Ask an ex-Catholic

[Pyrrho]

I know the feeling.  I almost start to feel ill if I think about it too much, that I really believed the nonsense that I believed.  To be thoroughly indoctrinated as a child gives one a kind of understanding for how people get sucked into such nonsense, but I really wish I were one of those atheists who had no clue about it.  So much wasted time and effort thinking about all that ridiculous nonsense!  It makes one wonder what one would have done if one had not been raised to believe fairy tales.

So much of it is so bizarre and crazy, but when raised to believe it, it did not all seem that way at the time.  Even basic points, like why did God insist that he become a man and then be killed in order to forgive people?  Why not just forgive them?  It is just so crazy, it boggles the mind.  And yet it is what millions of people believe, or claim to believe, and they don't seem to think it is a crazy thing.  It is very disturbing to think that one ever believed such rubbish, and very disturbing that many people still believe such rubbish.

Back to the questions.

Did you attend one of those cool, magnificent (from an architectural standpoint) churches, or one of the more modern ones?  And did the church have great music, with a glorious pipe organ?  Or was it more like just some nun strumming on a guitar?  And do you think any of these things had an influence on how long you stayed in the church?

I attended a small but old fashioned brick church with beautiful stained glass, sculptures, and a vaulted ceiling.  And yes, we had great music with a traditional pipe organ, and we all got to sing along most of the time.  (I also got a horse as a gift from my mom for first communion.  So....yeah.  Bribery, lol.)

This is a SUPER good question, because I think it played a very large part in my staying there as long as I did.  The music, particularly, is really beautiful and has stayed with me for life.  We also had very traditional nuns and priests that always wore traditional garb, not modern, they were Bernadine Fransiscans, and regular Fransiscans respectively.  One young Brother would come and do funny magic trick at the kids masses; he made it all even more magical.

The new modern mega churches were possibly part of why I stayed away during what I'll call my "seeking" period in my early 20's. 

There is some great religious music.  I listen to religious music of Bach and Mozart with some frequency.  We had mostly boring hymns in my church, with an electric organ (and piano), so I did not miss the music when I stopped attending church.  My wife, though, does not like some of the religious music to which I listen, as it reminds her of her Catholic upbringing (she, though, was only brought up in a half-assed way to be Catholic, and was never really much of a believer, so asking her about this isn't the same as asking you).


I would think, though, that the magic tricks were not a good idea for keeping people believing in religion.  It is too suggestive that miracles are really just con jobs, just tricks rather than anything real.  In the church I attended, they wisely never had any magic acts (or if they ever did, I must have missed that week due to illness or being out of town).  It seems to me to have been a tactical error, to have an authority figure in your church do a bunch of pretend miracles.  Unless, of course, he was trying to make atheists out of you.