H
handydandyandyman
Guest
Hello everyone. Long story short, I grew up in a very conservative and sheltered homeschool upbringing. I went to a small church and grew up with likeminded people. In my teens, I experienced sexual abuse, extremely severe depression, and lost faith completely. I stopped going to church at about 18 years old and turned 23 a few weeks ago and haven’t really been able to go since. With the dark experiences I’ve had, I have an incredibly hard time justifying to stances that the church has against sexuality, and all the other social justice debates that we all know and talk about. I have an extremely hard time with faith and not being nihilistic but deep down I want to believe in something. Somedays I go from reading Augustine and then Christopher Hitchens the next and I just can’t make a decision. I feel like I’m on a journey and I want to have faith again but there’s a blockage with the beliefs I have in human rights and so forth. I want to be myself but I don’t want to hurt my parents. My girlfriend also works as a sex educator and writer for PP and my parents don’t even know. Does this make me a bad Catholic or a bad person? I have so many disagreements with so many fundamentals in the faith but yet I still want faith? I just want to know the truth but since no one will ever know, I can’t seem to commit to a religion. I feel so lost. Can anyone give advice? Has anyone been like this before where they couldn’t trust a priest or church authority?