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My Problems with Religion (Part 1)
My Problems with Religion (Part 1)
Let me state right up front that I am a spiritual person. Most of the time, I believe in God, whatever he/she/it is. I truly believe that there is something higher up in the pecking order of the universe than you and me. Albert Einstein said that he believed in God because the universe was just too perfect for it all to have happened by chance.
I have had experiences with spirits (ghosts). So I know first-hand that there is a plane of being beyond our consciousness.
So yes, I do believe that there is some sort of higher intelligence in the cosmos.
I don’t, however, believe in religion.
When I discovered last week that my step-mom was really sick, I began thinking about these things, and I’d like to share with you some of those thoughts.
Why are there so many secrets? Why are there so many mysteries? What happens to us after we die? Do we continue on, or is it over? Why do we worry about it? Why do we, like I am right now, ponder it? There is no definitive answer. There is no way of knowing. (Personally, I believe that there is some sort of afterlife. Whether that is reincarnation, or going to a higher plane of existence, or actually walking the Pearly Gates, I haven’t got a clue. I just have a hard time believing that when I die, it’s the end of everything. Some would say, I’m sure, that I’m just fooling myself. Perhaps. What I know is, it works for me.)
And if there is an afterlife, is there a Heaven and a Hell? I’m pretty sure that is no such place as Purgatory. According to what I was taught as a Catholic boy growing up in the fifties and early sixties, Purgatory was the place where you went if you died with venial sins on your soul. (There were two types of sins: venial and mortal. Venial sins were things that you did or said or thought that only slightly irritated God. So, if you died with them on your soul, they were forgivable, but you had to do hard time in the celestial prison called Purgatory in order to expunge your record before entering into Paradise. (For some reason, sins stuck to your soul. I’m not sure how.) However, when your sentence was up, you could go through The Pearly Gates and be in the presence of God for all eternity.
The other type of sin, mortal sin, was REALLY bad, and it was something that REALLY pissed God off something fierce. If you killed somebody, or mutilated somebody, burned down a church, or looked at a Playboy Magazine, you committed a mortal sin. The only way to get one of those off your soul was to go confession and get absolution from a priest. (Venial sins stained your soul with washable ink, so they could be removed easily. Mortal sins were written on your soul with a Heavenly Sharpie that was loaded with indelible ink, and only a priest had the acetone solution that could wipe it clean. SOOOooooOOOO, if you gaped at Miss January and then died before you go to confession, the mark was on your soul permanently, and you went to Hell.)
There was also another place created by the early movers and shakers of THE CHURCH. (When I was an altar boy at St. Mary Catholic Church in Portland, CT, we were taught that there was only One TRUE Church, i.e., the CATHOLIC Church, and I was lucky enough to be raised in it!), That place was LIMBO. Limbo was where you went if you died as a baby before your parents had a chance to get you baptized into the ONE, TRUE FAITH. I guess they figured that you really hadn’t done anything wrong; so they couldn’t send you to Hell. And you didn’t die with any sins on your soul other than ORIGINAL SIN, thanks to old Adam and Eve. (Everybody in the freaking universe is born with Adam and Eve’s Original Sin on their soul; thus we are all guilty of something before we can even get started!) So they had to create this new place for the unbaptized babies. (I hear that Limbo no longer exists now. It was dissolved by a Papal Decree a few years back…Amazing that somebody can do that, isn’t it? Wipe out a celestial place that has been in existence since the beginning of time with the stroke of a pen!)
Incredible, isn’t it? I mean, who thinks this stuff up?
posted on July 9, 2008 5:10 AM ()
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