Bay 12 Games Forum

To give my story, and make an unnecessarily long point, I was raised Catholic. One of the things that turned me off about it was a school thing. It was a Catholic school but it was also a state school so they weren’t allowed to “discriminate” against non-Catholics who were in the catchment area. There was some kind of mass or something being held in the assembly/gym hall that everyone had to attend regardless of their own beliefs, and someone was singing a hymn on stage and afterward everyone applauded.

There was a proper, non-religious assembly later that week, in which the head teacher was all “you shouldn’t have applauded, it was a mass.” and I remember thinking, even though it wasn’t part of the “process” of a mass, someone was celebrating god with a god-given gift, and we weren’t in church, so why shouldn’t we acknowledge it, politely or otherwise? What’s the point of doing things in the same formulaic way every week, that doesn’t allow deviation?

That basically got me thinking very Protestant thoughts that the church dignitaries were all human beings, and thus capable of making mistakes, so who were they to dictate to me what my relationship should be with any deity, which then expanded to the entire Catholic Church structure up to the Pope, all of whom were appointed by fellow capable-of-making-errors human beings, and then to the Bible itself being written by fallible humans, back to Jesus himself, who may or may not have been actual god, but his followers were certainly humans, so were likely to make mistakes. Why am I being told to live my life by teachings that could have very easily been misinterpreted or mistranslated over the thousands of years since they were taught/written down, through however many different translations from original texts?