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My Problems with Religion (Part Four)
My Problems with Religion (Part Four)
When the idea first struck me to write a post about my thoughts on organized religion, I thought that the subject would be exhausted in one or two posts. However, I have been reading the excellent posts that Mellowdee has been publishing on the same topic, and her piercing questions and striking observations about growing up Christian have fueled fires inside of me that make me continue to delve into the subject matter. (If you are interested in this topic, you should visit her blog and read these posts. To me, they are absolutely fascinating, articulate, and very intelligently written.)
Most of my youth in the church was spent being afraid – afraid that God was going to get angry with me. Afraid of the nuns. Afraid that I was going to go to Hell. In fact, with the Hell thing, I spent most of my childhood absolutely convinced that I was Hell-bound because I had committed so many mortal sins that I had lost track of them (as George Carlin once said, "HEAVY on the impure thoughts, Father!). If I lost track of them, then I couldn’t confess them. If I couldn’t confess them, I wouldn’t receive absolution for them . With no absolution, there was no forgiveness. With no forgiveness, there was no Heaven. I had it all figured out, and I was miserable!
My religion confused me. On the one hand, I was told that my body was a Temple of God, and that I was made in God’s image. On the other hand, I was informed that certain parts of my body were dirty, and certain bodily functions were offensive to God. How could that be? One view seemed to be diametrically opposed to the other one, and yet they were both preached as Ultimate Truths to me by the nuns, the priests and my mother.
Then there was the oxymoron of a loving and fatherly God who seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in meting out punishment. I was told that God loved me and watched over me. I was also told that I should fear God because he was JUST WAITING to punish me for my sins! By creating sexual drives in humans that must be supressed and making other sins almost irresistable, it seemed to me that God was purposely setting me up for failure and punishment. It also seemed that He was willing to dole out the most severe of punishments for the slightest of infractions.
God was loving, and God was vengeful. How can both statements be true?
I was also taught that there was only one way into Heaven, and that was through the Catholic faith.
Only Catholics were in Heaven? You mean to tell me that Gandhi never made it? What about Buddha? Or Aristotle? Socrates? King David? None of them were Catholic. They weren’t good enough?
How about all of my friends who were Jewish or (shudder) Protestant? Not one of them was going to go Heaven?
My best friend when I was growing up was Jewish. I remember being troubled by learning that only Catholics went to Heaven. Surely God would make an exception for Jay! Jay was a great guy! He bought ice cream for me down at Annino’s Drug Store when I didn’t have enough allowance for it. His fixed the flat tire on my bike without me having to give him any baseball cards as payment. He stood up for me to other kids when I wasn’t around.
When I asked my mother about it, she told me that I was wrong. That God never made exceptions. Never. And that, in Jay’s case, she was DOUBLY sure that God wouldn’t change his mind because Jay’s mother used to be Catholic, but she married a Jewish man and changed her religion. That, I guess, REALLY pissed God off because Jay’s mother knew what the truth was, and she renounced it!
Poor Jay!
Okay, maybe Jews and Protestants couldn't pass through the celestial turnstile… but what about my dog? She was the sweetest creature that ever lived, and she wasn’t not going to make it to any kind of reward? She wasn’t human so she didn’t have Original Sin on her soul. And she never hurt a fly. (Will Rogers once said, "If there are no dogs in Heaven, when I die, I want to go where THEY went.")
Well, come to find out, according to my mother and the parish priest, dogs don’t have immortal souls. (How did they ever find out these things????)No animal does. Only humans. (And, Lord knows, human beings were not animals!) So, when Speckles died, EVERYTHING that was Speckles died. Her soul and spirit just rotted in the ground along with her body.
I remember once thinking that Speckles was SO LUCKY not to have an immortal soul, because then she didn’t have to worry about going to Hell. (By the way, Speckles was a dalmation. Cool name, huh?)
Heaven sounded more like an exclusive club filled with smug, harp-playing hypocrites rather than a place of eternal bliss.
When I was a kid, I had to go to confession every Saturday and to communion at Mass every Sunday. (If I missed confession or communion, I was grounded for the following week.) And, if I received Communion with a sin on my soul, that was a MORTAL sin! Sometimes, with teenage hormones raging like crazy, it was pretty tough not to commit a mortal sin from Saturday night to Sunday morning! (Remember, not only was sex a sin, but just THINKING about sex was a sin!) There was many a Sunday morning when I was sure that God was going to come right down from that cross on the altar and wring my sinning little neck as I approached the communion rail on my way to committing YET ANOTHER atrocity against him!
When I asked what good going to church did, my mother told me that it filled me with The Holy Ghost. (The Holy Ghost later morphed into The Holy Spirit when the Powers That Be in The Church decided that "Ghost" was much too scary of an image to be linked to God.)
Nobody really knew exactly what The Holy Ghost was. (Mellowdee speaks about this same thing rather eloquently in her blog.) We knew that God the Father was The Creator and Ultimate Judge of all Creation. God the Son was the Redeemer, and he also was The Father’s closest advisor on all matters Human. But the role of The Holy Ghost was not as well-defined.
The Holy Ghost was what filled the Apostles at Pentecost when Jesus had just been killed, and they were all hiding out in that upper room. The Holy Ghost entered each of them as a tongue of fire and gave them a shot of testosterone or something, because suddenly they all grew big balls and went out to teach the multitudes without being afraid of facing the same fate that Jesus faced at the hands of the Pharisees and the Romans.
The Holy Ghost also had something to do with sex, I figured, because at all the Catholic dances, when you were dancing too close to your date during the slow dances, a priest or nun would come up to you, pull you back a little bit from your partner, and say, "Make room for The Holy Ghost."
LET HIM GET HIS OWN DATE!
(Still more to come.)
posted on July 13, 2008 7:06 PM ()
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Second, I can't imagine the burden you must have felt growing up... You'd almost have to walk around with a note pad in your pocket to write down every time you sinned just so you wouldn't forget anything when it was time to confess. Jeez! And the thought that your Jewish friend would go to hell... man! I remember asking my parents about the tribes in Africa who never learned about God, and they said that God makes exceptions for them like he does for babies. I was happy with that. 
And finally, I love your closing statement!!
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