“Belief is a beautiful armor, but makes for the heaviest sword.”
I got a call from my father this morning, telling me I had to take down a post on my Facebook. In the comments, my own lengthy reply included a mention of my family, and the manner in which I’ve seen them profess their beliefs about homosexuality, other religions, and politics in general. He demanded that I take the post down, because it was disrespectful and misrepresentative. I don’t particularly think it was either.
I’ve woken up at home to my sister and mother explaining to my younger brothers that Muslims are terrorists. I dragged myself out of bed just to clear this up. When confronted, they clarified, “Well, maybe notallof them are terrorists, but the terrorists are all Muslim.” Still wrong, and a bad assumption to give kids.
My teenage sister once explained to me how she learned through her Catholic education that homosexuals are “only gay because they were abused as children.”
My mother is earning her PhD in a related field, yet she still professes that evolution isn’t possible outside of simple population development. She doesn’t believe in speciation, which is one of the major whole points of evolution.
I am bombarded on a daily basis by Facebook statuses professing Catholicism and Christianity. It’s a bit much. Still, that’s their right to put on Facebook. But if I put up anything even questioning the Church on the terms of the Church, we have a problem. Sometimes I call for reform, and it’s a problem. Sometimes I outright reject the entire notion of religion, and that’s certainly a problem.
I’ll admit that sometimes I’m begging for a fight, but I can’t help it. It’s so agitating to see people try to sway others social, moral, and political opinions with their misperceived conceptions of religion. Often the profess things in the name of the Bible that aren’t even in the Bible. They love to blame others as selectively interpreting a passage, yet they’re just as guilty of the same thing.
Speaking of selective, urging people to vote solely based on their pro-life sentiments is a problem for me. I don’t even know where I stand on the issue, but I don’t think that it’s theonlything that matters. And if you want to present the issue as a religious obligation, you have to also take into account other political issues that are more or less religiously relevant. Jesus teaches you to love others, yet I see you casting them down. Jesus teaches you to give to others, yet you preach some form of Objectivism.
I cannot follow a religion that goes directly against my own morals. I believe that the most important aspect of my moral code is that I don’t like to do anything that harms others. I do things that go against the Catholic faith, but I know that I am in no way harming another person. On the other hand, there are things that my Catholic family and friends urge me to do (or vote) that would directly hurt other people, and I refuse to do this.
I think that altering one’s morals for the sake of a religion is a problem, and I’m unwilling to go through with it, and I’m unwilling to sit quietly.
I often wonder if people who assert their faith in their religion with absolute confidence do it because they struggle with cognitive dissonance.
They must struggle internally, because they are expressing certainty in something which, by its very nature, cannot be ascertained.
As such, these people may put on a front, presenting their belief system as irrefutable because they know that it is impossible to prove.
asked a sign on a church that I passed today. Clearly, their intended implications were that the results would be catastrophic.
“But how would we ever have noticed?” I mused.
You’d think you’d know that.
So I went and saw this on the big screen last night. What fun.
You prolly can’t tell from lookin’ at me, but I have a serious thing with Charles Schultz and Peanuts. I do. Snoopy is my spirit animal.
They were showing it in an old theater, the kind with a balcony…
Charles Schultz is a genius.
