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Case ([personal profile] case) wrote in [community profile] fandomsecrets2015-10-18 12:11 pm

F!S Anon Meme (the ??th!)

F!S Anon Meme (the ??th!)


Secrets, rants, opinions, anything you want to say about your fandom or a fandom or fandom in general, do it here! Anonymously, of course. Get it all off your chest.

Some ground rules:
1. Going anon is encouraged but not absolutely required.
2. No autoplaying/autolooping embeds, or embeds that cover/stretch the screen.
3. No dropping personal info or IRL contact info, etc.

That's about it, though!

I'll be linking some general/general-fandom threads I see so people don't repost new threads with the same stuff. If you want me to link your thread up here, drop a link in the first comment!



General:
Halloween costumes

Fandom-general:
Porn comics
F/F recs
Guilty pleasures

Fandom-specific:
Girl Meets World

(Anonymous) 2015-10-18 07:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Formally agnostic, practically atheist, raised in & still feel affection for Catholicism.

(Anonymous) 2015-10-18 07:59 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm curious, if you'd like to share, how that process evolved?

(Anonymous) 2015-10-18 08:13 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, I was raised Catholic, in a very Catholic social environment, Catholic school K-12, etc. So the existence of God and the whole Catholic framework was very much the background assumption - and it's something that I find emotionally compelling, and the framework of the Church made sense to me. But then eventually I started thinking more about my beliefs and examining my perception of the world - aided in large part by the fact that my high school religion classes were very big on promoting this kind of interior examination, regardless of one's beliefs, and had a lot of retreats and things of that nature - and it started to become more and more tenuous and I started to see, less and less, any way to fit God into my understanding of the world.

And eventually what happened is we did an exercise in one of my religion classes where every day at the end of class one class member would stand up and give a little explanation of what God meant to them, of their understanding of God. And I was near the end of the schedule and so I would listen to all these other people give varying accounts of God, and each time, I'd sort of mentally check and be like, "Nope, I definitely don't believe in that." And so eventually it got to the point where I was just, like, "No, I don't believe any of those things are true, I don't feel any of those feelings. I don't believe that God exists."

At the same time, though, my feeling then and after was that the kind of experience that my classmates and other intelligent sincere religious people talked about, and the kinds of evidence and feeling that they used, were not something that was really accessible to me. So much of it seemed to come down to some kind of inborn belief or feeling, and I think that is meaningful but not provable one way or the other. And so, as a practical matter, I don't believe it's knowable one way or the other with certainty, or provable - but I also have a positive belief in the non-existence of any divine being.

And, in terms of having affection for the Church, that's mostly down to the fact that almost everyone I knew who was involved in Catholicism - parish priests, religion teachers, principals, everything - was for the most part just very intelligent and compassionate and wise. And because, I guess, in some ways, when you grow up in the logic and the framework of something like that, you maintain a lot of those values and modes of thought.

Sorry for writing so many words.