I’m giving up the faith

To be more precise, I stopped believing about a couple months ago. Although that was part of a longer process of doubting and reconsidering, and I’m still making sense of my new lack of faith (which is why I haven’t posted anything on it until now).

It’s still a bit weird to think about. My faith was pretty much the central part of my life. This blog was just a personal blog, but it pretty quickly became almost entirely a religious blog. Heck, I was thinking about becoming a consecrated religious at the start of the year.

Why?

It’s difficult to pin down exactly why. There are a lot of reasons and they are all tangled up together. But I’ll try to untangle them now. I’m not looking to offend or convert anyone, or start an argument, but just want to share my thoughts.

1. Christian ethics and spirituality is too passive and weak (sorry)

I’ve read a lot of Christian spiritual books, and at the heart is a deep submissiveness to God, to authorities, and even to oppressors. The central theme is giving ourselves up, abandoning ourselves, passively trusting and submitting. The Church and scriptures talk about the Christian as a child, a servant, a slave, and a bride (in a clearly patriarchal sense).

Now, I’m not saying that this is all wrong. It’s not. There’s a deep truth and beauty to it really. But it lacks the wisdom of the opposite principle, that life has to be grasped, that (at least at times) we have to imitate Jacob and wrestle with God. We have to fight for justice and our rights, both for ourselves and for others.

I don’t want to be too harsh, but Christianity appears to be a religion for losers, that praises being a loser. “Blessed are the poor”, “the first shall be last”, “give to whoever asks of you”, “resist not evil”. We can make sense of this by taking a deeply anti physical, anti world stance, holding that everything the wicked might take, even our lives, are ultimately worthless, and I think the early Church did believe this, but the Church no longer really holds such a stance and I don’t want to either. I want to stake my claim and fight in this world, for this life. I don’t want to be a slave/servant/child/bride, I want to be the master of my own life.

2. The Church doesn’t believe

The more you try to take the faith seriously, the more you see contradictions, and the more you realise that most of the Church, and in particular the hierarchy, don’t care. They care about some things very passionately of course, from various points of doctrine to social causes to liturgical minutiae, but I think very few really care about the faith or holiness. I’ll give a few examples.

• Confession – if confession is really so important, why is it so infrequently offered? The easiest answer is that few priests think it really matters.
• Hell – why are so few people scared of hell, both for themselves and for their loved ones and for the non Christian majority of the world? Again, the easiest answer is that no one really believes.
• Women veiling – why did the Church abandon a practice with crystal clear roots in scripture and apostolic tradition? And why is there not even a proper justification given for this change? People claim it was merely a local cultural practice, but the scriptures themselves explain it on a completely different basis, arguing from nature, the creation account, and the angels. The easiest explanation again, is that the Church just doesn’t care. [For the record, I have no desire for women to be covered, I just wanted my church to be consistent with its supposed beliefs]
• Jesus’s teachings – too often I went to mass and Jesus says something remarkable, only for the priest to either ignore it completely to speak about something else, or even worse, they contradict or weaken Jesus’s words to the point of being just dull. Again, it seems they just don’t believe.

3. Hell

The doctrine of hell brings a whole mess of problems. I’ll list them out:

• Does God want people to go to hell? If not, then in the end He doesn’t get His way and His victory is incomplete. If He does (as Aquinas and others taught) then He’s not so loving (except in an abstract “ground of being” kind of way that isn’t what anyone really means by love).
• Is hell a good thing or a bad thing? If God is willing to send sinners to hell as a punishment, why shouldn’t we be happy with this outcome?
• Is the criteria really right? ‘No salvation outside the church’ – that’s just absurd. I know there’s the idea of “invisible Christians”, but that is either an exception to the general rule, or it’s a sneaky rejection of the rule itself (like the Church’s change in policy towards the practice of usury).

4. Many minor points I had overlooked

When you start questioning, suddenly every issue you had questioned previously, not found a solution to, and decided to leave and come back to later, comes back all at once.

• The divinely sanctioned and commanded violence in the Old Testament
• The shortcomings of the Law, including treating women as property and tolerance of slavery
• Contradictions in the scriptures eg in the resurrection accounts
• The lack of good reasons for denying women access to the priesthood
• The general tendency to treat morality as a system of laws

5. Where is the love?

Jesus said that his disciples would be known by their love. Can we really say that Catholics or Christians as a whole are known by their love? I can’t.

What now?

Now, I’m making my way through life as my own master. I’m still figuring out exactly what I do believe now, and reading a lot of philosophy in the process. I’m enjoying it so far! Life is good, and I’m embracing it wholeheartedly. Feel free to continue following this blog or to stop as pleases you.

Now that all that’s said, I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

These teachings became beautiful to me, even if I wasn’t yet convinced that they were true

It feels strange, now, to look back at my first encounters with Catholicism…

I remember when I was a young teen, I was troubled by Jesus’ words, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ And the fact that no Christians I’d heard of had ever even tried to obey Him. Did no one wish to be perfect?

I did some research, and found the idea of “voluntary poverty” and the figure of St. Francis of Assisi, and I devoured his story from the Catholic Encyclopaedia. Finally, I had found someone who took the gospel seriously! He excited me a lot, and I spent a lot of time daydreaming about St. Francis and his companions, and whether I might imitate him.

Until then, I had been taught that the gospel was something done to me, that I really had very little part in. But Jesus in the gospels was teaching me something different. He taught me about the Kingdom, that made insane, outrageous, improper demands of me. His gospel was something I had to live for myself. It wasn’t merely internal, but actually, was a matter of turning me out of myself. St. Francis validated my understanding of the gospel as a Life for us to live out, and that was possible to actually live out.

I think this shifted my thinking, so that I began preferring a more Catholic idea of salvation as by some combination of faith and works, rather than the protestant “faith alone”.

 

The other crucial encounter was with Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and their Catholic Worker movement, a few years later. I had been looking into Anarchism for a while, and then the ideas of “Christian Anarchism” in particular, when I decided to look into the Catholic Worker movement, by reading the biographies of Maurin and Day.

Peter Maurin

Once again, I was shocked and excited to find real people making the attempt to take Jesus at His word. I’d come across various radical protestant groups, anabaptists, mennonites, Dukhobors, etc, but they weren’t the same… As radical as they were, they couldn’t go all the way (I guess because they were larger, family based communities). The Catholic Workers lived the foolishness of the gospel, in God’s absurd love. They taught me the radical Catholic vision of humanity as genuinely children of God, as spelled out in the Church’s social teaching.

In reading their biographies, I glimpsed the world of Catholicism, full of saints and sacraments, and I began to envy them for it. Reading about how Jesus truly, physically fed them, and lived in them, in the Eucharist, and was also truly there to be served in the poor, made me realise the one weird thing that really separates Catholicism from protestantism: God’s extraordinary intimacy with us. And I wanted it to be true.

Mary being the Mother of God, the Church bearing God’s authority, salvation being by faith with works, the power of the saints, the real presence of the Eucharist, the effectiveness of Baptism, and all the rest, were the extraordinary ways that God lives in and amongst His people. These teachings became beautiful to me, even if I wasn’t yet convinced that they were true.

St. Francis of Assisi, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day introduced me to Catholicism, and started me on my road to one day becoming a Catholic myself. They showed me a faith that was radical, exciting, and beautiful. And now, I look forward to thanking them each when we meet in heaven.

God bless you!

My rejection of and return to church

I remember as a child, once asking why the Bible, especially the gospels, were so good, and church was so boring and lame. And I remember that my mother’s response wasn’t that I was wrong about church, but just that she didn’t know. I noticed how little the gospels were referred to, and how little the sermons sounded like something Jesus would say. I noticed that, church just seemed to a place to feel good together, with ideas to make you feel good, but not to really change your way of life.

But in the gospels, I saw a Jesus all about changing lives, and living in the Kingdom of God, and being perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. I saw a Jesus who was demanding, and changed lives. Jesus was not a life coach preaching about positive thinking.

Of course, churches vary greatly. I visited a lot, and a lot were quite motivating, and even inspiring. But I didn’t feel it lasted. It seemed to me, a more or less empty entertainment, remembering how good Jesus is, and sometimes suggesting he might want to do something in you. What kind of thing wasn’t ever clear.

It seemed to me, Christianity had been made a private matter, relevant mainly to our feelings. It seemed we were told to love God, and always be feely-goody people. And tell others to do so also.

At one point, I thought Christianity was perhaps best seen as a God-given pyramid scheme, where we believe, and must then get others to believe, even though we were only really believing in believing itself. And by this scheme, we get to heaven. It seemed like the gospel we were meant to spread, was that there was a gospel to be spread.

It’s fair to say, I was very confused. But, I applied good protestant logic, and concluded that the churches had corrupted teachings, and I would be better off on my own with a bible. Which, for a good few years, I did.

[I think it’s good logic from a protestant perspective, because if the Church Jesus himself founded with the apostles could be corrupted (and to maintain protestant beliefs this would have to have happened extremely early on), then it seems inevitable that the churches founded by reformers should also be corrupted even sooner. In view of this fact, I believe the fact that protestant churches are as unified as they are, is a testament to God’s care for them]

So, I became an lone sheep, as soon as my parents stopped making me go to church. But I continued to read the Bible and other Christian books, and I think I grew a lot in those years. My understanding of the scriptures became a lot less muddled and confused. I had decided to ignore Paul at first, because I found him confusing, and I found that suspicious. But I returned to him later, and found he made perfect sense when taken in the light of the gospels I had seen.

I was especially delighted that my new church of one appreciated Jesus’ attitude toward the poor. It wasn’t skipping over Jesus words on selling all you owned and giving it to the poor in order to be perfect and follow Jesus. From early on, I had thought Jesus was talking to me when he said that. I wasn’t obeying it (I was still a child and had no idea how to), but I did look upon it as important. I also noted how Jesus spoke strongly of works when talking about salvation (“as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me”). This tendency, combined with more or less independent political thought, brought me to believe in “Christian anarchism”. [I won’t go into my beliefs in this period of time any further here, but if you like, the last year of this period is somewhat captured in the archives of the first year of this blog]

But then Christian anarchism pointed me towards Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker movement, which is brilliant, which pointed me to Catholic social teaching, which is brilliant, though I wondered about a few points, which then pointed me to Catholic theology, which is brilliant, though it took a lot of wrestling for me to understand and agree, and I just disagreed a lot at first.

It gradually dawned on me, that a Christian is not alone, and should not be alone. And however disappointing I found church, Jesus had put in a lot of effort to found his Church, so I had to go. So, I tried a couple churches on the few Sundays when I was up on time, and was disappointed. Eventually, I tried mass at my little local, Catholic Church.

It was a shocking experience. So much sudden standing, and kneeling, and everyone responding together. I tried my best to go with the flow. I was terrified: heart racing, sweating so much I hate to think how I smelt. I loved that the gospel was read. That really pleased me. In the second half of the mass, what I now know is the Liturgy of the Eucharist, I strongly sensed the reverence of those around me, and learned what the word sacred really means. At the sign of peace, I was stupendously happy to be saying, “peace be with you” and shaking hands with those around me, especially the priest when he came down (I suspect they thought me very strange). I didn’t go up for communion, because I didn’t know if I was allowed, and I was unsure on transubstantiation, and whether it could make it a sin for me to take it, if I was wrong about it either way. I remember noticing, that I had a wonderful feeling throughout, after the fear passed, that I had only ever had while reading the Bible. It almost felt like I was in the Bible.

This experience really should have been enough to convince me to begin becoming Catholic. But I decided to wait, and research on my own to make up my mind. I waited far too long. It was at least six months before I asked about becoming a Catholic, and in that time I rarely came to mass or other church (sleep pattern mainly).

I find it funny to think, how the reformation is viewed as rejecting a lifeless institution with a corrupted gospel, to make a better, more biblical church, but I was led to reject what I viewed as weak institutions with a corrupted gospel, in favour of a better, more biblical Church (the one seen in the Bible), and ended up at Catholicism. Ironic.

God bless you