Blood, Ash, and Hard Pews

During my junior year of high school while in Calculus, a girl once asked me, "Are you Christian or Catholic?" At first I replied "Catholic", but then the logical error hit me across the face. I said, "You mean am I Protestant or Catholic?" She replied, "No." Me: "You know that Catholics are Christians too, right?" Her: "No they aren't." This escalated into a heated, fruitless argument that continued for the next few minutes until the bell rang. By the time the class let out I was seeing red. It is easy to forget that such ignorance continues to exist in the world.

My relationship with Catholicism is a strange one that extends back to elementary school. At that time I was a self-proclaimed atheist. My parents weren't much of churchgoers, but around fifth grade my parents (aka my mom) started taking us to Mass semi-regularly and sending me to CCD in preparation for my confirmation. CCD stands for Catholic Child's Dungeon.

By this time my atheist zeal had settled down and I approached the classes with an open, if skeptical, mind. I asked a constant stream of questions that were sometimes hostile, othertimes curious, always trying to give my teachers a run for their money.

With my parent's breakup and the nasty fallout that ensued, my mother turned to religion. Because I recognized the solace of believing in a higher purpose and because I wanted to be saved on the off chance that Christianity was correct, I came to want very much to believe. I approached religious things with complete respect. I made the sign of the cross, I prayed, I went to confession and I seriously contemplated the readings and sermon. I almost convinced myself that I believed in God. I certainly told people I did when it would smooth things out.

Still, I like my mother held reservations about some of the more dubious teachings of the church. I remember on my only religious retreat, when they separated the girls from the boys and the deacon explained how masturbation and sex before marriage were sins and how he and his wife did not use contraception, but instead only had sex at certain times of the month. The abject silliness of not using contraceptives but timing sex to avoid having children resonated with the Catholic Church of the history books. I had recognized the contradictory nature of Catholicism.

There were glaring logical impossibilities in many aspects of the doctrine. For example, that we are only free of sin immediately after confession, but if we die with a mortal sin on our conscience (a few of which I committed on a routine basis) we are condemned to hell. So if we die on our way home from confession we go straight to heaven, and if we die on our way to confession we go straight to hell. More famous is the Trinity paradox in which God is held to simultaneously be one whole God and three separate entities: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Catholicism is not a rational religion, and I came to respect that. I understood that things don't always have to make sense to be true. It allowed for a more perfect separation of religion and science. It taught me to separate my modes of thinking into compartments. I could put on my Catholic cap and think in terms of rites, sin and redemption and then I could put on my science cap and think of religion as a product of people's tendency to believe in magic.

Coming to terms with Catholicism was among the most important formative events of my life. I recognized that many of the rituals made sense on a humanist level, even if completely backwards and superstitious on a religious one. I understood that Catholic theology was the product of a long line of brilliant thinkers with tremendous human insight. I saw that Catholicism possessed the wisdom of millenia.

In my sophomore year I imbibed European History. With it came a host of new modes of thought. The most important of these was Nationalism. I applied Nationalism to Catholicism and then mentally tore Protestantism to shreds as we studied the Protestant Reformation. Not that I disliked Protestants, I just arrived on why their religion was an inferior expression of Christianity. I came away with a complete intolerance for Protestants who looked down on Catholicism.

During high school I shed my religious pretense. I was eager to go to church with my mom or stepmom, I prayed occasionally and I still wanted to believe, but I no longer tried to delude myself into belief.

So I am still Catholic in a sense. I owe a lot to the religion and I have an affinity for the culture. Watching my roommate lose his faith was sad for me, but I understood it was inevitable. Untempered rationalism and religion should not cohabitate, unless you're Mormon and then everything makes sense.


Protestants are pussies for using unadorned crosses.

My thanks to Blaise Pascal for his wager.