By A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that I’m a practicing Catholic. One of the reasons is that I think of myself as a good Catholic, but as a Christian.
I grew up in a church that was a real part of my life. I went to church every Sunday for eight years, from the time I was in elementary school. I knew all the songs by heart.
For six years I attended the same church that my parents went to. It wasn’t until the end of my freshman year that I realized my parents weren’t really Catholics. They weren’t exactly Catholics, but they were members of the Church of Jesus Christ. And when I went to high school, I didn’t really know what that meant, so I decided to go to church for a test.
After the first year of Catholic high school, I went to a Catholic college, but I didnt get into any of the church related activities. I just kept my day job and went to church on Sundays. When I left Catholic for Christianity, I went to a Baptist church. They just asked me if I was a Christian, and I said of course! That was the first day of my true conversion to Christianity.
That conversion is what I call it. I knew there was something wrong about me but I didnt know what it was. Ive always been a devout Christian, but it wasnt until I went to a Christian school for my first semester of college that I found out what it was. It wasnt until then that I could explain it to my family though because I wasnt their church kid.
It’s funny how the church I grew up in, Baptist, never really had a lot of the same things that I now have come to appreciate. I never would have been able to speak up because the people I was in church with didnt really know what they were talking about, but I can see how having the same church as I grew up in could be problematic. To me, Baptist is not a religion. Baptist is a group of people who like each other and are good at praying.
Baptists are a pretty traditional Christian group that don’t see themselves as religious. “I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in Jesus” is not a belief, but having a lot of the same beliefs as your church is not necessarily a problem. What could be a problem is the lack of a single authority that they can point to in order to defend their belief system. This is especially true when it comes to church property, and the church building itself.
The problem is that the church building itself is full of stuff that doesnt belong to the church. To the best of my knowledge, the church property on Blackreef is not even a church property anymore. It’s just a house, a guest house owned by the people who use the church building (the Visionaries) to worship. So what happens is they put up a roof over their heads.
In a church building, everything is a problem. From the very foundation up, everything is a problem. Everything. Everything is a problem. It’s a problem. Thats why churches are always full of stuff they don’t own: stuff that gets in the way of the mission of the church. Thats why the pastor looks so damn smug.
Thats why I’m not here.
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