Catholic AND Liberal?!? Say it ain’t so!

[drunkoffthestars]

This is going to get really really long, just a warning. It started out as a response to a comment in another journal about forcing your choices on other people and why it's a pain in the ass and WRONG, and ended up with me trying to explain how I can believe in God, call myself Catholic, and still think that forcing your values on other people is wrong.

I’m what I like to call a do-what-i-want Catholic. I was raised in a Democratic Catholic family; I attended Catholic mass nearly every Sunday till I left for college. I went to Catholic schools through high school. Being Catholic is pretty ingrained in me, it’s something that means a lot to me in terms of the traditions and rituals and family that are important to me. BUT, that doesn’t mean I agree with or like most of Catholic doctrine (which I see as entirely separate from the teachings of Jesus, which constitutes the core of Christianity). I think the Pope=infallibility thing is dumber than dirt. I don’t think that having an abortion is killing a baby or that it will send you to hell. I don’t think having a divorce and re-marrying is adultery. I don’t think that masturbation is wrong. I don’t think that being gay is akin to being the devil.

A lot of my faith and religious beliefs are HEAVILY influenced by the simplified teachings I was exposed to at my Catholic grade school (then, I got bored and then I discovered the wonderful world of fiction, but that’s another story. Suffice it to say that I got so far and no farther for a long time). There are a couple things that really stuck during those initial lessons.

- The first one was a passage about prayer. It's the one where the Lord's Prayer comes from (Matthew chapter 6, if you're interested), which is probably why they were reading it to us, but the bit immediately preceding it is what stuck. Basically, it's about keeping prayer between you and god. It says that prayer should not be done, and I'm paraphrasing, in your inner room with the door closed, not in the synagogues and on street corners. And then there is another bit that says that (paraphrasing again) when you fast, you should maintain a neat and tidy appearance so as to not advertise the fact that you are fasting. All of this said to me that what was between me and god was between me and god and was not something that anyone else needed to be privy to.

- Then, there is the all-important Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, chapter 5). I didn't know what to do with most of the Beatitudes at the time (and still don't know what to do with several of them) there were a couple that were pretty clear to me. Be merciful if you want mercy. Making peace is a good thing. Righteousness is something to strive for (although, somewhere along the way, I think my version of righteousness turned out a bit different from that of most religious people). And then there is the last bit, about loving one's enemies, which was explained to me as Jesus basically saying don't pay attention to those 10 commandments, there are only two that matter: Love god and love and respect your fellow humans and the world around you.

- And lastly, there was the bit about judging others (Matthew, chapter 7) which (it took me a while to get there) I took to mean that you should mind your own business and leave others to mind their own, as human judgment has a tendency to be greatly flawed and that the flaws you see in others are generally shadows of your own flaws, so you should sit down and shut up about other people’s shortcomings and do what you can to improve your own self.

And that is the main of the teachings of Jesus as I see them. So as far as I’m concerned, I am supposed to mind my own business. I’m supposed to help people who ask for it. I’m not supposed to hurt people (including by telling them they are going to hell). And I’m not supposed to tell other people what to do as I am far from perfect myself.

Either they skipped, or I zoned out when they were going on and on about spreading the faith, and your duty to convert others and how everyone who isn’t Catholic is going to hell, and by the time it was brought up again, I was old enough to call that bullshit and chucked the whole Catholic faith for a while. Seriously. If God is supposed to be so loving, what the FUCK is up with that?

Eventually, I realized that the only person who could speak for God was God and that people who try to speak for god, even with the best of intentions, often get it wrong. Then, I realized it’s called faith because it ISN’T logical and it doesn’t make sense, but you can do it anyway, because it’s all in how you look at it anyway (that last bit being a product of my scientific training, as I want to be a biologist when I grow up). Finally, I figured out that I am Catholic in that I believe in god and the rituals and traditions of Catholicism mean a lot to me and I think Jesus had some really good points and that not everything in the bible is the literal truth as there are many many kinds of truth and only a few of them are based on hard touchable fact.

In the end, it all comes down to doing my best. My beliefs dictate that I act in a manner that is respectful of other people’s choices, and my beliefs says that I have to think about things and try to make the best choices I can for myself and remind myself that everyone else is not me so I don’t get to make their choices or make choices that restrict their choices. I can believe in god and not think that that gives me the ability or the right to dictate to anyone else what is Right and Wrong. I can volunteer to pick up trash out of the woods and from along roadsides. I can donate money to Planned Parenthood, who is in the business of helping people do what is right for them. I try to give money, be it donations or commercial exchanges, to people who do things that I like, just like everyone else. So I try to buy stuff second hand, I try to minimize how much I get from multi-national corporations. My conscience dictates that I vote for the candidates who seem most likely to uphold the rights of everyone to be happy in whatever way is right for them. My conscience dictates that vote against laws and politicians that restrict choices, devalue life, and devalue people. And sometimes, it all works out and I help people be happy and sometime it doesn’t work and I say mean things and or I waste paper and water and electricity and I sit on my ass and do nothing or I vote for the wrong thing. But I do give my self credit for trying, and that’s all anyone can do. In the end, it all comes down to doing my best with what I’ve got.




the abortion coda, because it gets brought up alot

Abortion is wrong for me, but if I ever showed up on my parent’s doorstep pregnant and alone, they’d put clean sheets on my bed, get me some health insurance, and dig out all the old baby clothes my mother has saved over the years of having three children. I think that abortion is killing the possibility of a pretty cool person, and that’s not something I want to do. But it is only killing that possibility, not actually killing that person, and there are a million other things that could happen to kill that possibility, like I could miscarry or I could be a shitty mother or the world could explode or be invaded by aliens or the kid could go to a really shitty school that only taught it how to take standardized tests and never let it play with finger paints or plastic farm animals under the guise of teaching it French and it could turn out to be a crummy person anyway. So having an abortion because you don’t want a child and/or can’t afford a child isn’t any worse than being a crappy parent and turning out a psycho or sending it to a shitty school where it learns that the sole worth of a human is measured in how well it fills in little circles with the right kind of pencil.

I know that not every woman on this earth is a secret clone of me, so what is right and wrong for me is between me, my conscience, and god. Everyone has their own version of right and wrong and everyone has their own set of beliefs and I am not the one who should be saying if what they need or want to do is right or wrong, because they are not me and I am not them and as long as what they do doesn’t restrict the choices I can make (within reason, yadda yadda) they can do what they want to do.

And of course, there are some things that I think are pretty universally wrong. I don’t really have a problem with saying that doing things that will hurt other people is wrong. And of course, you have to draw some pretty fine lines in there, and no one is going to agree on where they should be drawn. Most people will say that killing other people is wrong, but there are always exceptions and whatnot. And I’m pretty down with having laws that limit the amount of pollution a given entity can produce as that is something that affects everyone, but there are a lot of people who would disagree. And I’m ok with abortion being legal because an abortion (or lack thereof) affects 1 person: the mother. And you could disagree and say it affects the baby, except it’s not actually a baby yet. It affects the existence of a POSSIBLE baby and I’m sorry. In the choice between which has a higher value or deserves more protection or has more right to a choice or something, a person who already is alive and well and (mostly, or well on their way to being) adult and a merely potential baby which may or may not survive to birth, which may or may not survive childhood, which may or may not disastrously affect the wellbeing and life of the already existing person? The Existing Person WINS. Which is why I think abortion should be legal. It’s about the choices and a little blob of cells, even one that is baby-shaped, does not get to trump the choices of an actual real live person.

THE AIND.