Religion is my "Thang"

[meowzician]

Hi @meowzician

I'm a cradle Catholic.

Loved your post!

To what degree are you still a practicing Catholic today?

I was interested in the brief discussion here about the use of the word because I don't think the Roman Catholic church is the same as was meant by the word 'catholic' in the first 5-10 centuries or so of Christianity. Catholic originally just meant universal, and I believe it applied to all who could sincerely profess the Nicene Creed once it's form had settled down. The same term (I believe in one, holy, catholic church) still appears in the creed as used by the Orthodox and many Protestant churches, as well as my own.

There is a tendency in the human mind to want a religion that has always been there and has always remained the same. But no such religion as that exists. It is the nature of the universe for everything to evolve, including religious ideologies.

I agree with you that the connotation of "Catholic Church" has changed over. I think originally it mean that it wasn't exclusive to one ethnicity the way Judaism is. It certainly came to refer to the institutional church which, as I think we would all agree, because EXTREMELY institutional for a while. And today in your post-Vatican 2 world means the community of all believers.

I think the Roman Catholic Church is like this - like the Jewish religion it runs all the way from organised and structured worship, through many sorts of public service, through many social activities, to the deepest of mystical prayer and experience. As such it can cater for a very wide range of folks with very different spiritual paths from each other.

All quite true. And when you add to this that the Catholic Church includes peoples from all over the world without exclusion, I do think the name "Catholic" fits very, very nicely.

As I have learnt over many decades too, an organised religious community such as the Catholic Church (as well as many others) provides individuals with very great support when life is difficult, or you hit a spiritual dry patch.

There are all sorts of scientific studies documenting that participation in a religious community increases human flourishing in a unique way.

But I don't think this is the only way up the mountain - there is only one peak and as long as a path is going upwards towards the summit, maybe it doesn't matter where you start from, though, like climbing Everest, some ways up may be more challenging than others.

In the end, for me what matters is not the outer form, but the heart within. A true spiritual path brings us to the possibility of a direct and loving experience of the divine person within each of us, and to be aware of and to love that divine spark within all people - and to accept it as a gift freely given to anyone who can take it.

I can tell we are going to be good friends.

 

[meowzician]

The thing about black and white thinking is that when I was in my 20's I still encountered people who made out that the bible and everything about it was still black and white. Even today some groups target college students not maliciously but because they are young and have no fully formed opinions and they say: "Look at this we have all the answers to what you should believe." I never went to college but I did spend time on the internet looking at people debate each other.

I can hear how these people hurt you. I'm hearing every word. I see you. I understand. And I hurt with you.

Let's talk a little bit about religious people who become adults but are stuck in the black and white thinking of a child. I know full well the damage they can do to others. But I also have compassion for them because it is not their fault that they have the spiritual equivalent of a developmental delay.

Are you familiar at all with Piaget's stages of cognitive development or Kohlberg's stages of moral development? Welcome to McLarin's stages of spiritual development. Just as a child has to master the concrete stage of cognition before he can move to the next stage, we all must master that initial spiritual stage of black and white thinking before we grow to the next stage. But some people never reach mastery. Sometimes things go wrong. People get stuck. It's not that they are wrong. They are not at a bad stage. They are simply stuck in an earlier stage.

I was raised in an extraordinarily religious home, the daughter of a fundamentalist pastor. I cannot exaggerate the number of rules we had. My parents believed that Christians should obey the Law. I was seven and my brother was five when my mom began reading us the Books of Law, every verse, every begat, from Genesis 1:1 to Deuteronomy 34:12. The number of rules we had just for keeping the sabbath were daunting. What kind of Christian DOES that?????? LOL

I experienced three traumas as a child, and there was just something about that 1-2-3 punch which made it extraordinarily difficult for me to move into a more mature spirituality. That literalist, fundamentalist ideation just made grooves on the rock and the water didn't want to flow down any other way. It has taken me a lifetime to reach the place I am at now, and even now I sometimes find myself reverting to that thinking.

So I've actually made two conversions. The easier one was out of Christian fundamentalism, through Catholicism, to Judaism. The much, much harder conversion was from black and white thou shalt not question thinking to happily embracing doubt as a gateway to a deeper spirituality.

I'm not invalidating your feelings in any way, shape, size or form. But sometimes we can recontextualize the things from our past that have harmed us. I hope that perhaps by sharing what I have this might be a possibility for you.

You really were isolated back in the 1970's

OMG, how old were you in the 70s? I ask because I was born in 61, and was a teen in the 70s. I have always felt like I get shoved in with the earlier boomers when I never went to Woodstock or protested the Vietnam War. LOL They had a world of opportunity that those of us growing up just 10 years later never had. We grew up with recession and inflation and gas lines and Watergate and the rising costs of housing. I was reading the other day that some psychologists believe that the resilience that us 70's kids have is a trauma based reaction.

I realize that was a severe diversion from our topic, sorry. LOL

and my mom had lots of church friends and networks of people who believed. But in my case I was adapting to a different culture with all these toys, cartoons and schooling not available back then. My mom was born in the 1950s so many things happened I was aware of from tv and the history channel tv program.

Oh for sure. I think every generation feels this way. I know my son often expresses the same thing.

Church really did make me afraid at some of the messages because somethings you should not tell kids, those are adult services.

YIKES! I'm sure you are referring to the whole hell thing. I don't know how I escaped that. But I was never once afraid of going to hell. The songs my mother would sing as she worked or rocked me were all about God's love. I have to tell you, I do not like it at all when people use abstract fear to keep others in line.

I actually knew a blind man named Paul my moms age and he said to me: so Richard Dawkins is your authority not the bible.

LOL, yeah, I know the type.

I am not saying this is the essence of religion but it does show people can be influenced as to how they think others think. If he thought I was stupid and that I can be influenced to believe propaganda and that means I should follow the right propaganda instead of wrong ones.

Oh, well said.

 

[Fruiteloop]

OMG, how old were you in the 70s? I ask because I was born in 61, and was a teen in the 70s. I have always felt like I get shoved in with the earlier boomers when I never went to Woodstock or protested the Vietnam War. LOL They had a world of opportunity that those of us growing up just 10 years later never had. We grew up with recession and inflation and gas lines and Watergate and the rising costs of housing. I was reading the other day that some psychologists believe that the resilience that us 70's kids have is a trauma based reaction.

I realize that was a severe diversion from our topic, sorry. LOL

I was talking about my mother. She was 20 in 1977 the year star wars came out. I was born in 1987

During covid we watched lots of old tv programs like Magnum Pi and the Andy Griffin show at midnight when she and my aunt were awake. Dragnet was interesting as well.

It reminded me of when I was 6 - 9 years old how isolated I felt then as tv can turn off and you are alone with nothing to do, of course different shows were on pbs at my age and in my moms time and I lived in the desert.

I hear kids today say it was better without cell phones because everything was more personal and real and I saw many tv programs from the 80s and 90s but in the 70s my mom never told me much of what happened but it is the culture of what it must have felt like since the internet was not around and I did not get heavy into the internet until 2005 to 2012 and afterwards.

I know history facts because of how my memory system functions and what I was exposed to but I am not that old. just odd memory.

Also I watched recent documentaries on generational growing up.

if you born in the late 60s then you were a teen in the 1980s
Stranger things is a show I never watched but it has spy's and aliens and advanced technologies in the 80s

The 90's had x-files and nickelodeon shows.
Like anamorphs (kids received power from a centaur alien to turn into animals)
and the radio show coast to coast A.M.

Adult programs I watch many of those not just kids stuff.

I am going to look into spiritual development stages you mentioned so thank you for that information.

 

[John K]

To what degree are you still a practicing Catholic today?

I’m very much a practicing Catholic - it’s a city I like to live in.

But I also like the country it is part of - there are plenty of other good places to visit there too. Mind you, there are also some dodgy places it’s not too safe to wander into alone at night.

There is a tendency in the human mind to want a religion that has always been there and has always remained the same.

It’s funny isn’t it how many folks make their religion their god? There’s something a bit idolatrous about it. We mistake what is a road atlas for the destination. You can end up stuck at a signpost that way rather than moving on towards where it is pointing.

I agree with you that the connotation of "Catholic Church" has changed over. I think originally it mean that it wasn't exclusive to one ethnicity the way Judaism is.

Like I said, I think anyone who can in sincerity recite the Nicene Creed is part of the universal church - i.e. catholic with a small ‘c’. In truth, the Roman Catholic Church became a thing during the dark ages when the Western Roman Empire disintegrated and lost routine contact with the Eastern Empire. The ecclesiastical language split into Latin and Greek didn’t help. And then, sadly, there was the power politics of the Middle Ages. What’s surprising to me is how much of the fundamentals of the Christian faith survived without great distortion between ourselves and the Eastern Orthodox churches down to the present day.