theatrical_muse #186 - Religion
I learned a lot about religion, growing up the daughter of an anthropologist. She was always telling me about this culture, or that culture, or this ancient belief system and how it translates to what we believe today. I don't think there was a particular denomination to anything my mother ever believed. Because she looked at the past, and she looked at the present, and all she saw was a universal tie; a transcendence. An all roads lead to the same place kind of thing, that meant to her that it didn't really matter what we believed, so much that we believed.
My Dad was Catholic. But the devotion to it had faded from generation to generation and we never really went to Mass except for on Christmas and Easter. My sister and I were never confirmed with the Church. We never went to Confession, did penance, anything like that. I think he tried to teach us the things he was taught to believe, for the sake of tradition. But by then, I think it was only that, and not really a matter of trying to turn us into Catholics ourselves.
Especially since my mother was so focused on a religion that was worldwide.
For me, I found my own idea of God. Even though the tests Mom ran showed pieces of the world to be thousands and sometimes supposedly billions of years of old, I don't know. I kind of bought into the Creation theory. The human body is way too intricate to have climbed out of some primordial sludge or evolved from a monkey that would have, in a sense, done the same. I didn't really believe in the idea of church, in being afraid of Hell to get in to Heaven. But in my own way, I found what I thought was God.
It was rocky, as a teenager, when you go through all of those things that you do, and you want to rebel at the sky for the simple fact that it's blue and that's the way it's always been. It was even harder when Hallie died. Because when you're 17 years old, who else is there better to blame than God for the terrible things that happen to us? As I've hit my twenties, and started to question everything, everything, because everything I thought I knew suddenly makes no sense, it's gotten even harder. More tenuous. Because you need to know what everything is, and what everything means. And it's a long way from belief to truth.
Then Mom died, and the delicate hold I still had on faith snapped and broke completely.
It seemed that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I had trusted something I'd never had any proof of, I'd never been given a reason to believe. Only reasons to doubt.
Lauren Santini
Original Character/Buffy the Vampire Slayer
469 Words
My Dad was Catholic. But the devotion to it had faded from generation to generation and we never really went to Mass except for on Christmas and Easter. My sister and I were never confirmed with the Church. We never went to Confession, did penance, anything like that. I think he tried to teach us the things he was taught to believe, for the sake of tradition. But by then, I think it was only that, and not really a matter of trying to turn us into Catholics ourselves.
Especially since my mother was so focused on a religion that was worldwide.
For me, I found my own idea of God. Even though the tests Mom ran showed pieces of the world to be thousands and sometimes supposedly billions of years of old, I don't know. I kind of bought into the Creation theory. The human body is way too intricate to have climbed out of some primordial sludge or evolved from a monkey that would have, in a sense, done the same. I didn't really believe in the idea of church, in being afraid of Hell to get in to Heaven. But in my own way, I found what I thought was God.
It was rocky, as a teenager, when you go through all of those things that you do, and you want to rebel at the sky for the simple fact that it's blue and that's the way it's always been. It was even harder when Hallie died. Because when you're 17 years old, who else is there better to blame than God for the terrible things that happen to us? As I've hit my twenties, and started to question everything, everything, because everything I thought I knew suddenly makes no sense, it's gotten even harder. More tenuous. Because you need to know what everything is, and what everything means. And it's a long way from belief to truth.
Then Mom died, and the delicate hold I still had on faith snapped and broke completely.
It seemed that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I had trusted something I'd never had any proof of, I'd never been given a reason to believe. Only reasons to doubt.
Lauren Santini
Original Character/Buffy the Vampire Slayer
469 Words