my beliefs and my friends

Every once in a while I get caught up in the secular humanism that, well, in which I believe.  Logic and reason are important to me, and (to paraphrase Penn Gillette from This I believe) I don’t need a God to tell me to be nice to others; I try to be nice to them because I want them to be nice to me … blah blah blah.

However, I was raised Catholic, and that’s the sort of thing that one can’t get out of one’s system very quickly.  One doesn’t just turn these things off.  I’m very interested in the inner workings of the Church, how it got to be the way it is, and try to think of reasons why it is still a good thing for people (I’m an eternal optimist, I guess).   I’m so interested in it, I’m starting to read up a lot on the early Church.

I’m reading a book called “Voting about God”, about the Nicaean council — in which a council of bishops decided whether or not Jesus was God as well as human.  This was not always the belief of the believers, which is now taken as Gospel truth.  In order to determine the truth, bishops had to vote on it.   It just isn’t clear in the scriptures if Jesus is equal to God, or if they are the same, or what.  So the bishops voted on it. This is as opposed to the present pope who says “truth is not determined by majority vote” (Boyer, New Yorker, 20050516).  This is also opposed to the protestants who say “if it’s not in the Bible, it’s not true”.   Well, the trinity wasn’t in the bible, so the truthiness of it had to be decided by this council.  The result of the council was the solidification in belief in the trinity - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one.  In the Catholic church, this is embodied in our profession of faith “We believe in one God …”

As I’m reading this book, thinking about how the Catholic church evolved into what it is today, I also think about how Biblical fundamentalist Christians of today say that the Catholics created all of these rules and beliefs (and creeds) beyond the Bible, and they say they think all of this stuff is garbage and are going back to the source, to the Bible.  One of my big huge problems in my readings is that in the early days of the Church, even the Bible was voted on.  By the very same groups of bishops who created the Nicene Creed.  Why is one of these group decisions good in their eyes, and one of them bad? 

I think about this a lot for a person who doesn’t read the Bible very much.

Ok, and now, after all of that, the point of this blog entry is not that I think that people who believe in the Bible-as-only-source are wrong.  Their faith evolved over hundreds of years, like the Catholic faith evolved over thousands of years, and there are lots and lots of reasons why they believe what they believe (and why I believe what I believe which is sort of secular humanism, sort of Catholic). When I start going down this path, even without my friend Stacey being with me, I think of her faith.  Her faith is very very important to her, and I would not dream of even thinking to myself that what she believes, or the life she’s chosen to live, is somehow wrong.   Thankfully, she does the same for me.

One more thing.  I work with a lot of international people, and just had one of them tell me how the food was better in his country, how people in the US think they are all better than everyone else, how Americans this and Americans that.  I am just so tired of this - I equate being Catholic with being American.   Believe me, just like Catholicism, I know that there are problems with being American, but I have chosen to be American and Catholic even though I know all of the bad things.

Please don’t tell me that the way I live is wrong.  Please.

Posted by Marie on April 24th, 2007 under Uncategorized

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