Faith and Reason: My Experience with Religion - Part 3 of ?
I've decided to extend this as I underestimated the time it would take to finish it. Part 1 is here and part 2 here.
The day came when the classes started. I had already been reading some books on the Church and I was surprised by the many rules in the Catechism (Catholic rule book). Especially how easy it was to commit a mortal sin, which separated you from the grace of God until a confession was made. This was serious, if you died in this state, you were liable to end up in hell. There are many sins that are considered mortal including intentional murder and rape. However, using contraception was also in this category along with masturbation. I started to ask more questions and started to read more about hell and eternal damnation.
It really bothered me how seemingly easy it was to end up in hell, forever. I was supposed to believe people who never heard of Christ or had nothing to do with Christianity were somehow doomed forever. In one of the confirmation classes, a priest spent almost the entire session explaining how hell was real and that lots of people ended up there. Some of the teachers tried their best to explain it away and told me to just have faith. If I was confirmed, I was confessing a certain amount of faith in the church and it’s teachings and the rightness of it all.
It just didn’t make any sense. How was an eternal punishment justice for even an entire life of constant sin? Somehow I could not let this go. I was really surprised at the lack of interest in the ramifications of this teaching. The clincher was when one of the teachers said that if I had doubts, it was coming from the devil. So I had to doubt my own mind? If I doubted my mind then how would I come to any decision fearing it might be from the devil? The dominoes fell and I dropped out of the classes.
Now this class which was supposed to confirm me in my beliefs opened a floodgates of doubts. It also was making me question how I came to believe certain things at all. I started reading how the bible was put together and how it had changed over the years, not just the translations but entire books were taken out during the protestant reformation. What did this mean? Was God guiding all this or was it just men? Maybe some of the writings were genuine and others not. It was all very confusing at the time.
Stay tuned for part 4
