This I Believe:

A Long-Winded Excuse For Why I’m A Bad Christian, Even Though I Really Just Don’t Want to Wake Up At Eight On a Sunday

Although I was baptized a Catholic, the only time I ever go to church is to light candles. My parents practice the polar opposite of my blasphemy: mass every other day, prayers at every meal, priests joining us at dinner, and religious paraphernalia littering the house, in contrast to my posters of Supernatural and The Rolling Stones.

I never understood my parents’ avid devotion. To clarify, I used to be the perfect shade of Christian, Our Fathers before bed and everything, until one of my hyper-religious aunts criticized Pokémon. Nobody messes with my Lvl. 100 Blaziken. My spiraling disillusionment with the church only intensified with my maturing awareness of issues like gay marriage and abortions.  Regardless, my parents forcibly carted me to church, luring me under false pretenses of “hey let’s go shopping!” or, once, when we were in Portugal, “We’re going to see a castle” which turned into “loljk we’re going on a three day pilgrimage in Fatima.” While the congregation exalted praises, I’d bore holes into the back of my parents’ heads bowed in hallelujahs, wondering how on earth they could lap up any of this. Scanning the many grey heads and replaced hips, I rationalized that it had to do with old age -- the closer they got past the half-way mark, the more the idea of impending mortality scared them straight. 

After they started going on “church trips” every couple of months, to the point that my mother had actually left me all alone in Paris to visit nuns in Lourdes, I realized that this wasn’t just an express pass to heaven for them; Catholicism was the panacea to all things wrong in their lives. My father used the services to placate his guilty conscience from his affair. My mother sought solace in the Big Guy Upstairs and his miracles, subscribing with blind faith to the hope that everything would work out for her. Psychology teaches that people innately seek out security and certainty. Although I couldn’t fathom any of their practices, I saw the effect it had on them, and the comfort it brought them. 

When I resolved to leave the church, the priest asked what I myself believed in, if not the Christian hype that my family advocated. Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve gathered a cornucopia of beliefs and superstitions, half of which make zero sense. I’m not a huge fan of Yahweh, but I do sometimes view the world as a higher power playing a Sims game on crack. From watching Full Metal Alchemist, I determined that the universe functioned in a system of equivalent trade, where good and bad events are cyclic. From reading Shaman King, I adopted the mantra of “everything will work out.” Whether they be personal philosophies I’ve drawn off of anime shows, which speaks volumes about my mental stability, or ones conjured out of the ether, like knocking on wood three times or squeezing my ring down if I want something good to happen, my beliefs are probably far more absurd than a Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 

I believe that people need things to believe in because it makes them feel that the world is safe and predictable. Omnipotent entities, governments, unspoken sets of cosmic truths, friends or families give people footholds in an otherwise terrifying unknown, regardless of how nonsensical these dogmas may seem. People need beliefs, and although I’m still wary of getting into a car with my parents on a Sunday or when we’re in Europe, I understand that I have no right to deem others’ doctrines as complete and utter horse feces without being a raging hypocrite.