@Pocaracas,
I was a fallen cradle Catholic until the prayers of my wife brought me back to the church and Christ. If there’s hope for a “traitor” like me, there’s hope for anyone! Please allow me to join my prayers with your wife’s prayers that you may come to know and believe in God. As my wife reminded me, “Your sons are looking to you as they develop into men. What is the image that you portray?” God bless my wife and may He bless you and your entire family.
hmmmm… I don’t think anyone’s prayers are ever going to make me believe… but… who knows?!
And the image I’m portraying for my kids is one of a wise “old man”, with a knack for tech stuff… also, a bit playful! In essence, a friend who they must respect. I can live with that.
Around here, we don’t let ourselves be too much defined by our beliefs… nice people are nice people regardless of what they believe…
You are a very young father. I imagine your wife comes from the same background. I grew up in a non-practicing cradle catholic family with many cultural superstitions so my need to find the truth was very important hence the reason I rely a lot on my faith. I can understand the indifference towards religion. It can get messy but truth is truth and it is out there.
Well, since we’re sharing stories around the campfire… here’s mine!
Both my parents always seemed pretty secular to me, never going to any church or anything… except for the occasional (and I mean very occasional) Christmas or Easter.
Then, when I was 4, they got divorced, because my mum cheated… me and my, then, 2 year old brother, were handed to our father - so my dad had custody, but we had to spend every other weekend with mum.
As kids, we didn’t notice much, but my dad keeps telling us that those were some hard times for him… I can imagine what it must have been like…
Then there was my grandmother always trying to get us to memorize some prayers - honestly, parts of them gave me the creeps as one concerned an altar statue talking back and the other was about some jacket with silver buttons… at the time, I ended up memorizing the thing, but never cared much for it. She was also the one who insisted more that we go to mass… But didn’t get much of a chance to do it, so it ended up being only a couple of times per year.
All along, even not thinking much about it, it seemed all grown ups claimed there was this god controlling everything, so… yeah… as a kid, I went along with it… until one day.
One day, I was about 10, I heard a news piece on the car radio about something that was filmed in some, to me, remote part of the world… I remember thinking “man, they have cameras everywhere, nowadays!” (far was I from imagining everyone with a camera on their pockets, like it is now with phones)… anyway, it then struck me “you know what else is everywhere?.. god… but there’s no video of any god… hmmm… oh boy… could it be?.. could it be that I’m the only one who noticed this?!”
So I stayed quiet for a few years, thinking I was the only one who thought that god wasn’t really there, everywhere.
Then I found that there was a name for this “condition” - atheism - if there’s a name, there are more people like this - a weight lifted! Some time later, I discovered that some 20% of the world’s population thought a bit like me… second weight off me!
Since then, everything I’ve learned in school made absolute sense and I never even considered the possibility that there was some discrepancy between what I was learning and whatever was on the holy text… until the bit about Adam & Eve didn’t connect. Someone was wrong and, in my mind, there was already one strike on the god side… also, cavemen actually had some fossils to attest to their existence, so that was strike two.
Time and education then made me refine some of the details…
By now, some knowledge of history, some knowledge of psychology, some knowledge of archaeology, some knowledge of physics, some knowledge of chemistry… well… they all contributed to create a pretty plausible picture of how things may have developed to become as they are now… no god required.
It is because of this neat picture I have in my mind, that I find it very difficult for any person to convince me of the existence of any god…
God itself may accomplish it… who knows if it ever will?
My dad never made any comment beyond “you can’t see the wind, and yet it is there. Not seeing something is no reason for it not to exist.”
My mum married an atheist - with her, I watched the nightmare on elm street when I was 8, aliens when I was 12… my head got messed up for a while, but then it managed to sort out fact from fiction: movies and the like were fiction so no point in dwelling on them, news and documentaries are fact, so watch a lot of these - I watched so many wildlife docu’s in my teens… also, my favorite movies are now entertaining ones - comedy, sci-fi, animation like pixar’s - nothing that claims to be “based on a true story”
Thank you for respecting my point of view and keeping it light. And thank you for your support earlier today. I really need to talk to someone. Bless you and your family.
Don’t mention it.
I’m glad you’re feeling better - that’s one step towards harmony within the whole family.
