Originally Posted by GreenLantern2814
My recollections of Calgary Catholic school religious studies, was that it was pretty tame.
It tried to contextualize the Bible a bit, and had very broad strokes “be good to people, blessed are the cheese makers, other religions have valid beliefs” sort of messages.
We’d have assemblies that were led by Father Bob, who’s nearly the most secular priest I’ve ever seen. He was fundraiser, not a hellraiser.
Did they discourage sex before marriage? Yes. Is that the worst thing to do to adolescents? Eh. I dunno. Having a kid when you’re still a fetus yourself seems like a bad idea. The birth control stuff is weird, you’d think they’d want to at least cover their bases. But when they tried to tell us masturbation was a sin, every boy in the room went “then send me to hell”
Nobody didn’t think evolution was real, or that dinosaurs were a hoax, or that the universe was a millennia younger than 10 billion.
But god is just as real. There’s a reason a version of god shows up everywhere, because something about that is true. And it doesn’t mean there’s a magic genie, but it does mean there are some universals to the human experience that transcend space and time. And religious stories do a better job of articulating those metaphors than just about anything.
Don’t let #######s take God away from you / God and its nature are unknowable, and you should always beware of people who claim to know unknowable things.
Your sense of right and wrong, your conscience, your soul - that’s all real. Only a fool would argue otherwise. Some grubby old men in Rome don’t know what happens to your soul when you die, but you know deep down whether or not you deserve to burn.
Because me, I think we get the afterlife we think we deserve. You know the sort of life you led, and if you did something that deserves an eternal punishment (like actually deserves it, not failure to abide by some Cherry-picked passage from a 2,000 year old copy of the Silmarillion), God or whatever you want to call the cosmic force that binds the universe together will see that you receive it.
But if you spent your life trying to do the right thing, trying to be honest and honourable, and trying to be brave even when you weren’t, when the time comes to stare death in the face, maybe you see your dogs again and have your grandparents remember you.
Maybe.
|