Angry at God and disillusioned by modernity (more)

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I’ve been feeling a lot of anger towards God and the morality/belief doctrines of the Catholic church and other Christian churches. Being raised Catholic and being taken to mass weekly and shortly after I started high school, I started to “wake” to existence and modern-day society at large.

All the feelings of fear and anxiety started kicking in too. I still feel the same thing now than I did in school. At that time, I also got into being exposed to doomsday ideas, either threats that are sometimes legitimate like global thermonuclear war or outright ridiculous like the Mayan calender apocalypse. And even Christian groups talk about this stuff, and there’s even a whole other branch of theology dedicated to those ideas.

I also started to have a dim view of the world in general. I am a younger milennial, and have the more overall impression that the world was better and easier when my grandparents or my own parents were growing up and were younger adults. It makes me wish I lived in the past.

Like one part of me is willfully rebelling and committing what is widely considered sin, but another part of me feels a guilt deep down remotely. I retrospectively see subjects in the church and schools about things like “lust” at attractive women as a kind of misandry. Also, the “pre-emptive” tendancy in a lot of churches and denomination teachings, that says that anything (even intended to be good) that’s been “ruined” is inherently sin or God thinks his creation was bad because man messed it up. I can’t convince myself that anyone wanting to look or be “sexy” or “lusting” after women without intent of rape is bad or sinful. I just don’t want to understand why other “good Christians” don’t feel the same way.

I was also inspired by the thread of a user named “nsper7”, I read and feel quite similar to him.
 
I hope that you would find some comfort in Dante (if that’s possible)! In his Inferno, he imagines himself entering Hell, beginning with the least of the sins and proceeding all the way down to the most serious of sins. Guess which sin Dante and Virgil encounter after they pass thru Limbo. Lust. So, for Dante, lust is the least of the deadly sins. I can’t help but agree with him. Pride, wrath, greed are all so clearly more serious than lust. I hope you can take some comfort in Dante (the Shakespeare of Italy!)
 
Tails said:
I am a younger milennial, and have the more overall impression that the world was better and easier when my grandparents or my own parents were growing up and were younger adults. It makes me wish I lived in the past.
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I am the age of either an older parent or younger grandparent to you.

Life was NOT repeat NOT any easier for young people then. Vietnam affected a lot of US young people, drug abuse and drinking and crazy sex were all rampant, the Ayatollah was holding our people hostage and wreaking havoc with gas prices, the economy was horrible, employers were shutting down all over the USA, and then Reagan took office and all the young people were sure he would start a nuclear war with Russia.

When I was about 23 I told my mother (who had lived through WWII and seen lots of her classmates die in it) that I was envious of her generation because they seemed to have it easier and she laughed in my face for awhile.

It’s true that when I went to college, it cost less, but even with the lower cost, most people I knew still didn’t get to attend and many people still could not pay their small loans and kept deferring them for 10 or 20 years.

All eras are pretty much equally hard for young people. Be glad you aren’t fighting a war.
 
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When having a discussion with someone regarding the percieved rules Catholics follow (and “lack of freedom”), I brought up the following worldview I had picked up online somewhere:

Freedom isn’t our ability to follow the crowd, and do what the will desires, it’s having the ability to say “no” to those desires that we know are bad, even though the world may disagree with us. True freedom is the ability to deny these things, not blindly following the crowd.

Another tidbit I picked up in the confessional: know that our precepts exist to protect us, and to keep us happy. I know, I know, sometimes this is hard to see, but at the core of any faithful relationship is trust.
 
Maybe you believe that, but to me it makes the idea of (example) America as a “free country” akin to some sort of trick.
 
It’s extremely free, in comparison to a host of other countries.
 
I did not mean to dispute the idea itself that America is free.
 
Tis_Bearself: Then, we still have talk about war (nuclear or others) all over again today.
 
Yeah, and you’re always going to have war talk and conflicts, unless/ until we have a period of peace at the end of the world.

My point is that we had the same thing when I was young. You do not have it any worse. You have it pretty much the same. Some things actually improved, such as access to information via the internet, and the possibility to find all kinds of things online that you cannot easily find in your local store.

The reason young people think they have it worse is that they have not yet developed the skills that older people often have developed, to roll with the punches and to have some confidence and a measure of success gained over time. You will get these skills with age. Then you will have typical “old person” worries.
 
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Tis_Bearself: Well, there is politics that happens anyway, and of course our country changed a lot (and the rest of the world for that matter).

I have another interlocking thing with that.
 
Just to pull back a bit and get a wider angle on this…

I agree with you that in a way it’s harder to grow up nowadays.
And here’s why.
You were all bombarded by the internet at a very early age.
As opposed to earlier generations who got their information from books and newspapers, your generation was fed sound-bites and memes—complicated and nuanced issues were reduced to catchphrases .

The creation of the printed word takes effort, reflection, thought to make, and gatekeepers to release to the outside world.

On the internet, any schmoe with a two-bit opinion and internet access can say anything they like, with absolutely no filter, or fact-check, or even consequence.

I can tell you know your way around a computer, and feel yourself to be woke. But please examine what woke you up. Was it from reading the classics? And science and history and theology and philosophy? From many sources? And from actual books?

You need to push away from the computer and spend most of your time in the real world.

Peace
 
The world has changed somewhat, yes, primarily due to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the USSR, and the rise of the EU.

If by “Our Country” you mean the USA, nah, it hasn’t changed very much at all. Same ol’ same old. I would say the last really big changes for USA were the 1960s civil rights movement, the ensuing women’s rights movement in the 1970s, and Watergate. All of which were over long ago.
 
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Of course you do. It is the easier things to do. St. Paul calls it the desire of the flesh as opposed to the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Check it out (in Gal 5).
 
I still feel that the bad stuff happening today is much more disgusting and sickening to me than what stuff might have gone in the past. Broadly speaking, I think western civilization peaked around the 1950s and started to slowly decline or dying after, even though the 60s to early 2000s weren’t bad either. Someone says things are getting better, but it might just look like that on the surface. Everyone hears stuff in the news and articles today about how we are slowly losing our freedoms and liberty by the overarching of the government.

Also, I just liked the old way people did stuff back without as much of the automation and distractions we have today and obesity wasn’t a real problem like today’s world… I’m still going to say I would’ve liked it better living back in those days compared to today in most ways,
 
Well, you can feel this way all you want.

Factually, your conclusion is suspect, because it’s based on your feelings, your opinions, and an overly rosy and probably fictionalized concept of life in the past that doesn’t really help you with life in the present. Good luck with that.
 
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Apparently the older generation in the 1950s used to be nostalgic about Victorian morals.
 
Perhaps you should learn more about the Catholic faith, because once you get to see what the Church teaches, you realize things regarding sexual sins are truly good and beautiful, and fulfill your soul unlike anything else on earth can.

I recommend the Catechism of the Catholic Church http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM
 
I remember a former pastor saying that he felt sorry for young people today, because they are surrounded by so much filth in popular culture. Much more so than 50 years ago (not that things were perfect then). Tails, is it the moral ambiguity and acceptance of overt immorality that bothers you?
 
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Loud-living-dogma:
That’s a part of it. Still, I feel just as frustrated with the teachings of the churches themselves sometimes, and other concerns with God/Heaven/Spiritual ideas. I didn’t want to sound harsh.
 
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