Anonymous asked:
The backstory is that when I was a kid I was pretty Catholic. I liked going to Mass and everything, but I could never really wrap my head around the God thing. I knew about science, I knew that magic wasn’t real, and I knew not to believe everything you hear, that unbelievable stories people passed around often turned out to be just urban legends. But I still tried to be a good Catholic, and pray and fast and do all the things you were supposed to do.
At some point, I heard the story of the Incredulity of Thomas. It made me feel terrible–if Thomas was a bad person because he didn’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead without evidence, then I was a bad person too. I tried to believe, but I didn’t know how you were supposed to make yourself believe something that didn’t make any sense. I started praying every night before I went to sleep, asking God if He existed to please help me believe in him, to give me a sign, or maybe just come in the night and fix my brain because it was clearly missing the faith module.
Then one day when I was 16, something clicked. I realized God didn’t exist, and that was okay. I wasn’t a bad person for thinking He didn’t exist because, you know, the belief system that told me I was a bad person wasn’t true because he didn’t exist. I felt tremendously relieved and happy. I stopped praying. I still went to Mass, but it went from something I looked forward to to something I dreaded. All the priests saying these wonderful things about Jesus, all the people following along in the prayers and saying the Nicene Creed, did they really believe God existed, or were they just going along and pretending? Were they just silly and deluded, or evil men perpetuating this structure of lies that hurt people?
That phase lasted a couple of years. After I had time to get over all the negative feelings I had about Catholicism, I started to miss it more and more. The music, the weekly ritual of Mass, the fasting and giving things up for Lent, the comfort of praying every night before I went to sleep. I started getting into my hypercontrarian Social Conservative for the Signaling phase and thinking a lot about the value of ritual and community and tradition and hiding in a corner of the campus bookstore to read First Things when it came out every month and thinking people who get it. (Yeah yeah I know, thou shalt not steal.)
This thread is actually a fairly good summary of the argument in my head going on about religion these days? I was really excited when I came across the argument that the focus on belief and brain-states in religion is actually sort of modern and degenerate and Protestant-centric, and religion at its heart is about participation in rites and tradition. But on the other hand, I’m still unsure about the value of rites and tradition that are grounded in a belief system that ultimately I can’t get behind. I mean, a lot of Catholicism really is founded on the whole Jesus thing and on the concomitant system of moral beliefs that, well, I don’t agree with. A lot of Mass still feels hollow to me, knowing that it’s not true. The most meaningful ritual I’ve ever participated in was an effective altruist ritual, because I really believed in the value and truth of everything we were saying and doing. But, well, if EA is a religion it’s a religion that was founded in 2011 by some nerds who spent a lot of time arguing about utilitarianism on the internet. It’s not exactly a two-thousand-year-old tradition passed down by your ancestors for almost that long that you can baptize your children into.
This is silly, but this issue is actually the biggest thing one of my friends and I fight over. Whenever I say that I want to go to Mass or refer to Catholics as “we” or express an opinion on the direction the Church should take, she accuses me of appropriating religion. She thinks that participating in religion without believing in God is wrong, that if I don’t believe then I’m only being Catholic ironically, and that’s disrespectful of people who are actually religious. And maybe she’s right? I don’t know, I do a lot of things ironically I guess, not that I’m trying to it just happens, and even from the inside it’s hard to tell the difference between doing something ironically and just doing it. How do you do something really, truly sincerely?
And I just don’t get her attitude toward religion. She’s one of the people I mention in this post: she believes in God (or uh, believes that she believes in God), but this belief doesn’t really lead her to do anything except go to church twice a year or so to hear the pretty music. I mean, if the Christian god is real, doesn’t that change everything? Doesn’t that affect every thought you have, every action you take? Isn’t it better to try to do something, even if the faith module in your brain is broken and maybe you’re just doing it for the signaling or maybe you’re doing it because you want to but you’re telling yourself you’re doing it for the signaling so you can maintain some level of ironic detachment, than not to try at all?
So yeah idk if any of that was helpful anon. I don’t really have any settled thoughts, just a lot of feelings and questions.