Growing up Catholic

As a child growing up Roman Catholic, I feared Father Octave and Sister Ann.  I swear they were Omni conscious.  Whenever I didn’t attend Mass on a Sunday, they would know. So I dreaded Wednesdays; that was when Catechism was held after school in one of the classrooms. My heart would be beating a hundred times a minute as I entered the room with eyes to the floor. All the other kids would be seated with their hands clasped on the desk, eagerly waiting for Catechism to begin. I would sit behind them, trying to become invisible. Then I would hear the dreaded “Charles, come up here.” All eyes would turn to me, feeling sorry, except my partner in mischief, Melvin, who would be giggling. I’d slowly get off my seat and swagger to the front with hands in pocket, eyes to the floor.

“Take your hands out of your pocket,” Father Octave would bark out. “I didn’t see you in church.”  By this time, my eyes would be filling with tears.  “Look at me. Why didn’t you go to church?” His voice was now a decibel louder and a note higher. “Do you want to be with the Devil?”   I would be too afraid to even whimper. “Do you want to be with the devil?” he would repeat.  I would finally answer with a meek “No.”  Automatically, I would stick my hands out, palms up, and Sister Ann would give each a hard whack with a ruler.  

When I didn’t attend Catechism one Wednesday, Father Octave came to my house looking for me.  Finding me hiding under the bed, he pulled me out by the arm and wringed my ear.  My mother watched with approval.  My cohort Melvin received the same punishment, but his mother wringed his other ear, even though she had allowed him to hide under the bed. In those days we were made to fear God, even though they told us God was loving and forgiving.

In my young mind, the Statue of Jesus was indeed God. I never questioned it.  Whenever I needed comforting, I would sit and look at it, which my mom kept on her makeshift altar in the living room.  I always felt drawn to the statue whenever I was alone in the night.  Just by looking at it, I felt rejuvenated and reassured.  Sometimes, after reading the papers, or writing letters, my eyes would wander to it, and I would daydream.  Some of my most pleasant experiences occurred in those daydreams. Words were never spoken. My relationship with the statue was all I needed to reaffirm my private relationship with God.  I could not comprehend why there were people who didn’t have a Jesus Christ statue to look at. When I was a 5^th grader, I told another 5^th grader, who had no religion, that he should come to Catechism with me. He said he could not because his parents did not “believe in religion.” I told him “if you don’t believe in religion, then who is going to protect you from the Devil?”  He said “My Dad said there is no Devil.” I replied “what if he’s wrong?”  The following Wednesday, he attended Catechism with me.

Towercycle commented that my exploration of Pascal's wager was fairly weak in my article on “How to think about God.” Bless him; despite being an atheist, he apparently knows the ins and the outs of Pascal’s wager. But because he is an atheist he sees flaws in the wager as all atheists would.  

It was not my intent to explore Pascal’s wager but to point out how I feel about not believing.  Edward McClennen summarizes Pascal wager as follows:  

McClennen, Edward. 1994. “Finite Decision Theory”, in Jordan 1994b. Taken from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/

As a 5^th grader, I convinced another 5^th grader to reach the same position as Pascal’s.  But unlike Pascal, who used deep, esoteric reasoning and mathematics, stressing himself out in the process, I used kids’logics and was able to get there lightning quick.  

Towercycle also said “...all religions lack credible evidence of truth.”  I don’t think the two 5^th graders would trust him.

I don’t see the flaws that Towercycle and other atheists see in Pascal’s wager. Perhaps I am not as smart as they. Exploring Pascal wager as a freshman in college, in philosophy 101, brought insanity in the class room, as I recall. The professor himself skirted around the mathematics part and told us not to worry about it, but just to understand the matrix, the inportant part. 

Matrix or no matrix, I accept God as a fact of life. Growing up Catholic, I always dread the thought of ending up in Hell or in Purgatory.  I wondered about the Protestants, who never had statues of Jesus Christ in their churches or the Crucifix.  They, in turn, probably wonder why Catholics do. Isn’t it idolatry? The Catholics could always refer to Exodus 25:18-20:  “(God said) You shall make two cherubim of gold, make them of hammered work at the two ends of the mercy seat. Make one cherub at one end and one cherub at the other end; you shall make the cherubim of one piece with the mercy seat at its two ends.  The cherubim shall have their wings spread upward, covering the mercy seat with their wings and facing one another; the faces of the cherubim are to be turned toward the mercy seat.”

So who is right- Catholics or Protestants? In thinking about God, these issues just fade away. They don’t seem so important. Protestants, nevertheless, have images of Christ in their churches too, albeit on paper. It’s the principle of representation.  It’s not idolatry. Neither the statue nor the paper is being worshipped; what it symbolizes is. Thus, to me whether your eyes focus on the cross, a statue, a picture, a long pole, or a rock, it’s not important. It’s not going to determine your destiny.  In thinking about the Creator, it doesn’t matter if we worship in a mosque, a temple, a church, in a forest, or in bed. If we accept that the Supreme Being is Omniconscious, Omnipotent and Omnipresent, then he is within us wherever we go.  I won’t argue that the probability of the Creator’s nonexistence is less than 50%, but that ITS existence is at least 50%.

I can almost sense that Towercycle and other nonbelievers are ready to poke holes in this article. I welcome criticsms. I'll just fall back on my comfort zone and reply: No one really knows what befalls us when we die; it’s the biggest gamble we’ll ever faced. As the great Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao responded when Ricky Hatton’s camp said that his style of boxing had many exploitable flaws, “Let your ward train hard and good luck come fight night!”