Dear Internet,
My parents are Roman Catholic. My mom was almost a nun, and my dad was almost a monk, but they loved each other and got married instead. As such, they have old-fashioned, stiff-pants beliefs about religion, stuffy morals, stubborn ideas, traditional ideas...
They would disown me if I ever abandoned the faith, especially my father.
Which is why I haven't told them that I don't really believe anymore.
I never believed that the eucharist turned into the body of Christ, never believed that the cheap wine turned into the blood of Christ. I never understood how the priest, a man just like the rest of us, could perform a miracle every stinkin' Sunday by saying the same boring words, over and over again... words he probably isn't even paying attention to; I know I'm not.
I never understood sainthood. How can a team of men decide that someone long dead deserves recognition, that they should be prayed to? Why are we praying to dead people? We have no proof that an afterlife even exists, yet we pray to dead people who may or may not even be in Heaven? How do we know they were even sane? If the point is to talk to God, why not just talk directly to God?
That goes for confession, too. If I want to confess a sin to God, why not just talk directly to God? Why bother telling it to an old guy who may or may not keep with his vow to not tell anyone about what I said?
How do we know that anything in the Bible is true? It's all based off of hundreds of years of oral tradition, aka people passing stories around by word of mouth. Humans have a tendency to exaggerate. How do we know how much they exaggerated, how much they twisted the stories, to spice them up? How do we know that the people writing about things before oral tradition, before language, even, were writing out of inspiration by God? How do we know that they were not just philosophers that got bored and decided to get their work published, to be read by the masses, or frustrated authors that wanted their work read? How do we know there is any truth to it at all?
And the Christians just tell me, frustratingly, that God says in the Bible that we walk by faith, but not by sight, that we should have blind faith, blessed are those who have not seen yet still believe, etc, etc.!! I'd point out to them that God and various authors of the Bible contradict themselves all over the friggin' place, but I don't think that would be taken very well by them.
Continuing on my skepticism of the Bible, the Bible was translated several times before we got the King James version, which is what we modified to get today's English version of the Bible. Some things are lost in translation between languages, so that's bad enough to make someone skeptical. But it gets worse-- not only is it a book based on oral tradition passed on for centuries, translated into several languages, and not only is the English version translated from a translated version and not directly from the original Hebrew, but the King James version almost assuredly embellishes on every frigging story in there. All the thees and thous, the repeated theme of three of everything (three was very in vogue at the time), the dragons, the imagery-- all of it is so dazzling, so obviously from that era! And we did not bother to look back at the original Hebrew and see how much of that bedazzling and embelleshing they did. We just read it as if it's absolute truth, dragons and all.
How do we know that Jesus rose from the dead? How do we know what he said, what his conversations were? How is there dialogue in the Bible? How can we know that's really what he said? Who was there, who told who? Did someone make it up? Is it basically historical fiction that was extremely embellished? Is there any truth to it at all?
Here's another thing I don't understand or believe-- Adam and Eve. How do we know those were their real names? How do we know there was a Garden of Eden, with two of every freaking animal on Earth? Doesn't that discount dinosaurs entirely? Why is there no spot on Earth where there are bones of every creature on Earth? The easy excuse they give is that the gates were closed and blocked off so none could return-- but what about the surrounding area? Wasn't it just as nice? Where did all the animals go? Did they just randomly wander off in different directions and somehow manage to go all over the globe? Why are there no dinosaurs today? If a meteor knocked them all off the surface of the Earth, how did everything else survive? If it was a disease, why did it only affect dinosaurs, and not other reptiles?
Another problem with them is that there were only two people in the world in that theory. Which means that the entire human race is a product of incest, which is strictly forbidden in the Bible. (Paradox!)
What of all the different colors of skin, the different locations of people, the different languages (Bible says: Tower of Babble! --but nothing about skin color). Did the skin color just sort of happen, depending on where they lived? --Okay, if that's the case, why the different eye shapes? Why the different kinds of hair?
Then someone said that it says in the Bible that Cain and Able married women "from other lands". Okay, and why are they not included in the creation story?
Mom says that there are creation stories similar to that of Adam and Eve all over the world. That every culture has one, so that must mean we're all united somehow, right? That this proves Adam and Eve existed? --I think not. Given the egocentricity of humans throughout history (thinking that the Earth was flat, since that is how it appears to us; thinking that the sun revolves around the Earth; thinking that the Earth is the center of the universe; thinking that the sun is the center of the universe, etc.), it would be easy to see how every culture would like to think that humans originated there. And yet, even if we did all originate from a couple of each ethnicity, how do we draw the lines to know how many ethnicities there originally were? How many original couples were there? And if there were so few people to start with, we are all inbred to some extent. And inbreeding is expressly forbidden in the Bible.
All right, so where did we come from? I do not believe in evolution, either. We did not descend from apes. If we did, then that would mean that there was an original form of ape which had a bunch of mutated babies, some of which became chimpanzees, some of which became gorillas, some of which became humans, depending on biological factors. And incest is still involved, because how else would such drastic mutations occur? We do not even have the same number of chromosomes or genes as other species of primate. That is a major genetic issue.
Going back even further, if that ape descended from an original mammal, which evolved from a mutated fish, which evolved from an intelligent bacteria... the whole story sounds stranger and stranger as we go. And it always involves drastic mutation and incest.
And if we did evolve, if I am wrong about evolution and it did happen, then why are we the only 'intelligent' life forms on this planet? What makes us so special? Why are there not other 'intelligent' life forms evolving and learning languages, speaking with us, communicating with us in some way? Why is there no further evolution of species? Why have we stopped at this particular point? What is so special about the way things are now that we have frozen the evolutionary chain of events here?
However, I also do not believe in the Big Bang theory. For one, there cannot have been nothing in the beginning, and then suddenly a dense ball of matter appeared and exploded and caused life to spontaneously form and mutate drastically. That is just ridiculous. (That, and science still has yet to explain how it was possible; there are even scientists who will say they can prove it is not possible.) Well, if that is not how we came to be, then that means that we must have been shaped by something divine.
But what?
Why are we here? Who is God, if there is one? Is there such a thing as fate at all, or is that just an idea we made up to comfort ourselves? Does God really care about us, does he really help us, or is he cold and unfeeling, observing us as if we are some kind of experiment? Does he reach out and help particular individuals with particular circumstances because of some grander plan? Is there a grander plan? Or is everything spontaneous, affected by our actions? Do we write our own futures completely by ourselves? Does God look over our shoulder and give us hints? Is everything we do pre-determined? Why give us free will if there is fate?
These and many other questions way heavily on my mind, and have done for some time... I shall leave you for now to ponder these.
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