Thursday, July 28, 2011

Mama Mia Culpa!

Last time I wrote about how I felt about the connection people try to make with their murderous intentions being the calling of God, which dropped into the bucket of doubt, purged almost instantly by logic and the fact God is ALWAYS the reason for things, good or bad. Someone brought up The Virgin Mary in a comment that was certainly a topic in a later post, but I figure, why wait? As stated in earlier post, I am not the best Catholic. To be honest, I am not sure what to call me. My wife, who has studied many religions, including whatever a harikrishna (sp) is seems to think of me as an Episcopalian, or was it a Methodist??? I am not sure anymore. I like to think of me as just Scott, but that tends to make me an outsider to everyone else. 

Religion is so complex and means so many things to each person, it is pointless, if not impossible, to state my case on the matter. I found that, in my own research to discover what I was, I was wasting way too much time of my life trying to slap a label around my faith to feel like I fit in with everyone, forgetting that I did not care one iota what people thought of me. This freed up a lot of time with my day. Faith became one of the first 10 questions in the 20 questions on a date scene, instead of a life-long devotion. Maybe in writing this I will find out that I am really something completely different than a Catholic. My God, maybe I am a Mormon in denial, or an Evangelical suffering from a number of deadly sins, mainly Envy in not having the bank roll that most Evangelicals have. But, for now, I am a Catholic by choice and a believer in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit by soul. Now, about the Holy Mother. 

"I am not a fan of the Roman Catholic church. From their worship of Mary and saints, to their part in the Inquisition on up to today's molestation cases."

For the most part, I agree with this with the exception of Mary. She has been one of the main topics I have argued, defended, countered, fought for and questioned in silence, since I started reading up on my religion. Traditionally, it feels to me like he role in a bit convoluted, depending on where you see her and who is trying to explain her to you. A lot of the time, I like to take other people's thoughts about a subject and apply it as though they were asking me a question. Before posting this, I will nutshell my own interpretation of my faith. 
God removed for now, focusing solely on the two "Real People" in question. If God chose to impregnate Mary, to carry out his will and bring his son into the world to die on the cross for our sins and all, why would we not pay her some respect? Not worship her, but respect her as the vessel of the LORD and conduit between Man and God. If she was chosen by God among everyone else, and appeared to her and spoke to her and allowed her similar gifts to conduct his holy work on Earth, she is entitled for some notice.  Why is it then, when someone insults our families, specifically, our mother or father, we pounce and even kill that person, yet we are so smug to say "You acknowledge the mother of Jesus?" And turn the check as though I just whipped out my penis and placed it on the table.  

And here is another point to consider, Fatima. 

It's not like one or two people claimed to see the same thing here, but tens of thousands of people standing around, apparently dropping acid, so they could all witness the Miracle of the Sun take place as a mass hallucination. Sounded like one hell of a trip, according to the description from people there. I used to dose when I was younger, and I can tell you I never saw the sun move closer to me with a sudden burst of intense heat that should have turned me into a pile of ash. I did see this cat in a CK coffee shop come into the bathroom, where I was having a total meltdown, look at me with a look of death, his eyes hung from their sockets, and I immediately returned to the table to explain to my friend, who was also tripping, that I had just seen a corpse. But nothing about a sun dancing in the sky. I can also tell you, first hand, that some of the explanation is due to staring at the sun for to long. Did it. Did not trip. Had an awful headache for a few hours, but did not naturally trip, otherwise I think we would see way more people randomly staring at the sun. Call me crazy. 

The actual number was something like 70 thousand people, all of whom saw something very impressive. The reports did not mesh as far as Jimbo seeing what Galaxy-girl saw, but each saw something miraculous nonetheless. There comes a time in life that you just have to accept our Science can not explain everything and, because of this, not take it to mean that it did not happen. Not being able to explain something is called faith. It's also called a UFO, but this only applies if you are a ScientologistSmurfologist, blue in color and deathly afraid of cats? The Virgin Mary is just a common household name as her son, it just falls on the host to open the door and let either one or both inside for a spell. 


DEVOTION TO MARY

If you want to see what a person's real priorities are, then watch what they do when their life, or the life of a loved one, is in danger. When Pope John Paul II was shot, while the ambulance was rushing him to the hospital, the Pope was not praying to God or calling on the name of Jesus. He kept saying, over and over, “Mary, my mother!” Polish pilgrims placed a picture of Our Lady of Czestochowa on the throne where the Pope normally sat. People gathered around the picture. Vatican loudspeakers broadcast the prayers of the rosary. When the Pope recovered, he gave Mary all the glory for saving his life, and he made a pilgrimage to Fatima to publicly thank her.

(If Mary *is* the conduit to the Father who saved the Pope from his death, then why not thank her? What if, like all things, God is corporate based, which sounds silly but humor me, and Jesus manages the day to day business as the "Managing Messiah" and Mary the mule for all of the prayers coming in? Think about it. We pray to God for everything! even things that doesn't concern him. Do you honestly believe God cares if the NFL lockout ends or not? You think God gave Kanye West the ability to make millions of dollars, while the majority fight for a minimum wage job? Someone needs to delegate the real prayers from the BS pile.)

Jesus said, “[W]here your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Luke 12:34) Some statues of Mary have real crowns made of gold. The web sites listed in the Notes show pictures of statues of Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of Lourdes wearing crowns.The statues in the pictures are replicas, and their crowns are ceramic and painted gold. But the crowns on the original statues at Fatima and Lourdes are real crowns made of real gold.
(Again, if Fatima happened the way all those hippies proclaimed, it was Mary who appeared to them not God. To compare, it would be like enshrining Mile High Stadium with Jesus, instead of a Bronco.)

Vast sums of money are spent on some special statues of Mary. For example, the statue of Our Lady of the Pillar in Saragossa, Spain has a crown made of 25 pounds of gold and diamonds, with so many diamonds that you can hardly see the gold. In addition, it has six other crowns of gold, diamonds and emeralds. It has 365 mantles which are embroidered with gold and covered with roses of diamonds and other precious stones. It has 365 necklaces made of pearls and diamonds, and six chains of gold set with diamonds
(this is the only one I actually get physically sick about. but, still, this has nothing to do with the Virgin Mary or God, but everything to do with the church and doesn't mean we worship the Holy Mother. It just means our church has too damn much money.) 

So, I would probably be a bad (insert name of religion here) just because I personally feel like the mother of anyone should have some respect. Someone once asked me, "If you feel so strongly about Mary, why don't you observe your own mother in the same light." I told them because last I checked, I had not brought anyone back from the dead, or been nailed to a cross recently. I say recently because there is always that slight delay, the one that shows they actually considered me being nailed to a cross at some point; otherwise, why did I say it? Yeah, I guess that is my point as well.

I don't think my church is the one "true" church, nor do I think any other man made institution is the proper seat in which to sit my holy arse. I do believe it has the most history (I know, Muslims are older and more numerous) in that there are so many events in history where Roman Catholics tore across the lands, splitting faiths and heads and injecting their faith into cultures that already had an idea of who their God was. I know the bible is writhe with conflict and contradiction, and that is why I no longer see myself as a Catholic as much as a man posing as one...taking from it those values that I deem important to me, waiting, watching, listening and above all looking to the heavens for the moment someone gets it all right. When the LORD God returns to reclaim his people and all that...at least I thought that was my purpose, but then something else happened to me. I stopped praying. 



8 comments:

  1. Now I'm confused. Do you believe people saw apparitions of Mary at Lourdes and Fatima? DO you believe Mary has just as much power to answer prayer as the Father, or the Son? That's the problem between catholics and protestants, roman catholics add church doctrine to the Scriptures, whereas protestants, thanks to Martin Luther believe in 'sola scriptura'. I'm in the second camp, since I don't remember Jesus ever saying to pray to his mother, or that she had any special powers. Mary definitely has a place of preeminence and respect in the faith, but she should not be worshiped, neither I think she would want it. Mary was fully human, like you or me, and without a Savior she would also perish.
    It's kind of difficult to understand how you can still have faith in God, if you believe the Bible is full of contradictions and conflict. I bet that if you took the time to research these so called contradictions, you would find out that there aren't any in the original manuscripts. Great post as usual:)

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  2. Alessandra- I was not stating Mary has any power. As a conduit of faith (If this is even accurate in itself) Mary does not DO the healing, but God. As for Fatima, I do believe they saw something, just as I believe I saw something when I was younger. My issue is that *others* professed these people to see something as a direct result of something other than their faith, such as looking at the sun too long. The thing about Jesus is I don't recall anyone ever "hearing" Him say anything. There are people who claim to have wrote down his words. I have and always will question if these words wer verbatim. Simply because I can say something to you, and you might repeat my words exactly, but someone is likely to interprest them down the line. But this is somethign I will focus on more when I get to the bible. There is a fact out there somewhere, which I have read several times, that the actual bible, the gospel of the diciples that managed to survive their travels have only been seen by those of the highest authority. As for researching, I have done much of it. There is a difference between researching and studying or practicing those words.

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  3. I'm not a biblical scholar. Or any kind of scholar, when you get right down to it. So I can't claim to be any kind of authority on anything. My only redeeming factor is that I have read (literally) thousands of books. When I was young, my parents told me to look at the different religions and make up my own mind. I read the whole bible and thought "Hmm. Maybe." Then I read the story of Gilgamesh. It was almost the exact same story, but written 2500 years earlier. Elements of many biblical stories all written into one character. Virgin birth. Son of a god. Super powers. Reigned as king for almost 200 years, etc. I thought "Why is there no church of Gilgamesh?" Did some more reading and read how the christians systematically suppressed and destroyed all traces of other older belief systems, much like the romans they claimed to be harassed by. Then I ran across a quote which summed the whole quandary up for me in one line: "History is always written by the victors."

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  4. I have to side with Alessandra's comments up above. She and I seem to agree on a lot of things though.
    I've been given the comparison of praying to Mary and the saints like it was someone wanting to talk to the President. The priest said, "You wouldn't just walk up to the President, you'd probably go through his secretary or chief of staff.". This is true, but what if the President is your father? Do you go through the chain or do you talk to him directly when you are in need?
    I know many people who say that they are (Roman) Catholic, but when I ask them why they use birth control, don't believe the pope is infallible, etc...they tell me that they don't believe everything "their" religion espouses. Well then you really aren't (Roman) Catholic then, are you? You may be Christian, but you don't follow the rules the Vatican is handing out. Personally, I don't cling to any denomination. I follow the general ideas of Protestantism, but don't agree with all of the ideas of any particular sect.
    Regarding Islam, I think that you'll find it came well after both Judaism and later Christianity.
    So much more I'd like to say, but back to work for me. Maybe I should take the plunge and write about it myself.

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  5. Again, u always come up with a great idea and smart discussion Scott. I don't know how to comment this topic about the virgin Mary this time, since I am not Catholic. I born Christian Protestant in a country with Islam majority, Indonesia, so my tolerances toward other religions is rather flexible. My grand parents from my mom's side were both Islam but lucky me they both died before I even in the womb of my mother (hehehehe...naughty me, this is what I called tolerance!). I learned about Protestanism when I was young, I was baptised and given the passed certificate of learning the bible (6 months study), however I only knew just a little about Christianity. When I was in the university, some friends introduced me to Jehovah Witnesses, they looked alright to me, but still there are some believes there that I hardly accept and shared, so I am Christian yes, in between Protestant and Jehovah witnesses (the last one is forbiden here in Indonesia). What I know 100% is I am Christian in my heart, I always pray to God our father in the name of Jesus Christ and I knew since I born He is the only one who always listen to my prayers and blessed me with whatever materials, talent and knowledge that I accomplished till today and forever. I live and fear in God, coz I know well He is always around us, though that never stop me of making sin, sometimes His forgiveness and abundant loves make us feel so much relax in doing something He dislikes. regarding virgin Mary, I respect her as a chosen woman, but I second Alessandra and George that we should not worship her, since it is not written as a must in a holy book, or may be it is written there some how because it depends in the perception of the people who read and in understanding the contents of the book. About the statue that is always used as the media of prayer in Catholisim, I must say that I really against it, since it is clearly forbiden by God as written in 10 Commandments. We can always meet God in our spirit, soul, mind and prayers, that is what I strongly believe. Well Scott, thanks a lot for bring this issue up to your readers. Forgive me if there is any word I said have hurt u. God bless u Scott because u r a man who is always searhing the truth, and there is no other truth than he Himself our GOD.

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  6. Egad. Am I finding myself in the literal role of Devil's Advocate here or what? Woof!

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  7. Scott, do you believe in the Constitution? How about the Preamble or the Bill of RIghts? DId you ever hear Washington, Jefferson, Adams etc. utter those words? Yet, we charge these men with coming up with such lofty ideals, on which we base our society and our laws. If you believe God is omnipotent, don't you believe HE would be able to preserve the words His Son spoke through eternity? Great discussion anyway, can't wait for more...

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  8. No. I don't believe in the institution of Government. I used to, before the meaning lost itself inside a political Pandora's Box. I use to believe in many things that on the surface felt right, but I think you may have given me topic for the next post...until then.

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