My Life: Stuff I Lost

This post will admittedly come a bit too close to my "don't talk about my beliefs" rule. It will discuss what I believed, faith-wise, as a child. It won't technically get into my religious beliefs as of right now, so I do have a loophole for my own rule already prepared. It will, however, give a general rule of what religious beliefs I am not. I'll start with an easy one; I am not currently a Zoroastrian.

It gets a bit trickier from here. But meh, nobody reads this thing anyway.

I was raised Catholic when I was a child, just like my brother. There was some conflict with this decision between my parents and against all common sense, but I won't get into detail about why that is. It was a fairly routine religious upbringing, at least around the time I was seven, when my family moved. It was about then we went to church almost every Sunday (at noon, we had some limits,) did the CCD thing (weekly religious school; like Sunday school but not on that date,) gave up fish on Lent (on only Fridays, again with the limits,) and even got confirmed in high school. Because we were late getting in, we did a lot of the basic stuff late as well. For example, I didn't do my first communion, which a lot of people do in second grade, until 5th grade or so.

And for most of that period, I wasn't just raised Catholic, I was Catholic. I was a believer, at least in the basics of the religion. Now, there were some things I was uncomfortable with, even at an early age. For example, as a child, I assumed everyone got into Heaven, because that was the only way that made sense to me. They eventually told me otherwise, but I wasn't really comfortable with that answer. I eventually also abandoned the general Catholic opinion on sex and homosexuality. On the other hand, I did buy into the "abortion is bad" argument for years. It's harder to emotionally change your side on an issue when there's something being physically killed compared to, say, two people who just love each other.

Even outside of dogma, I should have seen the warning signs that this may not be working. There was, for example, the time I threw up in communion class and had to get cleaned up in the bathroom. The girls' bathroom; the men's room was apparently out of water for some reason. Or there was the time, well after I had first communion, when I received it church but had a cough. I ended up coughing it out in the middle of church, and the priest was forced to re-bless it and...eat it himself.

And then there was CCD itself. The classes themselves were fine, but the teachers managed to be designed for maximum encouragement towards conversion...to anything else. There was the incredibly nice teacher whose business slowly was destroyed by legal problems throughout the year. Job's much more interesting when you watch it going on in the middle of class. Or the teacher who totally failed to control class, letting it fall into total anarchy. Or the ancient teacher who made us all wear nametags, constantly reminisced about the conservative paradise of the 1950s, and, well, thought I was mentally retarded. These are not the purveyors of wisdom that encourage piety.

Things finally came to a head in my freshman year of college, though. Now, keep in mind that I was an idealistic child, convinced of a sort of ideal environment for a socially-awkward intellectual misfit like me. 12 years of public school did a good job of convincing me otherwise, so I thought that college would be different. Sadly, at this point, it wasn't. The erudite sanctuary I hoped to find was nowhere to be found, and I wasn't growing in the slightest, at least not socially. At the same time, my contacts began to regularly irritate my eyes, leaving me nearly unable to even see in bright lights.

The last straw, though, was when my grandmother passed away later that year. It wasn't a surprising thing; nearly everyone has to lose their grandparents fairly early in life. But it was too much for me at the time. I remember one moment in particular; the day after the funeral, with me now back "home" at college. Still despairing over the death of a beloved relative, sitting outside with my dad and unable to even look at him, I began to really question why. What was the point of all the suffering? Oh, I realized that suffering alone does not justify conversion; I never expected a perfect life. But at this point, all my assumptions about how life was supposed to be were starting to fall apart, and I saw no clear way to happiness as an adult; the path that one was supposed to go had finally began to unmistakably fail me. At the same time, I wondered why, no matter how much I was suffering, why my prayers to God never got any response; no justification, no comfort, no connection with the entity I supposedly worshipped; nothing.

I won't tell you how long it took me to change my beliefs, or what they eventually became, but I will say that they changed at this point. And I'll also again mention that this sort of conversion is really mis-timed after already deciding to go to a Jesuit university.