us, and for no better reason, as are given for every other fact you've been told or will be.

A little older - it can't be too much older, because I think we'd just been taught some variant of the myth of Nanabozho (by some other name, but I can't remember which) and the great flood in school - on a Sunday afternoon, a local rabbi's son was visiting. The subject came up somehow, and I compared it to the myth of the sage-king Yu, and he brought up Gilgamesh in response. I wondered why there were so many flood myths, and his answer was "maybe there really was a flood," followed by us talking about how, from what little we knew of ancient history, it might have meteorologically taken place. At some point, I think I said "of course there was really a flood, but..." and he gave some ambiguous "yes, but..." in response - yes, there was really a flood, but what about the real reality, effectively said the rabbi's son to the Catholic boy who would be at afternoon mass in two hours.

Still I would be defensive of the faith, cringing when someone described God as a "fairy tale" or the Bible as "abhorrent bronze age fables" or whatnot (not having absorbed how abhorrent much of it really was), and still I was confirmed, again, with the letter that there must be a God "even if this 'God' is only the random selection of quantum states," or whatever I wrote. (I still remember when I was asked in CCD to draw someone practicing their religion and drew my pre-9/11 concept of a suicide bomber.) This changed in college, when I took a course in evolutionary biology, an obvious fill where the professor spent most of his time arguing with creationist writings - not because I had any problem with evolution (again, raised Catholic), but because in discussion sessions, where we were meant to talk out just how wrong these creationists were, there were no creationists I could see, but maybe half the class were religious in some way - and I found myself jumping down their throats. They seemed to me more ridiculous than the creationists we were reading, who at least were consistent in their acceptance of those anachronistic myths, rather than these people, who were fighting to defend Truths they knew were wrong! I don't think my beliefs changed then - I remember many musings on the nature of reality that all assumed there to be no god - but this was the last straw breaking my absurd compartmentalization, "God, who I believe exists, is not a part of my concept of reality unless specifically challenged," which I think is where most theists in the modern world are.
The trick to poker is learning not to beat yourself up for your mistakes too much, and certainly not too little, but just the right amount.
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