Good, Better, or Evil...
So, I am currently in the fourth week of the period in the Catholic religion called Lent. This is a time where us Catholics take time to look back on the past year. Give thanks, as we always do, and present a sacrifice in honor of Jesus dying for our sins. Basically, we sacrifice something now, because Jesus sacrificed his life for us. Some people give up candy or chocolate, others give up a favorite food, some give up alcohol, etc. For the last decade, give or take 2 or three years, my sacrifice has been to fast for 24 hours once a week. Usually, it's my last meal on Thursday until Friday and then I can eat seafood. So I have come to ask myself, does this yearly ritual make me a good Catholic? I am not an avid churchgoer, but I do pray faithfully. Personally, I do not believe that actual organized prayer is necessary for organized religion. The concept that being in the House of God makes your voice heard above others seems silly to me. I mean, God is omnipotent, so why does anyone need to be in a church, synagogue or mosque to prove his or her devotion? Not that I have an aversion to people partaking in this, it's just not a cornerstone in my own beliefs. But anyway, I think about the Lord often, and during Lent, I am literally thinking about my religion at a minimum 24 hours a week. So I do this 6 times a year, which breaks down to 144 hours a year. But the average Mass is between 45-60 minutes and if a person goes every week, that's 52 hours actually thinking about God, Jesus and your faith. Now, I'm not saying I'm better or worse than anyone else, but considering my sacrifice is actual effort as opposed to ritual, would people consider me a bad or good Catholic? The reason why I put this out there is because we joke around saying silly things like "you're a bad Jew if you eat pork." But really, who is to judge? How can any of us know what is really being a good religious person? And this is my problem with organized religion, no one knows jack. Shouldn't we all hold our beliefs the best we can and not pass judgment on others because they celebrate in a different way? And yes, this is an age old question, but it's deeper than that, because although people have been unacceptable of other religions for centuries, people are unacceptable of people within their own religion because they don't practice the same way. What is it about religion that turns fairly normal people into all knowing agents of God? Why can't people live by the universal creed of do as to others as you would want others to do unto you? How come that's not enough?
2 Comments:
Are there rules in religion? And who determines these rules? And how do we prioritize these rules? Do we think women as an abomination if they do anything like a man? Should we stone premarital sex offenders? Should we stone disobedient children? The Bible says many things, so who gets to decide which passages we stick by and which ones we don't. Who gets to decide how to interpret them?
If the Bible is God's word, why does it have so many versions? Is He playing tricks on us, telling only a few of us what the REAL rules of going to Heaven are?
The biggest failure of organized religion is its ease at thowing common sense and intelligence out the door. "Faith" vs. "Doubt" are a battle that organized religion will often try to emphasize, although most people miss that the "Faith" and "Doubt" don't necessarily apply to their depiction of religion, but to God himself. People are inspired by the grandiose depictions of God's work that they fail to realize that evidence of God's work occurs daily. It sometimes has no flash, and it seems routine, but it is evidence of God, and yes, it can be called science. Instead we must believe in something "supernatural" in order to believe God is there. It is sad that people must believe in the unbelievable to believe in God.
The reason you ask, because if we believed that God did make sense most of the time, why would we believe their sometimes wild mischaracterizations of the Bible.
Am I bad person because I don't go to Church? Those claim that it is in the Bible, and therefore if you don't, you're disobeying God directly. Am I going to Hell if I eat meat on Friday? Disobeying God directly.
But is the real reason these people hold onto these strict, petty rules because they realize it is easy to follow these little sacrifices than to truly become a good person. If they follow more of these rules but still hold onto the hatred and disdain not mentioned in the Bible, they will still be better than us. Is this religion, or is it moral superiority/inferiority complexes at work?
Or even worse, is it control? They care not about religion itself, but to use the power of blind "faith" to pursuade you for their own causes. Is Church just a forum for priests to "interpret" the Bible into their own agendas. It wouldn't be the first time in our history, and I doubt the last.
My belief in religion is that of the passage of the summary of the Commandments, "Love God with all your heart, mind, body, and spirit" and "Love thy neighbor." The rest is just a story of how it was done. As in any other story there are examples of good and bad. The interpretations should be left to the individual. We should have a mind of our own, otherwise why would have God given it to us.
The "Golden Rule" isn't enough for many religious people because a big tenet of many religions, especially Christianity, is to convert others into your particular fold. Or to put it another way, "leave no soul behind."
Because of this every person that chooses to ignore a religious path is a catastrophic loss. Call it a battle of plainly obvious versus plainly obvious. One set of people knows that a formally spirtual life is the only way to go, another knows that a formally spiritual life isn't at all necessary.
People convinced that they're doing God's work in this regard can be extremely annoying. They're the folks who hold up pictures of surgery on the highway to gross out everyone else. They're the folks who insist on putting religion in the public square. They're the folks who know only that the Founding Fathers were Christians, leaving out the fact that our government was designed specifically to be cleansed of taxpayer-funded religious influence.
Ed's questions are even easier. Of course there are rules in religion--those rules are invented, interpreted, and prioritized by man. The Bible was written by men. That as much as anything else is what I can't get my head around. Enthusiastically religious people tend to think that the Bible was written by God, it wasn't. The same people also believe the specific rules of their specific denomination were written by God, they weren't.
The fact is that many of the rules you come across in the Bible are based in preserving your life (don't eat pork because it's riddled with bacteria, avoid meat because it's healthier) or perpetuating a patriarchal society(about a billion examples).
The Bible is a handy little set of stories that can teach you to be a better person. Unfortunately it's been manipulated for centuries.
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