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In regard to the Auntie Pinko article dealing with the person beset on all sides by nasty atheists, I offer the following in response/addition/consolation:
OK. I am a former Catholic who turned towards atheism at a very early age. I simply couldn't reconcile the things I absolutely knew to be true with what my faith was asking me to believe. It's not that I had any trouble believing in God at that age, I just had a real problem with the fact that it was written in their own texts what he was, but the clergy just didn't seem to know much about him. You've all known that mouthy kid who asks all of the "uncomfortable" questions in Sunday School/CCD/whatever, right? Well, I wasn't him. I was the one who watched everyone else ask their little "inconvenient" questions and became completely disillusioned at the paucity of satisfying information within the answers. It's like these were people of extraordinary faith possessing no reason. With the collected theological underpinnings of Catholicism spanning the 2000 years since Christ walked the earth, you'd think that they'd be able to come up with something convincing that didn't hem, haw, and hedge.
This is where me and faith in God broke company. Here I was, an impressionable kid, trying desperately, for his own future survival in a world ruled obliquely upon the precepts of logic and immutable physical truths, being told by people, who had no interest and respect for reason, how the world works and what is expected of me by an apparently capricious deity. I knew, just from my own experiences, that faith and reason were not mutually exclusive in the human mind, but here were people who chose that intellectual end. If I was going to know spirituality of any sort, I was listening to the wrong people. How knowledgeable could they really be if they could simply eschew reason as a casual inconvenience of an inferior material world?
I had only one real "uncomfortable" question of my instructors. My question was simple: How can reason be anathema to faith if God respects it enough to create it, nurture it, and expose it in the very natural world he created? Even though this was, at the time, expressed in the language of a second-grader with a simple, guileless inquiry, the recipient of this query became red-faced, angry, and otherwise visibly agitated. You could also hear the crickets chirping. No answer. At that point I realized that if I was every going to survive in the spiritual world, I'd have to look elsewhere for my battle armor.
Unlike other people, who abandon Catholicism for something more "honest" that doesn't have fealty to a church that looks more like a corporation than a concept of spiritual enlightenment, like Protestantism in one form or another, I chose to simply abandon the concept of God. I mean, really, has the flavor of religion every really been the problem? Has the papacy ever really been the problem? If anything, the pageantry and institution of Catholicism is its draw. It has traditions, requirements, and a heritage that spans the globe. If answers to my questions about here and the hereafter existed and could satisfy my curiosity, it could. Because you are born into it, the people within it seem to start from a position of imperfection and strive to be more like its ideals. 'Adopted' religions tend to be chosen on the basis of what already matches one's character, at least from what I've seen. People don't want to change or adhere to uncomfortable or difficult stricture.
Catholicism says you're a sinner? Then New Christian Religion #25 says you're not! You're home!
A little cynical, I know. But then no one becomes an atheist without being a little cynical. Take our dear President... please! I joke, but, I don't believe for a minute that he's any different now that he's born-again. He was an impressively odious and selfish little shit before his 'epiphany', as he apparently is now. Only now he seems to think God thinks that being an odious and selfish little shit is OK, just as long you do it his name instead of your own. Has his born-again-ness improved his character in non-trivial Christ-like ways? No, but it's given him a divine mandate to jam his shitty character down our collective throats. Anyone know the Heimlich?
I feel the need to provide this backing information, because the Auntie Pinko article this week had someone having trouble with the nasty atheist: the one who insults Christianity and its adherents, and thinks that everyone of faith is a deluded whackjob. I know these ostensibly rare guys and gals, and quite honestly I get offended by them, too. Simple reason: my mom was a very intelligent and reasoned person who was faithful to Catholicism until the day of her death. Their comments seem to indicate that they would consider my mother a deluded idiot. And NO ONE talks about my mom that way, y'hear?
I understand the pain of this person, I really do. It must feel terrible, even lowering, to have to justify your faith to someone who expresses nothing but contempt or disregard for it. I know, because I've had to do it more times in my life than any faithful Christian has ever dreamed it would ever be possible and necessary to do so.
But let's be completely reasonable, here. For every nasty atheist prick (only a small percentage of us are 'nasty' and we are already a miniscule percentage of people in this country and the world), there are at least 100-200 nasty little born-again pricks who just can't seem to get off our backs. While not all of them have the brass to bug us, and certainly those that have the brass do not bug us constantly, they invade our space with much greater frequency than the nasty atheists invade theirs. You know what we do? We suck it up. After we tire of sucking it up, we retort. We've been at it so long, our retorts are getting clever and biting, often vicious (possibly viscous). Auntie Pinko is right, it just builds. It is unreasonable to believe that after years of the occasional attempts at saving, the out-of-nowhere impromptu harangues and disgust by so-called Xtians in our dismal lack of belief in their God, and the simple awful contempt shown us because we don't have the ability to set aside crucial questions regarding our faith (any more than they do) and just give in to ritual and morbid preoccupation with death, that some of us don't go to the 'dark side' and tear into people we perceive as our antagonists.
We've got people around the world (and here, too!) who think that atheism isn't faith? Well, because I have spent my life thinking about my beliefs (my faith was not a given), and I would say that belief is as strong and purposeful in my life as it is in any 'person of faith', and that, to me, IS faith. I've had to defend this position often so. Quite honestly, I'm tired of feeling obligated to do so. A person of a liberal mind should be able to accept that truth, right, without having to have it proven to them?
So while I have much empathy for this person of faith that AP has saw fit to counsel, I also step back and say, "while I don't feel that you deserve such contempt, now at least you know what it feels like to have your most core and, dare I say, sacred beliefs mocked, questioned, and dismissed as idiotic or pathetic". A lesson may have been learned here, inadvertently. While this person may not do it him/herself, this person certainly knows people who do mock and chastise people for their beliefs, and just because those beliefs are ones he/she shares, this person says little in admonition. Perhaps now, this person can put it in perspective and develop a little understanding for the person who mocks them, where it comes from, and express compassion for them, rather than offense at their careless remarks.
After all, isn't THAT what Jesus would do?
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