The OCD Diaries

October 27, 2014

The Good and Evil in Every Religion

Recent beheadings at the hands of ISIS have caused a spike in news-show rhetoric about the need to profile those who look like Muslims as a way to stop terrorists. My Facebook feed is frequently overrun with talk about how Islam is a savage and evil religion.

We’re doing what we do best when scared: painting entire groups and faiths with the same bigoted brush.

Mood music:

I understand the anger.

I absolutely loathe ISIS. Every time I see footage of innocents beheaded, I want to throw up. I felt the same way when watching the violence committed by insurgents in Iraq a decade ago. I have no stomach for murder. When it’s done in the name of religion, it makes me feel worse.

I won’t lie to you: When seeing this violence, my imagination has run wild with thoughts about how great it would be to wipe out these bastards with nuclear weapons. I’ve thought about how fitting it would be to see these guys getting their heads cut off. In that regard, I’m not much better than the people who litter my news feeds with hate and cries of vengeance.

But when I reflect some more, I always come back to a stubborn fact — evil exists in all religions.

I’m a Catholic whose faith was shaken by the news of widespread sexual abuse at the hands of priests. It’s also hard to understand the blood spilled in the name of Christianity in places like Northern Ireland. Christians have done terrible things in the name of Christianity since the beginning. The Crusades are but one example.

What I always come back to is this: Non-organized religions breed evil. So do individuals. Organized religion breeds evil, too.

I consider myself faithful in the belief that Jesus Christ is my savior — the guiding hand through the minefield set by my personal demons. If that makes you uncomfortable, so be it. I see it as a personal relationship. The problems begin when people make it about more than that and attach politics to the mix.

I don’t buy into the rhetoric of organized Christian denominations that invites hatred of gays and others who don’t follow doctrine to the letter. That malarky is the seed that leads to violence against homosexuals. As a Catholic, I do have high hopes that Pope Francis is going to move us away from that. This statement is especially telling.

Most people follow their faith, be it Islam, Christianity, Judaism, what have you, peacefully. They don’t turn it into a political vehicle or a militaristic recruitment drive. I’ve met a lot of people of different faiths in my travels. In talking with them, a shared distaste for religious extremism always comes to the surface.

If we stopped blaming entire faiths for the evil acts of a few, we might actually get somewhere as human beings.

Battle between Crusades and Mongols Source: SodaHead

May 21, 2014

“Why Are You Religious?”

A security industry friend and self-proclaimed atheist asked why I’m religious. She ‘s surprised that there are so many religious people in an industry built on a foundation of technology and truth, of only believing in what can be seen and proven.

Specifically, she asked:

I want to ask you why you’re religious. It’s odd. I’ve been in tech for almost 20 years, and infosec seems to have the highest concentration of religious people of any sub-section of technology. As an atheist, it’s hard for me to reconcile such diligent pursuit of truth and provable evidence as comes with technology and religion. It just doesn’t parse for me.

This is my attempt to answer her question.

Mood music:

History

I’ve always believed in God. As a kid hospitalized multiple times with dangerous Crohn’s Disease flare-ups, I asked God to make the pain stop. Whenever I got better, I did what a lot of people do and stopped praying. I was born Jewish, but mine was a fairly secular household. We celebrated Jewish and Christian holidays alike, but God had little to do with it.

A lot of people become religious after life-altering events like a heart attack or the death of a loved one. I know people who found religion after nearly getting killed on a battlefield. There’s also the belief in a higher power that’s central to 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous.

I’ve been around the block, seeing the death of a sibling and a best friend to suicide. I’ve had scary medical problems. I’ve experienced deep, dark depression and addiction. I fell in love with a Catholic woman.

Those things shaped my faith, but there was no aha moment. My beliefs evolved over time. The more I experienced the Masses, the more I believed. So I converted.

What I Believe

That history led me to these beliefs:

I believe that Jesus came down here and sacrificed himself to give sinners like me a shot at redemption.
I believe in the Sacraments, and that through them, Christ lives in me. His teachings of kindness, charity and self-sacrifice — the Golden Rule, if you will — are principles I try to live by. There have been times where I’ve failed miserably — lying, giving in to temptation and anger and letting fear keep me from doing the right things.
I’m a sinner who strives to turn away from sin, and I have a long way to go.
I believe Christ never gives up on me, or anyone else for that matter.

If that sounds crazy to you, so be it. Just as you don’t have to justify your atheism to me, I don’t have to justify my faith to you.

I don’t think it’s possible to give you a satisfactory answer, anyway. You’re set in you’re beliefs, as am I. We won’t change each other’s minds, nor should we.

Jerks in Every Belief System

What matters to me is that people accept each other’s differences.

I don’t like when people force their beliefs on others. Talking down to someone because they see things differently pisses me off. I’ve seen a lot of Catholics do that and I’ve called them on the carpet for it. I’ve seen atheists behave just as badly.

Some believe you can either be religious or be someone who, as you said, diligently pursues truth and provable evidence; that you can’t have it both ways.

I disagree.

I don’t see it as an either-or proposition. You can practice faith and still be a seeker of physical truth.

Sometimes, one pursuit helps the other. Sometimes not.

cross shadowed by rising sun

April 4, 2012

Don’t Let Anger Blind You To What Really Matters

The front office at my kids’ school is mad at me and another parent for complaining about something on the school’s Facebook page. I don’t think they saw yesterday’s post in this blog. That would make them angrier still.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/RVFgxkL_vuk

I’ll admit I was angry when my wife told me the principal and office administrator got after her about my behavior. It’s not like I jumped up and down on Facebook yelling obscenities and calling people names. I simply agreed with the other parent’s dismay over a specific matter of the school not following up with parents on a school closing next week. I think I was more ticked off that they gave Erin trouble, because she did nothing wrong.

I make no apologies, because, as I said yesterday, we practically break the bank every month paying the tuition to send our kids there. In essence, we parents are the customer. The customer is not always right, contrary to popular belief. But school administrators should respond to them as if they were, unless the parent is way out of line, which we weren’t.

On to the main point of this post.

There’s a lesson here for everyone, whether you’re dealing with difficult people at your kids’ school, in your workplace or on your street. Anger should never blind us to what’s truly important.

Some are probably asking why we would continue to go to a church and send our kids to a parochial school where there’s dysfunction. My answer is simple:

–For me, going to church is about getting closer to God. Everything else is second fiddle.

–Our children’s education is far more important than squabbles with parents and administrators, though it obviously becomes a problem if the latter has a negative effect on the former.

–This is our home, and I don’t believe in pulling up stakes and leaving because of dysfunction in the institution. I’d rather stick around and try to be part of the solution. That’s not always possible and sometimes it’s best to leave. But I don’t see this as an example of that.

–If you leave and go to another community, you’ll find dysfunction there, too. Where there are humans, there is dysfunction. That’s life. It may not be fair, but no one ever promised life would be fair.

Since this is an issue within our parish family, I can’t help but bring my faith into the remainder of the post. If religion isn’t your bag, leave now.

This is Holy Week, where we remember the sacrifice Jesus made to give us all a shot at redemption. It’s incredibly easy to forget the core message when we get busy arguing with each other over matters that are more political than spiritual.

I officially became a Catholic at Easter of 2006. I was in a pretty dark place at the time, struggling with a binge eating habit that had me shot-gunning $40 worth of fast food on the drive from the office to the house every day. I was crazy with fear and anxiety, the result of OCD out of control. I was a depressed, disgusting mess inside, and it was slowly working its way to my outward appearance.

Finding my faith was a major step in bringing those demons to heel.

But it remains a struggle sometimes, especially when you have disagreements with people in the community. So I wrote up the following manifesto to help bring me back to the center. I’ve used it several times in this blog, but it bears frequent repeating.

These are the bullet points. Click on any of them to see the full explanation.

1. Don’t Succumb to “Happily-Ever-After” Syndrome.

2. Peace IS NOT The Absence of Chaos. It’s a State of Mind (or, if you really want to get technical, a state of being in God’s Grace).

3. What You Get is Only As Good As What You Put In

4. Don’t Let Politics Get in the Way

5. Plan to Fight the Good Fight to Your Dying Breath

Keeping my head and heart on those personal items is much more important than besting church and school officials in an argument.

And so I move on.

March 18, 2012

About Father Canole And Keeping The Faith

Life as a Catholic in the city of Haverhill, Massachusetts can be a bitch, sometimes. Here we are waking up to news that another priest, Rev. Robert Canole, has resigned from his pastoral duties in disgrace.

We look up to our priests and count on them for inspiration. We go in a confessional with them and spill our deepest, darkest faults. Then some of those priests let us down hard.

http://youtu.be/IaymN2mkaC0

According to my local paper, The Eagle-Tribune, Conole won’t be coming back to Sacred Hearts Church. My old friend Paul Tennant wrote:

Conole’s resignation has been accepted by Cardinal Sean O’Malley, archbishop of Boston. He was investigated by the Archdiocese of Boston for “serious adult-related misconduct,” according to a statement read by the Very Rev. Arthur Coyle, episcopal vicar for the Merrimack Valley Region, during weekend Masses at Sacred Hearts.

He left in May under a shroud of mystery. Rumor had it he was dealing with anger management issues. At the time, I wrote a post encouraging people to send him cards and letters of support like they did when my former pastor, the late Dennis Nason of All Saints, took a leave of absence to confront his alcoholism.

I also wrote something when Father Keith LeBlanc, a former priest at my parish and most recently pastor of St. John’s across town, left in a hurry after it came to light that he was being investigated for mishandling church dollars. It turns out he spent $83,000 of church money on porno movies and got three years of probation after pleading guilty to larceny. That one really hurt because LeBlanc led my RCIA group the year I converted.

But I still believe in what I wrote at the time, which is that everyone fails and has a shot at redemption.

Sometimes I wonder how I can stick up for these priests. After all, how much can a Catholic take? These are the same priests who tell us how we should live, how we should vote and how we should treat others. Theoretically, I should be mad as hell.

And yet I’m not angry. Sad, yes. But not angry.

I still believe what I said before, that as human beings, we all fail frequently and have a chance to set things right.

I’ve written about my own failures a million times in this blog. I’d be a hypocrite if I ripped into these priests. I’d probably feel differently if I was the victim of a pedophile priest. But I’m not.

In the 11 years I’ve lived in Haverhill, Mass., I’ve seen the best and worst sides of the Catholic Church.

On the ugly side, there were priests who played a part in the sex abuse that ultimately blew up in Cardinal Law’s face. There are parishioners who get so caught up in church politics that they forget what they’re truly there for, and they make life miserable for others. There was Father LeBlanc.

On the other side of the spectrum was Father Nason going public about his alcoholism, inspiring us all with his comeback. And, most importantly, there are all the people who have found their faith in recent years regardless of whatever ugliness is in the headlines, including me.

We all fail, no matter what our position in life. The important thing is what we do with our failures.

I hope these disgraced priests find a way to turn their experiences into something we can all learn and benefit from. The jury is still out on whether that will happen.

But as I keep saying, my faith is in God, not the humans who serve the church for better and worse.

That’s what keeps me steady in moments like this.

March 3, 2012

The Hypocrisy Of This Contraception Debate

Updated March 14 with this example of outrage from the Arizona legislature.

I don’t get why the Republican Party is bogging itself down in this contraception debate. In pandering to the religious groups, they’re ignoring the economic woes people care about most. That’s especially silly because the economy if an issue that’s big trouble for President Obama.

Would it not be wise to stick to the issue your opponent is weakest on? That’s my big question. But for me, a devout Catholic who is told every day by my church leaders that contraception is against God’s plan, the debate is more about hypocrisy.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/60b7frLVoTc

When the right gets into this battle, which always involves a discussion about the lack of God in government affairs, it’s the same to me as the left suggesting government do everything for us. The right scornfully calls this socialist activism, which God supposedly frowns upon. But isn’t it also social activism to tell us whether we should have prayer in school, a law against gay marriage or a ban on contraception?

I always try to hold true to my Catholic beliefs. Among other things, I oppose abortion. But that’s what I choose to believe.

Religious freedom to me doesn’t mean the right for one religious denomination to control what everyone does. It’s really about the right for people to practice their religious beliefs regardless of whether it’s Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism or Atheism without fear of government punishment.

I have the freedom to try to be the best Catholic I can be, but in the end it’s my responsibility, not the government’s. I agree with my friend Lori MacVittie, who said “Never confuse the will of the majority with the will of God.” She’ll probably disagree with much of this post, but that’s fine by me. I like when the truly smart people disagree.

As for contraception, the Catholic Church doesn’t believe in it. But it’s not forbidden in every religion. So why are Republicans going at it as if it were?

This debate has turned mean. I’ve never really cared for Rush Limbaugh. He’s a blowhard who throws bombs because his ratings go up whenever he does. That’s why he called Georgetown Law Student Sandra Fluke a slut for testifying before Congress in favor of birth control as part of health care coverage. Calling someone a slut is ratings gold. Those who advocate a boycott of his sponsors miss the point. The only way to silence this asshat is to get people to stop listening to him. When people stop showing up, that’s when the sponsors walk away.

Rush knows this. He also knows there are enough mean-spirited people in the country to keep his career coasting along.

Where does God stand on the matter? A lot of people think they know the answer, but they don’t, really. They are not God, and neither am I.

All I know is that people are mean in how they choose to stand up for their beliefs. As a Catholic, I fail to see where the Christian love and grace is in that.

This is not a defense of the Obama Administration or the left.

This is simply the lament of a guy who believes in God and in pragmatic government.