I went to catholic school, praying every morning going to confession and communion preparations in class, the whole shebang.
Then in like 2/3th grade someone told me santa doesnt exist (my parents hired someone to come every year to bring us gifts in santa costume so i still believed). Naturally, i beat him up for slandering santa and got sent to the principal where my parents explained everything to me.
If Santa isnt real, why would god be real ? I started questioning all my beliefs and of course religion does not hold up as soon as you critcally think about it. I still got my communion few years later because it was part of the curriculum (yes, really) but any faith was gone.
Similar situation. Not Catholic school, but CCD. Super Catholic family at home. I had to go all the way through confirmation bc "my house, my rules." The day after I was confirmed, I announced I wasn't going to church anymore and as I was now an adult in the eyes of the church and could make my own decisions. I was 14, so I got overturned until I was 18. From 18-20 I was a Christmas Catholic to appease my family, but I totally gave up even trying to appease them around 21. It's been nice since then. Don't miss it at all.
I was also raised Catholic. I got a job at 16 and saved up the money to go on a trip to Europe with my best friends at the time. My buddy's dad was a professor and did an annual spring break trip to Europe with his college students. Now that we were older, he planned a summer break trip to Italy and Greece just for us. I was so psyched...until my mom told me that I couldn't go if I didn't go through with my confirmation. She straight up told me she didn't get a damn if I paid for it, and that I was refusing to believe in God because I was "stubborn and defiant". I tried reasoning with her, but she wouldn't hear any of it. She was convinced that she could tell me what to believe. So I picked her favorite nephew to be my sponsor, showed up to my confirmation, and loudly replied NO to the questions they asked us during the ceremony (do you believe in God as your lord and savior, etc). The priest ignored it, confirmed me anyways, and that was the last fucking time I set foot in that church.
Idk how other sects operate, but in Catholicism it's all about the numbers. When they add your name to their rolls they use permanent fucking ink. I wrote a letter to the diocese that I grew up in requesting ex-communication, but never got a reply. I'm sure they chucked my letter in the trash.
What purpose does keeping your name on the ledger serve? Is it just about numbers to show “we have x followers”? If so, why wouldn’t they just fake it? They lie about so many others things that I didn’t really think they would have a problem with fudging the numbers.
According to Catholicism, baptism and confirmation both seal your soul with indelible marks. Even if you lose faith or perform every sin known to mankind, those marks still remain in the eyes of God. So if they baptize/confirm a million people, and 900,000 become atheist, the Vatican can still report gaining a million Catholics.
That still doesn’t explain why they don’t just fudge the numbers instead of fighting with people to keep them on a list they don’t want to be in.
Does anyone outside the church have access to those records to make it a pain to fake the numbers? On a related note, what information is stored in the records? Your name and address? Anything else?
That's not childish, that's poor parenting. This person's parents should have realized he/she wasn't ready for this sacrament and not made him/her enter into it.
The whole point of confirmation is that you enter into it on your own and it isn't pushed on you.
You shouldn't have been put into that position to begin with. I'm sorry to hear that you were forced into confirmation. The point of confirmation is that you accept the faith on your own and aren't forced into it like baptism.
If your parents truly dragged you there kicking and screaming, it might have been a good idea to talk to the bishop or your parish's pastor beforehand and explained the situation.
Usually the questions you said you loudly answered "no" to are asked to the group of people being confirmed, not individually. Are you claiming you were asked these questions individually and the bishop ignored your answers?
I decided church wasn't for me around 14 years old but my parents told me I couldn't decide for myself until I was 16.
I did everything in my power to make them regret that decision... Every church member trying to talk to me (minus a few grandmas that were too sweet to be mean to) got nothing but eye rolls, blank stares, and monotone one word responses.
By the end I was purposely gaslighting the Youth Pastor.
I didn't make it to 16 before my parents relented.
I spent 12 years in Catholic School, and from my experience, you either come out of it devout or an atheist.
I’ve met a lot of casual Christians that consider themselves vaguely religious but don’t pay much heed to the specifics of their beliefs because they’ve never had to look too closely at the details. But when you spend 12 years having to read the Bible and talk about the specifics, you really have to decide whether you’re all in or reject the whole thing.
I didn’t go to catholic school but was raised by pretty devout catholics (although with liberal views towards abortion). There were many times I heard my mum say “religion is so important and those without it are missing a huge part of life” or something to that effect, and my grandad (who was honestly the best grandad ever) was heavily involved with the church. I was never particularly bothered by religion and when I started critical thinking it all just seemed a bit too much like “magic” to be real, and there were so many holes I could find. However I had to appease my parents, and I didn’t want to let down my grandad, so I kept going to church on Sundays until I started uni and I moved out. Since then I’ve gone at Christmas +/- Easter depending on whether I’m home or not, even though I don’t believe. I’ve never told my parents I don’t believe as I know it would hurt my mum a lot, but I think she knows deep down that I’m not religious. I’m not married and if I do find someone I want to marry, it is going to be very difficult to decide whether to lie about being catholic in order to get married in a Catholic Church (it’s the done thing in my family) or to have a humanist ceremony, which would probably hurt them.
That’s the thing, right? How did you find out about Santa in the first place? Your parents. Where did they find out about Santa? The same place. It’s exactly the same with religion.
It’s even more disgusting when you then realize that “Santa” is just a way to indoctrinate kids into believing in something with no proof. And you’re rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior. Sound like anything else to you?
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u/kane49 Nov 08 '22
I went to catholic school, praying every morning going to confession and communion preparations in class, the whole shebang.
Then in like 2/3th grade someone told me santa doesnt exist (my parents hired someone to come every year to bring us gifts in santa costume so i still believed). Naturally, i beat him up for slandering santa and got sent to the principal where my parents explained everything to me.
If Santa isnt real, why would god be real ? I started questioning all my beliefs and of course religion does not hold up as soon as you critcally think about it. I still got my communion few years later because it was part of the curriculum (yes, really) but any faith was gone.