Post-Breakfast Pre-Lunch Update.
Methinks I am on the internet far too much and hitting the books and MS Word far too little. But ah, philosophy! It is so hard! I can't digest it properly! I cannot formulate criticisms and logical arguments for an essay! Cannot think like a philosopher!
... I blame Catholic school.
lol, this reminds me of some of the vague, half-formed ideas I had due to the recent election being all about funding to faith-based schools in Ontario. We'll see if those ideas find their way into this post (lord knows I can write essay length LJ posts without much problem, but essay length essays are always quite tricky).
Well, backing away from the tangent, this is not to say I think having had a Catholic education since forever was a bad thing. Far from it. I liked how my elementary and high school years turned me out, really. It's just that I can't help thinking (oh, and here come some of the ideas I spoke of come out) that despite all the good things I can say about my separate school education, I *may* have wound up more worldly and better "educated" in a slightly different sense.
You see, the transition to university wasn't as jarring as my teachers threatened it would be, but it was jarring in ways I wholly didn't expect.
The number one thing that jarred me most was seeing a lot of black people, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, etc. on a daily basis. It's terrible, because a lot of great people I know are definitely not Catholic and/or Oriental Asian, and sure as hell it's not like I didn't take World Religions in grade 11 and failed to learn anything about other faiths, but I'm just not in my comfort zone when I'm not surrounded by people who are more similar to me.
In elementary school, I hardly even understood my own religion because while I had to go to mass, take religion classes, pray the same prayers daily, it was never enforced in my own family. The paternal side of my family is the side I was raised with and am closest to, and they're an eclectic blend of Buddhist, Confucian and traditional Chinese cultural practitioners (if that makes any sense at all).
It's possible that I've gone to more temples than I've actually gone to church, and yet, I've prayed more in church (whether I wanted to or not) than I've ever prayed in a temple.
But I digress. The point of it is, if you come from a very classic Chinese family like mine, you get raised believing other people (aka. anyone who isn't Chinese, or even within the immediate household you live with) is an outsider and cannot be trusted. If your own family system is based on politics and you spend your early years surrounded largely by Caucasian Catholics, how can you be expected to be used to the idea of other people and cultures?
This is not to say I'm not trying hard to get over my biases. I love all of you guys on the friends list, regardless of whatever the hell your background is. Once I meet people and come to like them, I don't care what they look like. It's just that I don't go out of my way to meet people in real life most of the time, and even if I do, I don't go far from my comfort zone (that being other oriental Asian people who preferably look Chinese). This is why I don't like myself.
Again, I digress.
I got baptized because I think the maternal side of my family (Catholic) wanted it, and it also got me a ticket into Catholic school. My family probably thought it better than sending me to public school (seeing as my dad and his siblings went to Catholic school in Hong Kong too) and we still didn't have to worry about paying tuitions because of the separate school board funding. But really, while I honestly feel like the environment of a Catholic school seems marginally 'better' than that of a public school, I know that I'm speaking out of bias because I've never had anything else. Who knows, maybe I'd know a lot more and be less uncomfortable with non-Asian, non-Catholic/Buddhist people if I had gone to a public school though.
As much as I loved my schools, I'd feel bad if a separate education is leaving a lot of kids (kind of like me) half-blind about the other cultures living in Ontario and everywhere else. That's why I kind of felt like if the election had made it so that the separate system eventually disappeared, it might not be a completely bad thing.
The funny thing is, I'm half-blind about being Catholic, even though I was educated in a Catholic environment.
I don't think a lot of you guys would really relate to how weirded out I was as a kid because of school masses and Catholic sacraments, because unlike everyone else, I knew nothing about them. I was baptized (which was a traumatic memory mostly, because I was old enough to remember it and it was dark and there was a scary old man dumping water on me) and that was about it. It wasn't as if my grandmother was going to tell me things about what the sign of the cross is, now is it?
I think this is part of why I'm more of a lurker and observer. I've done a lot of watching and learning to deal with religion because I'd sound like a moron if I outright asked about things. I hate sounding more moronic than I already am.
I must admit that it wasn't until grade 7 or 8 that I finally managed to catch the actions that people are supposed to make when the priest is about to read directly from the Gospels or whatever. (Notice I'm saying "or whatever" because it feels like so long since the last time I've gone to mass that I've forgotten already.) It took that long because all I managed to catch for years was that you have to wiggle your thumb at different parts of your face for a second, and now I vaguely know that you're crossing yourself or something. I still don't know what it is that people are saying when they do it though, because it sounds like a big mumble.
Also, I've always found Catholic sacraments rubbed me the wrong way.
Like my first confession, and all the confessions I've had to make after it throughout elementary school. Sorry, maybe it's my Chineseness and my own personality making me bottle things up, but I don't feel like I have any obligation to tell a stranger all the things I've possibly done wrong in the past year or however long it's been. Frankly, I rarely even knew what horrible, sinful things my pre-teen self may have done that would warrant a confession to a 'representative' of God. And even if I did, why can't I tell the Big Guy Upstairs myself? So, in the end, I would make non-committal confessions about things like lying to my family about things like brushing my teeth when I hadn't. And then I am told to say 10 Hail Mary's or something to that extent and then I leave. Suffice to say, I still think confession is a waste of time.
Ash Wednesday was also horrible. You do not know how happy I was in grade 12 when I finally got through my last Ash Wednesday. While I like the sentiment behind it, my otherwise mild obsessive-compulsive tendencies would go on overdrive just thinking about it. I would have unfamiliar people touching me on my face, which I do not like. I would have people putting dirt on my face, which is in essence contaminating me with holy ashes (oxymoronic as it sounds) and I'm forced to allow this to happen. And worst of all, I would have to leave this source of contamination on me all day as a sign of-I don't even know what it's a sign of anymore, because I was always so concerned with finding ways of "accidentally" rubbing it off during the day, and running to the nearest bathroom when I got home to scrub my face down.
Yeah. There are other things, but really, confession and Ash Wednesday take the cake.
This is why I'm not a very good Catholic. But overall, I'm not a very good person anyway (although I can't say that I don't have my charming points), so this is just part of it, really. :D"
So what does this whole ramble have to do with philosophy? Well, apart from the fact that it has distracted me from it, as with when I took World Religions in high school, I took Philosophy. And it was generally a big waste of time. See, those two classes counted towards religion credits (another thing that most Catholic school kids will tell you they hate about going to a Catholic High School because they take up room for electives) so many of us took it in hopes that we'd finally get away from having to bullshit about Jesus in every assignment we wrote.
... we were wrong.
Because somehow, World Religions would talk about some of the basic characteristics of other faiths, but it'd magically link itself back to Christianity somehow. While the focus was never on Christianity exactly, it'd always come down to things like, "What makes _______ different from Christianity? How are they similar?" and so on, so forth. Maybe I'm just latching onto the bad points, because I do recall enjoying the class, but I hated how being in a Catholic environment automatically made it so that Christianity had to be somewhere in the curriculum for a World Religions class.
Same thing with Philosophy. Other people who took Morality usually did it because it was the easier grade 12 'religion' class. Those of us who took Philosophy were the ones who, after 14 years of required religion class, really, really, really wanted to do something different. Something more secular. And we were of course, let down. Because every "philosophy" essay we did required us to bullshit something about God and Jesus again in relation to whatever it was we were talking about.
Now I find myself in a philosophy class where bullshitting about God is out of the question. We have to "think" about the arguments we're making. And unlike English, there's nothing really concrete for me to go on except for the rather vague and generally unprovable ideas that I'm supposed to be commenting on. This is why I'm dead, and all because of Catholic school not really being the best place to learn philosophy.
And somehow all this reminds me of the good ol' Nostra Aetate, which all of us will remember for all eternity as potentially the most bothersome document on the planet because it was #1 on the list of things we had to know.
The Nostra Aetate actually appealed to me, because it does make a statement for tolerance (which is nice coming from the Roman Catholic church)... it just sometimes comes across as a little condescending. Um. Yeah. But regardless, it pissed us off because we had to memorize passages from it and quote from memory for our exam essays and such.
... also, the thing that's always pissed me off is how we always used "Christian" textbooks, and referred to ourselves as "Christian", when in all honesty I felt that by definition, Catholic =/= Christian. Sorry guys, but we may believe in similar religious figures and share some history, the way we go about it is totally different. The biggest thing for me is that while Jesus is important in Catholicism, he's not everything there is. Far from it. Christianity thinks Jesus is everything. Hell, that's why Christianity is called Christianity. And especially after being forced to read Christian pamphlets and seeing how they interact (courtesy of my aunt's Christian friends who appear to be trying to give me indirect religious guidance when I don't feel I need any), I'm pretty certain about Christians being concerned only about Jesus and not much else.
There's nothing wrong with that, but it rubs me the wrong way because it seems like a very narrow view. Not that Roman Catholicism isn't famous for being conservative and anal, but I think it's more because I don't consider myself exclusively Catholic because of my family environment and... now I don't know where I'm going with this and I don't need to make this any longer or trip over more tails seeing as some of my closest friends happen to be Christian and I'm really skimming over a lot of details so I end here.
Now I'm also probably dancing in difficult territory, and I should eat lunch and get back to work now. But hey, it's not often I make a "serious" post about "serious thoughts" about "serious business", so... yeah. If you read all that and don't think poorly of me, I am happy. ♥
... I blame Catholic school.
lol, this reminds me of some of the vague, half-formed ideas I had due to the recent election being all about funding to faith-based schools in Ontario. We'll see if those ideas find their way into this post (lord knows I can write essay length LJ posts without much problem, but essay length essays are always quite tricky).
Well, backing away from the tangent, this is not to say I think having had a Catholic education since forever was a bad thing. Far from it. I liked how my elementary and high school years turned me out, really. It's just that I can't help thinking (oh, and here come some of the ideas I spoke of come out) that despite all the good things I can say about my separate school education, I *may* have wound up more worldly and better "educated" in a slightly different sense.
You see, the transition to university wasn't as jarring as my teachers threatened it would be, but it was jarring in ways I wholly didn't expect.
The number one thing that jarred me most was seeing a lot of black people, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, etc. on a daily basis. It's terrible, because a lot of great people I know are definitely not Catholic and/or Oriental Asian, and sure as hell it's not like I didn't take World Religions in grade 11 and failed to learn anything about other faiths, but I'm just not in my comfort zone when I'm not surrounded by people who are more similar to me.
In elementary school, I hardly even understood my own religion because while I had to go to mass, take religion classes, pray the same prayers daily, it was never enforced in my own family. The paternal side of my family is the side I was raised with and am closest to, and they're an eclectic blend of Buddhist, Confucian and traditional Chinese cultural practitioners (if that makes any sense at all).
It's possible that I've gone to more temples than I've actually gone to church, and yet, I've prayed more in church (whether I wanted to or not) than I've ever prayed in a temple.
But I digress. The point of it is, if you come from a very classic Chinese family like mine, you get raised believing other people (aka. anyone who isn't Chinese, or even within the immediate household you live with) is an outsider and cannot be trusted. If your own family system is based on politics and you spend your early years surrounded largely by Caucasian Catholics, how can you be expected to be used to the idea of other people and cultures?
This is not to say I'm not trying hard to get over my biases. I love all of you guys on the friends list, regardless of whatever the hell your background is. Once I meet people and come to like them, I don't care what they look like. It's just that I don't go out of my way to meet people in real life most of the time, and even if I do, I don't go far from my comfort zone (that being other oriental Asian people who preferably look Chinese). This is why I don't like myself.
Again, I digress.
I got baptized because I think the maternal side of my family (Catholic) wanted it, and it also got me a ticket into Catholic school. My family probably thought it better than sending me to public school (seeing as my dad and his siblings went to Catholic school in Hong Kong too) and we still didn't have to worry about paying tuitions because of the separate school board funding. But really, while I honestly feel like the environment of a Catholic school seems marginally 'better' than that of a public school, I know that I'm speaking out of bias because I've never had anything else. Who knows, maybe I'd know a lot more and be less uncomfortable with non-Asian, non-Catholic/Buddhist people if I had gone to a public school though.
As much as I loved my schools, I'd feel bad if a separate education is leaving a lot of kids (kind of like me) half-blind about the other cultures living in Ontario and everywhere else. That's why I kind of felt like if the election had made it so that the separate system eventually disappeared, it might not be a completely bad thing.
The funny thing is, I'm half-blind about being Catholic, even though I was educated in a Catholic environment.
I don't think a lot of you guys would really relate to how weirded out I was as a kid because of school masses and Catholic sacraments, because unlike everyone else, I knew nothing about them. I was baptized (which was a traumatic memory mostly, because I was old enough to remember it and it was dark and there was a scary old man dumping water on me) and that was about it. It wasn't as if my grandmother was going to tell me things about what the sign of the cross is, now is it?
I think this is part of why I'm more of a lurker and observer. I've done a lot of watching and learning to deal with religion because I'd sound like a moron if I outright asked about things. I hate sounding more moronic than I already am.
I must admit that it wasn't until grade 7 or 8 that I finally managed to catch the actions that people are supposed to make when the priest is about to read directly from the Gospels or whatever. (Notice I'm saying "or whatever" because it feels like so long since the last time I've gone to mass that I've forgotten already.) It took that long because all I managed to catch for years was that you have to wiggle your thumb at different parts of your face for a second, and now I vaguely know that you're crossing yourself or something. I still don't know what it is that people are saying when they do it though, because it sounds like a big mumble.
Also, I've always found Catholic sacraments rubbed me the wrong way.
Like my first confession, and all the confessions I've had to make after it throughout elementary school. Sorry, maybe it's my Chineseness and my own personality making me bottle things up, but I don't feel like I have any obligation to tell a stranger all the things I've possibly done wrong in the past year or however long it's been. Frankly, I rarely even knew what horrible, sinful things my pre-teen self may have done that would warrant a confession to a 'representative' of God. And even if I did, why can't I tell the Big Guy Upstairs myself? So, in the end, I would make non-committal confessions about things like lying to my family about things like brushing my teeth when I hadn't. And then I am told to say 10 Hail Mary's or something to that extent and then I leave. Suffice to say, I still think confession is a waste of time.
Ash Wednesday was also horrible. You do not know how happy I was in grade 12 when I finally got through my last Ash Wednesday. While I like the sentiment behind it, my otherwise mild obsessive-compulsive tendencies would go on overdrive just thinking about it. I would have unfamiliar people touching me on my face, which I do not like. I would have people putting dirt on my face, which is in essence contaminating me with holy ashes (oxymoronic as it sounds) and I'm forced to allow this to happen. And worst of all, I would have to leave this source of contamination on me all day as a sign of-I don't even know what it's a sign of anymore, because I was always so concerned with finding ways of "accidentally" rubbing it off during the day, and running to the nearest bathroom when I got home to scrub my face down.
Yeah. There are other things, but really, confession and Ash Wednesday take the cake.
This is why I'm not a very good Catholic. But overall, I'm not a very good person anyway (although I can't say that I don't have my charming points), so this is just part of it, really. :D"
So what does this whole ramble have to do with philosophy? Well, apart from the fact that it has distracted me from it, as with when I took World Religions in high school, I took Philosophy. And it was generally a big waste of time. See, those two classes counted towards religion credits (another thing that most Catholic school kids will tell you they hate about going to a Catholic High School because they take up room for electives) so many of us took it in hopes that we'd finally get away from having to bullshit about Jesus in every assignment we wrote.
... we were wrong.
Because somehow, World Religions would talk about some of the basic characteristics of other faiths, but it'd magically link itself back to Christianity somehow. While the focus was never on Christianity exactly, it'd always come down to things like, "What makes _______ different from Christianity? How are they similar?" and so on, so forth. Maybe I'm just latching onto the bad points, because I do recall enjoying the class, but I hated how being in a Catholic environment automatically made it so that Christianity had to be somewhere in the curriculum for a World Religions class.
Same thing with Philosophy. Other people who took Morality usually did it because it was the easier grade 12 'religion' class. Those of us who took Philosophy were the ones who, after 14 years of required religion class, really, really, really wanted to do something different. Something more secular. And we were of course, let down. Because every "philosophy" essay we did required us to bullshit something about God and Jesus again in relation to whatever it was we were talking about.
Now I find myself in a philosophy class where bullshitting about God is out of the question. We have to "think" about the arguments we're making. And unlike English, there's nothing really concrete for me to go on except for the rather vague and generally unprovable ideas that I'm supposed to be commenting on. This is why I'm dead, and all because of Catholic school not really being the best place to learn philosophy.
And somehow all this reminds me of the good ol' Nostra Aetate, which all of us will remember for all eternity as potentially the most bothersome document on the planet because it was #1 on the list of things we had to know.
The Nostra Aetate actually appealed to me, because it does make a statement for tolerance (which is nice coming from the Roman Catholic church)... it just sometimes comes across as a little condescending. Um. Yeah. But regardless, it pissed us off because we had to memorize passages from it and quote from memory for our exam essays and such.
... also, the thing that's always pissed me off is how we always used "Christian" textbooks, and referred to ourselves as "Christian", when in all honesty I felt that by definition, Catholic =/= Christian. Sorry guys, but we may believe in similar religious figures and share some history, the way we go about it is totally different. The biggest thing for me is that while Jesus is important in Catholicism, he's not everything there is. Far from it. Christianity thinks Jesus is everything. Hell, that's why Christianity is called Christianity. And especially after being forced to read Christian pamphlets and seeing how they interact (courtesy of my aunt's Christian friends who appear to be trying to give me indirect religious guidance when I don't feel I need any), I'm pretty certain about Christians being concerned only about Jesus and not much else.
There's nothing wrong with that, but it rubs me the wrong way because it seems like a very narrow view. Not that Roman Catholicism isn't famous for being conservative and anal, but I think it's more because I don't consider myself exclusively Catholic because of my family environment and... now I don't know where I'm going with this and I don't need to make this any longer or trip over more tails seeing as some of my closest friends happen to be Christian and I'm really skimming over a lot of details so I end here.
Now I'm also probably dancing in difficult territory, and I should eat lunch and get back to work now. But hey, it's not often I make a "serious" post about "serious thoughts" about "serious business", so... yeah. If you read all that and don't think poorly of me, I am happy. ♥