Gay, Catholic and Doing Fine

[athrock]

Thanks for your thoughts.

When did you leave the Catholic Church and why?

Never really made sense to me in the  first place, I went as a child because my mom thought it would be good for me, but to her credit, she wasn't bent on making me go forever. To be honest the biggest reason I went was because I spotted a girl I was attracted to, but spent years pining after her in silence stupidly. 

I did want to believe only because I wanted to fit in. I really started to question Christianity because of one question a co worker at a construction site asked me. I was a day laborer paid to clean up after the construction workers at a housing development. He asked me "What if Jesus was just a man". That stuck with me. None of the hocus pokus stuff made sense but I was afraid to question publicly out of fear.

That was not a sudden de-conversion, it still took me several years to go from deist Christian, to deist, to "probably not" to "atheist". And even then it wasn't until after 9/11 that I sought other atheists out online. The only contact I had was with one atheist on campus in college, then after that, 3 atheists who attended a Unitarian Church. 

Some do have a sudden realization, like comedian Rickey Gervais who said it was because his mom told his older brother to shut up when he questioned the stories in it, basically he thought "If my mom is hiding something, it has to be bogus". I wish I had been that lucky to be that fearless.

I tell every religious person, the same thing, regardless of nationality, or religion or whatever part of the world they live in. You merely like what you believe, I do get that. It was understandable back then when humans didn't know any better, but we have much better tools to get the best data on reality of nature and the universe now.

There was no religion 200,000 years ago,  much less 4 billion years ago, much less 14 billion years ago. Now that I know scientifically how big the universe is and how old it is, I simply cant go back. I find it absurd in a universe of 100s of billions of galaxies, that this one tiny outpost being isolated in a hostile universe, humans matter. Especially knowing our planet has had 5 mass extinctions in evolutionary history.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Perhaps a question or two might stick with you now that you're a bit older and capable of thinking more deeply: 

What if Jesus were more than a man? 

What might that look like, and how would we know?

And what if there's nothing mutually exclusive between religion and science?