Pope Francis and the Beatitudes

I was born and raised a Catholic. I went to Catholic schools for 16 years. I’ve received all the sacraments except for the last one (good thing, that). As I got older and (presumably) wiser, the hocus-pocus of Catholicism gradually wore off, and it started to feel kinda silly. The virgin birth thing is a bit of a whopper, as is the bit where you go to hell if you eat a cheeseburger on specified Fridays. There’s lots more bits like this. Plus an absolute obsession with sex from a (supposedly) celibate all-male clergy, many of whom, as it turned out, could not keep their randy little hands to themselves. So it’s fair to say I’m a bit lapsed. Or a lot lapsed, since I’m now a full blown atheist.

I’m not proud of being a full blown atheist, any more than I was proud to be a full blown Catholic. I was a Catholic because I was born to Catholic parents. If my parents had been Muslim, I would have been raised Muslim. Inheriting your religion seems terribly random. It’s like being born into the mob. Or raised from birth to be an accountant. But still, we were taught that we were right and everybody else was wrong. Especially Protestants, who were wicked in so many ways that it was decided to keep the answer to “why?” away from us entirely.

We were also taught that being gay was wrong. Not only wrong, but a SIN. The mortal kind. Gays would never get to heaven. Gays would end up burning in hell for all eternity. And this edict was coming from a God who supposedly made us all in his own image, and loved us unreservedly. This seemed weird. And a real dick move to boot. I knew gays, and just about all of them were highly preferable to the hypocrites who knocked you over in the church pew so everybody could see them putting their $50 in the collection plate, and then told you to fuck off in the parking lot when you pulled out in front of them. I could not reconcile the inherent nastiness and casual cruelty of the church’s pillars with the kindness and decency of folks who spent Sunday mornings in bed sleeping off the joy they spread the night before.

Organized religion seemed nothing but a cover for bigotry. So I just pissed off and became a non-believer.